The committee met at 10:23 a.m.

[N. Simons in the chair.]

N. Simons (Chair): I’m very pleased to call this meeting of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth to order. I’d like to start by welcoming committee members, staff, the representative’s office — everyone who’s taking part today — and Hansard Services for the yeomen work they have performed this morning to connect us.

I know we have quite an agenda, and we’re a little bit behind schedule. So why don’t we start by asking the representative to provide the overview as item No. 1 on our agenda.

By the way, before I go any further, the Deputy Chair will be joining us later. We look forward to that. Rachna Singh will also be joining us later.

With that, Bernard, go ahead — Mr. Richard.

Overview of Office of the
Representative for Children and Youth

B. Richard: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m certainly happy to be here. We haven’t lost any time, because I’ve just finished reading my speaking notes. No, just kidding. Sorry. I was actually trying to recruit MLA Furstenau to our office, but then we both realized it might cause havoc on the floor of the Legislature.

Interjection.

N. Simons (Chair): Let’s not. The opposition members say: “You’re welcome to do that.”

[10:25 a.m.]

B. Richard: I thought so.

Good morning, Mr. Chair. I have Dawn Thomas-Wightman, the deputy rep, with me here and Jeff Rud, our communications director. I’ve heard Alan Markwart’s voice, so I’m sure he’s there with you. He’s the lead on the statutory review, so I’m very happy that he was able to make it. He’ll be responding to a number of the questions on that subject.

I’ll go through my first few notes on, essentially, an introduction. We paired it down, because we’ve had a chance to meet with the committee a couple of times now. I don’t want to be repetitive. I’ll be very brief.

Obviously, as I’ve said before, it’s really a privilege to be able to appear before the committee. The idea of the committee itself I very much appreciate. To have the opportunity to meet with you so frequently…. I’ve said before, I think, that in seven years in New Brunswick, I appeared before the standing committee on legislative officers twice. I think I’ve been in front of this committee four times in one year, so it’s an amazing privilege. I know we share the same goal of better services for British Columbia’s vulnerable children, youth and their families. So it’s great to be here.

Again, I’ll just be very brief in my introductions. I’ll start by talking about just a bit of what we do, and then we’ll move on to the annual report and, later still, the statutory review.

We’re an independent office of the Legislative Assembly. We don’t report to the Premier or any minister. We report to this committee. Obviously, we report publicly as well on the work that we do.

We have three office locations: the principal office being here in Victoria, with an office in Burnaby and one in Prince George. We have three main areas of responsibility, or mandate, under our legislation. I’ll summarize the three briefly for you.

Advocacy. Most of our employees work in advocacy. We support children, young persons and young adults who are receiving designated services — so services that are designated under the legislation. We receive something like 2,400 calls a year, but we open, on average, about 1,800 cases a year. We’ve opened 18,000 files since the office was opened, about a decade ago.

The majority of the requests for information or assistance fall within the areas of child protection and guardianship, so the main ministry that we are involved with on an ongoing basis is MCFD.

There’s lots of variety in the calls we get. Youth may call after being homeless or to seek services by way of a youth agreement. Grandparents may be wondering what their options are to gain custody or access to their grandchild in care — maybe a difference of opinion with respect to cultural planning for an Indigenous child, for instance. A parent may need assistance or respite for their child with special needs. A child may need a mental health assessment, or a young person may be in need of an advocate to assist with their discharge plan from youth custody. Even though we’re limited by the designation of services in the act, it’s still a pretty broad range of services that we deal with on a daily basis.

The second responsibility is monitoring, researching and evaluating government-funded programs and services at a systemic level and making recommendations for improvement. Undertaking any monitoring project, our primary goal is to be able to contribute to a better understanding of the issues at hand — so to make recommendations that will improve service delivery and results in the areas of safety, health, education and well-being for vulnerable children and youth.

[10:30 a.m.]

Some key monitoring reports we’ve done include taking a look at the provincial adoption system for children in care — so permanency planning and adoption — reviewing services for youth mental health and a recent report on education outcomes and supports, which I presented just a couple of weeks ago.

Monitoring is currently working on a number of projects, including reviewing the services and supports for children and youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, developing a process to assess the quality of care planning for children in care.

The third key responsibility is reviewing and investigating critical injuries and deaths of children and youth, which I mentioned when I presented earlier or when I introduced the office to the members in late October. In the tragic event of a child or youth who is in the care of the Ministry of Children and Family Development or is receiving reviewable services dies or suffers a critical injury, particularly where abuse and neglect are factors, our office is responsible for working collaboratively with other public bodies to inform improvements to services to help prevent similar injuries or deaths in the future. All critical injuries and deaths involving children and youth receiving reviewable services at the time of or in the year prior to the incident must be reported to my office.

We select a small number of cases for full investigation. We do receive roughly 2,200 reports a year of critical injury and deaths. Roughly about 800 of those, on an average year, are found to be related to services. So then we review a number of cases and eventually decide to investigate a very small number — probably three or four a year, I guess, on average.

A full investigation involves a thorough and rigorous examination of the system of supports and services the child or youth received, including a review of all case-related records and relevant legislation, policies and standards, including interviews — sometimes dozens of interviews — with numerous individuals under oath.

I have, as the representative, the powers of the commissioner under the Inquiry Act — so fairly extensive powers to obtain documents, to conduct interviews under oath and to subpoena witnesses. The results of these reviews and investigations are reported to this committee as well as to the public.

Our work also involves youth and community engagement activities, including a number of youth-led or -focused forums over the year. Most recent are Ignite Your Spirit forums for Indigenous youth in care, led by our Indigenous Strategies and Partnerships team.

The fourth core function of our office. Really, we consider it as a mandated obligation to engage children, as is required under the convention on the rights of the child and mentioned in several pieces of provincial legislation and reports as well. I’ll talk a bit more about that a bit later.

The youth-led initiatives contain considerable promise. While they are labour-intensive — they take a lot of work — they constitute a very valuable and, I would say, essential component of the work of the office.

I’ve been saying 62 percent of B.C.’s children and youth in care are Indigenous. But I’ve seen MCFD’s PowerPoint for this afternoon, and they’re saying 64 percent now. That percentage will continue to increase. There have been reductions over time of children in care, but the reductions have been, essentially, of non-Indigenous children. So even if there’s no increase in Indigenous children in care, their percentage of the total number of children in care continues to increase, and it appears that that will be the case, at least for some time.

It’s an important part of our work, and we’re very focused on building relationships and involving Indigenous children and youth in care or from care in the work that we do.

[10:35 a.m.]

That’s by way of introduction, Mr. Chair. I’m happy to respond to any early questions before moving on to the annual report and service plan.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much, Bernard.

I would just ask committee members, there or here, if there are any questions at this juncture. I see no questions, so it might be just appropriate to go into the review of the annual report and service plan.

Consideration of Representative
for Children and Youth Reports

ANNUAL REPORT AND SERVICE PLAN

B. Richard: This is the annual report for 2016-17, and it’s the service plan for 2017-18 and 2018-19. Both were tabled together in September of this year. You’ll find that the report provides detailed information on the activities and future plans of the various program areas of our office, as well as a section on measuring our performance against key performance indicators and targets.

The 2016-17 fiscal year was a period of transition, as you all know, with the departure of B.C.’s first representative and my eventual appointment as the second representative. I started in late November 2017 but was formally appointed in February of this year. During this reporting period, the office released 12 public reports. That was a fairly high number in terms of the average. I’m sure my predecessor wanted to finish off a number of things that she’d been working on over the years. So it was a very, very busy year overall for us.

Other highlights. I have this lovely coloured page here, and I have copies for all of you. It’s a page from the report that has highlights from the year. We had, as mentioned — I think I said 2,400 — actually 2,600 calls to advocacy in that fiscal year, 214 media inquiries. We employed 14 youth at our office. We appeared before parliamentary committees a total of six times during that fiscal year. We’ve engaged with a thousand young British Columbians. We’ve received 866 injury and death reports within our mandate, a total of 2,200 reports in all. We’ve released four videos and had more than four million hits on our website.

Although the leadership of the office has changed, the focus of the organization, of course, remains the same: to advocate for B.C.’s most vulnerable children, youth and their families in a number of different ways through our work of advocacy, critical injury and death monitoring, and Indigenous strategies and partnerships. In addition to individual advocacy and individual investigative reports, our work also includes systemic advocacy, the extraction of themes from individual advocacy cases and aggregate reviews. They’re designed to identify broad trends and patterns that can inform improvements to the child-and-youth-serving system.

While the ongoing work of the office continues, with new leadership has come an opportunity to change or review our approach to our work. I’ve called it the three-Rs approach in the past, in other presentations. We’ve had a chance to refocus our organization’s priorities. I’ve talked about the areas of priority that we’ve said we would focus on — overrepresentation of Indigenous children in care, mental health and addictions, and transitions from care. We’ve decided to be more proactive, and that has impacted our relationship with the ministry — I think in a positive way. We’ve decided to be less reactive. It’s just a different approach — neither better nor worse, I would say, but certainly different.

[10:40 a.m.]

We’ve reset our approach to working with children, youth and families, government ministries and other stakeholders, as I’ve mentioned, and we’ve restructured our office to reduce layers of leadership. We’ve eliminated all three ADR positions — so flattened the organization — and all of our executive directors now sit at our executive table at every meeting.

We’ve certainly worked hard to ensure that youth voices are heard and amplified by the work that we do. We’ve now held, as I’ve mentioned, two Ignite Your Spirit forums for Indigenous youth in care, the first in Sts’ailes, in the Fraser Valley, in the fall of 2016, and the second this past August at Lake Cowichan, during a very hot week in Lake Cowichan, 35 plus. The Minister of Children and Family Development can attest to that. She attended the witnessing circle on the Thursday of that week, and it was brutally hot but quite inspiring at the same time.

These are very powerful forums, organized by our Indigenous youth leadership team. The group leaders were former youth in care. We had 32 children in August technically in care — all in care at that time. A couple were in recovery. It was a difficult four days, but led by former youth in care, and quite inspiring, as I’ve mentioned.

The purpose is to hear about the challenges, goals and dreams of Indigenous youth in care and receiving government services and to get their ideas directly on how services could be improved. Our aim is to continue holding these types of workshops and meetings in other parts of the province — we hope to head up north in the spring — with the end result being a cumulative public report to government offering a synthesis of recommendations from the regions.

I want to end this portion of the presentation by showing a video. I don’t know, with all of the technical issues we’ve had, if that’s still possible to do. I’m hopeful that we can do that, and that would conclude our presentation on the annual report. Hopefully, you can see the video. It’s from the Ignite Your Spirit event.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Alayna, are you able to play the video on the laptop?

A. van Leeuwen: I hadn’t preloaded it. But if you’ll bear with me for a minute, I can do that and see what happens.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): That would be helpful.

N. Simons (Chair): While you’re figuring that out, the question is: are we going to review the upcoming service plan as well, or is that separate? Is that included?

B. Richard: I thought it was included. We certainly will comply with whatever your wish is.

N. Simons (Chair): It was just expressed to me that there was…. I’ll let Laurie, if you want to just….

L. Throness: I was just wondering, since the representative did not address the upcoming plans and priorities and objectives of his office, whether he might want to do that as well. He talked about the past a little bit, but not about the future.

[10:45 a.m.]

B. Richard: Every year we update our priorities in terms of looking ahead to future years. We’re well into the 2017-2018 fiscal year now — more than halfway through. I’ll just mention a few things.

We’ve reviewed our strategic priorities — actually, almost at the end of quite an elaborate process of creating a strategic plan for the office. We’re not quite complete. Once it’s done, certainly, I’ll be happy to share that with the committee through the Chair.

It has involved a significant number of meetings in our office with our staff. The idea was to align our strategic plan with the priorities that I’ve indicated. We’ve had a two-day session in Richmond about moving forward — as I’ve mentioned in my earlier notes, being more proactive and less reactive. The idea has been to reset the relationship with the ministry. We’ve started that. We signed a protocol with the former minister in April. The protocol really sets out in quite some detail the relationship, how we’ll work together.

We’ve created two working groups. One working group is on our recommendations — tracking recommendations, implementation of recommendations. We’re working with the ministries. Members of our staff and ministry personnel have been meeting a number of times. Certainly, former members of the committee would remember that there were wide-ranging estimates of how many recommendations we had made over the years. I’ve talked about 130, and I heard the MCFD present at this committee in the spring and say they estimate about 700 recommendations.

The idea of resetting the relationship is aligning the interpretation we have of what our recommendations mean, what constitutes a recommendation, and agreeing on implementation strategies. That’s going very well. I’m pleased with that.

We’ve also set up a working group with the ministry on care planning, care plans — aligning with the recommendations of Grand Chief Ed John. Our teams have been working together on definitions, what constitutes a care plan, what would be the role of RCY in overseeing care plans, the role of the ministry, how we complement each other. I think it’s been an effort to, again, reset the relationship, really focused on outcomes for vulnerable children in the system and how we can achieve improvements in a different way. We’ll see how that goes, but certainly so far, I’m pleased with the way that our folks have been working together.

Moving forward, we’ve mentioned our focus will be on a number of monitoring and research efforts. We’re working on a report on FASD. We’re quite focused on youth aging out of care. Transitions from care is a big issue. Some concerns have come up.

[10:50 a.m.]

Let me give you a few numbers. For example, a lot has been made of agreements with young adults, AYAs, at the ministry. Well, our research indicates that of the kids who age out of care, only about 25 percent avail themselves of an AYA or have the benefit of an AYA.

For me, that’s an issue. These are the same young adults that we find struggling. A high percentage end up on welfare, on the streets, homeless, dealing with addictions and involved in the sex trade. I’ve met many. Making sure that AYAs are actually taken advantage of, are used by young people transitioning out of the care system, is important to our office. We want to do more work in ensuring that that’s the case. This is a program that already exists but, in my view, is extremely underused.

We’re very focused on tuition waivers, for example. While our office and my predecessor was a keen, strong advocate for tuition waivers, they don’t help youth in care who don’t graduate from high school. Our numbers indicate that only 51 percent of youth in care actually graduate from high school, so a tuition waiver for them is not worth very much. I’ve talked to young adults who have been turned down in their application for a tuition waiver because they’re older than 26.

This is, I think, an important issue for our office. You’ll hear from us in the next year, possibly in two years, if improvements aren’t made on that issue — the requirement of having spent two years in care to qualify for a tuition waiver, the age cap of 26 and the additional issue of supports that are required for a person who has grown up in care to be able to pursue post-secondary education.

Any of us who have grown children know that family supports are so important. That is critically vital that the government continues to support young adults who have aged out of care if they are able to and interested in pursuing post-secondary education. So those are significant issues for us and will be part of our focus in the next two years.

I don’t know if it’s too much detail to respond to your question, but we’re doing some work on the opioid crisis as well. It affects disproportionately youth in care or who have aged out of care.

We’re hoping that you will be supportive of our effort to be able to advocate for youth who have aged out of care as they apply for AYAs, as they apply for tuition waivers. Currently these are not services that fall within our mandate. But as the age for AYA eligibility has increased to include young adults up to the age of 26, our mandate has not changed. We really feel strongly that we should be able to advocate for them.

We have three individual investigations that are in the works now and that we’ll be reporting on in the next year or two years. Investigations typically can take between 18 months to two years to complete. They cost about $250,000, on average, and involve a fair bit of travelling to interview witnesses, research and all the rest that’s involved, including staff time, of course.

That’s a look into the future and priorities that we will be working on if finances permit and if the committee also feels that we should be doing more work in those areas, as you’ll be going through the statutory review in the coming weeks and months.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much for that, Bernard. We have the video lined up and ready to show. So we’ll do that. We can have a little chat after that. It’s a 13-minute video.

[10:55 a.m.]

We’re just working on the sound. Please stand by.

I’m just asking Kate: can you hear us?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, I can hear you.

N. Simons (Chair): We’re going to play the video with the sound turned up on the laptop. I hope that works.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Also, Mr. Chair, I can send out to all members a link to the YouTube video. So if the audio or a picture isn’t as clear as it could be, members can watch it at a later time.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you. We’ll give it a try.

[11:00 a.m.]

[Audiovisual presentation.]

N. Simons (Chair): Okay, folks. I think we are going to give this a pass for now. I think we can all look forward to watching it after Kate sends us the link.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, I’d be happy to.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much for the effort. I know that the technical challenges would probably be resolved if we all had ten more minutes without us in the way. But since we’re here, and since we’re in the middle of our meeting, we look forward to seeing that. We’ll look forward to getting the link.

Bernard and Dawn and Jeff and Alan, are you here? Are you okay with some questions about the annual report and service plan, then?

B. Richard: Yes, go for it.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay, great. I look around. Laurie would like to ask a question, so I’ll let Laurie begin.

L. Throness: I have a number of questions, but I wanted to start with the reports that you make and ask how you choose the reports that you make.

I would just point out in the Alex Gervais report, the child fell from a hotel room, and there was a great deal made of that terrible and tragic circumstance. But I learned, as I studied, that about 27 children per year out of 7,000 are kept in a hotel room, so it was not really representative of the bulk of children in care.

I’m just wondering: are your reports chosen to be representative of a systemic failure? Are they chosen because they’re the most egregious cases? How do you choose a report to make — because you only do three or four investigations a year?

B. Richard: It’s very true, and it’s an excellent question. We review roughly about, on average, 70 files every month, so we get initial information, have a discussion. It’s the worst day in every month in our office. I can tell you that. It’s very, very difficult.

There are a number of cases that are of concern. First, members of our team look at all of the reports, and they’ll eliminate ones that are clearly out of mandate. Then, once a month, we’ll review roughly around 70 — I’ll say between 60 and 70 — files that have first been screened. Then we’ll do a second screening. We’ll determine how many of those are files that we should be taking a deeper look at. We call those reviews. We’ll take a bit of a deeper dive into a review and look at the circumstances surrounding the time in care.

[11:05 a.m.]

We’re not focused so much on the cause of death. That’s the Coroners Service job. We’re more concerned about the time in care and whether services or lack of services or quality of services have impacted the final outcome, whether it’s — and, obviously, in most cases — a critical injury or whether it’s a death, as was the case for Alex.

We have a view of the child’s time in care. For Alex, for instance, we knew that he had been moved 17 times in 11 years. We knew that he had been referred to mental health services five times but never accessed any mental health services. We knew that he had a significant relationship with his stepmom and that she was willing to care for him, but the ministry was only offering a fraction of what they were willing to pay a foster home to care for him.

Several issues came up in our review. He was a Métis child, for instance, and there were no efforts to connect him with his cultural heritage, so several issues there came up for us — care planning, permanency planning, quality of care, access to services, the instability involved in moving from place to place.

There’s no shortage of files we could eventually end up investigating. We have to make that kind of choice on a case-by-case basis. Certainly, we look at the number of issues that come up and if there’s a potential for making recommendations that could improve the care that’s available to all children in the system. It’s a judgment call, I guess, at the end of the day.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you for that comprehensive….

B. Richard: There was also…. May I, Mr. Chair?

The ministry essentially agreed with us that the time in the hotel, the 49 days that he spent there, was also a critical time for him. He had a full-time caretaker who had a room next door to him in the hotel but who was rarely there. That raised the question of contracted services, the screening of caregivers, the kind of screening that occurs. The caregiver in Alex’s case was not seen in the ten days prior to his jumping out of that window at the hotel, so there were significant issues during the time of stay in the hotel, for sure.

Actually, that resulted in a joint effort between the ministry and our office, which ultimately reduced significantly the number of children being cared for in hotel rooms. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but certainly, the length of time that children do end up in hotel rooms because it’s an emergency situation, and it can’t be avoided, has been considerably reduced as well.

So yes, we look at all of those factors and see if there’s a potential for change. Certainly, Alex’s death was not in vain, because some improvements have been made as a result, I think, of our work and the work of the ministry around those circumstances in his case.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you, Bernard.

Do you want to follow up, Laurie?

L. Throness: I just simply wanted to confirm with you that the purpose of these reports is to bring about systemic change in the ministry. Of course, Alex Gervais was a tragic case, but the purpose of the report, as you point out, is to bring change. That’s a good thing.

I have another question. Is that okay, Chair?

N. Simons (Chair): Sure. Absolutely.

L. Throness: Looking at page 24, I’m noticing the number of advocacy cases were down by about 10 percent last year. I’m wondering if you could just talk about that for a moment and explain why you think that might have been.

B. Richard: Yes. Our view is that there was, obviously, a period of transition that was significant for the office during that year.

[11:10 a.m.]

Mary Ellen was winding down her activities and really focused on a number of systemic reports. I was certainly new to the province, not as well known. It took me some time to get up to speed, to be invited to speak to groups. I think that would explain, for the most part, the reduction.

We actually are seeing that the numbers…. If I look at the end of the last fiscal year and the start of this fiscal year — although we’re not talking about that this morning — it looks like we’re going to be pretty much close to average for the ten-year period. So I think it was a bit of a bump in the road due to the significant transition and change of leadership at the office.

T. Wat: Thank you, Mr. Representative, for your presentation. It was certainly very informative.

I must applaud the office for advocating for free tuition for the youth that are out of care. Right now, from what I understand, it is only those who are under the age of 26 that will be able to have the waiver of tuition. So are you advocating for lifting the age limit?

I always believe that education is the only way to lift any individual out of a miserable life, and I totally applaud the office for advocating for that. But I just wonder, right now, under the current system, for those who are under the age of 26 and after they are out of care, how many of those have applied for this tuition waiver, and what is the outcome for those using this tuition waiver to pursue their education? I just want to know the outcome.

The second question. I always want to see how British Columbia compares with other jurisdictions. What are the other jurisdictions’ arrangements for the tuition waiver? Is it the same kind of age, or do they have an unlimited age, for the rest of their life?

B. Richard: I won’t speak too much about the other jurisdictions. I’m not sure I have much information on that, and it varies. I think most jurisdictions provide some support for youth as they age out of care, but I certainly wouldn’t have the technical knowledge of the differences between the programs that are offered and how they compare to what B.C. is doing.

Certainly, on the B.C. tuition program, I have very strong opinions. Those opinions have been developed through talking to former youth in care or youth from care.

I’ll give you one example. I spoke to a young woman, 32 years old, who spent a number of years in the sex trade and adult entertainment industry, as she described it to me. She has a 4.1 grade point average in a nursing program in Vancouver. But she applied and was turned down. Now, she eventually was approved on appeal, but I don’t know if you can even imagine what she went through, pending approval after appeal. That period of uncertainty was very, very traumatic for her.

She’s had a very difficult life. She was one of those youths who was left on her own and who became independent in her mid-teens, at 15, and was exploited, used drugs and became involved in the sex trade, as I’ve mentioned.

I just can’t imagine refusing someone with that kind of background, who is from care. Obviously, not all youth from care are interested or able to pursue post-secondary education. But of the vast majority who can, many, if not most, take some time. I think I saw from the Stats Canada census data last week that the average age of leaving home for young Canadians is something around 27. I know from my own experience that that certainly is a statistic that has changed over the years.

[11:15 a.m.]

Young adults need the support of their families. Housing costs are outrageous, as you all know, particularly in the urban centres of British Columbia. Young adults, many of them, stay with their parents longer.

Kids in care often leave care with a garbage bag with all of their possessions. Some of them, 25 percent, have the support of AYAs. Many end up on income assistance. For many of them, it takes time to reach a position where they can even pursue or think about post-secondary education. Setting an arbitrary age limit, I think, is unfair and really counterproductive. I really think, if you’re going to do it, then allow those who qualify for post-secondary education to benefit from the tuition waiver and additional supports as well.

This young woman I talked to said that even with the tuition waiver, she could not pursue her training without the support of Aunt Leah’s — housing assistance, for instance. It’s a non-profit in the Vancouver area.

I mean, I certainly am very supportive of the idea of tuition waiver. I really think that in the longer run, it will bring benefits to all of British Columbia, because young people who would otherwise struggle and be a cost to society can contribute as a result of post-secondary education and training. So I wholeheartedly support the program. I think we need to remove some of the barriers for those who are older than 26 and who would require additional supports — like daycare and housing, for instance.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you for that. Teresa has a follow-up question. Before we get to Teresa’s follow-up, I would just like to welcome the Deputy Chair to the table.

We’re very, very happy to see you. You’re looking good. We’re very pleased. So welcome, Michelle. It’s good to have you back.

We’ll go to Teresa’s second question.

T. Wat: Thank you, Mr. Representative. I totally agree that we should give the children, the youth in care, immense opportunity to pursue their education.

From what I understand from your comment just now, you are advocating for lifting the age limit, and there won’t be any age limit. Do I get you right on that one? Also, I think it’s a great idea to provide opportunity for youth in care to pursue education. But are you going to consider imposing any conditions — for example, whether we should try to encourage them to finish their post-secondary education — or just free for all?

B. Richard: I would be very reluctant to impose any conditions. As I encourage my own children to pursue post-secondary education, I would think that the government, as the de facto parent of these children and youth, should do everything it can to encourage and support kids, young adults, formerly from care to pursue any kind of post-secondary training. I will be advocating for — and it will be a focus in the coming year — removing the age limit and the two years of care requirement in the legislation.

I know that the Vancouver Island University is really breaking ground. They were the leaders prior to the tuition waiver becoming a publicly funded program. They continue to lead. They’re using all of the savings from the government’s decision to reinvest to provide additional supports to youth who apply at that university.

For me, I just can’t envision any circumstances where we would discourage any young person from care from pursuing post-secondary education and becoming contributors.

We talked briefly while we were having technical difficulties. We’re seeing intergenerational issues now and spending more time looking at those. There is a cycle, and breaking that cycle is fundamental to making long-lasting changes. Education is the key to that, in my view.

[11:20 a.m.]

J. Isaacs: Thank you for your reports this morning. Just on the post-secondary tuition, does that include trades as well as just secondary education facilities?

B. Richard: Yes. Technical and academic programs.

J. Isaacs: Okay, great. Apprenticeships, I would imagine, would follow through on that.

My question is just back to the caregiving. Are there people, some of our youth, that are still being housed in hotel rooms? If that is the case, do they have full-time caregivers?

Given the situation that occurred and the very tragic situation that was the outcome of somebody not being present for their job for ten days…. You said that there have been some improvements made. I’m just wondering if the caregivers are still there full time and if they’re logging in and reporting on a more frequent basis. How is it that for ten days someone just couldn’t report on their duties? I don’t understand that.

B. Richard: That’s certainly a good question. Certainly, things have improved since Alex’s stay in that hotel room, and a number of things are ongoing relating to that.

There are still kids who are put up in hotel rooms. Sometimes you’re responding to an emergency situation, and there’s just no alternative in the short term in some remote areas or just not the availability of emergency foster homes, for instance. For any stay over three days now, our office is notified. So we can advocate on behalf of a young person, a child in care, if a stay is prolonged beyond three days. When you think that Alex was in that hotel room for 49 days, that’s a significant improvement. That’s as a result of our work with the ministry.

The ministry is conducting a review of residential care settings. Clearly, part of that is the screening of caregivers, people who are hired. It’s a complicated system, I think, in large part because of liability issues. There are some organizations that contract with the government but then subcontract to smaller organizations which sometimes subcontract to individuals in the system.

I don’t know if you recall, but just after we released the Gervais report, there was a man from…. I can’t remember where he was from. He did a Global TV interview where he talked about…. Clearly, he had reformed, and he seemed to be in a good place. He had a young son with him when he did the interview. But he said that when he became a caregiver, he was hired after a very short interview. He had a criminal record. It wasn’t an issue. Within five days, within a week, he was working as a caregiver for a young person in care.

All of that has to be reviewed and is being reviewed by the ministry. We offered to participate in that review, as has the Federation of Community Social Services. We’re at the margins of it at this time. Actually, the Auditor General’s office has already publicly stated that they’ll be conducting a review of contracted residential services.

Certainly, the Gervais report, which we talked about as a result of another question, has spurred a number of reviews on a number of issues that we all hope will provide improved services in the longer term. But on the issue specifically of hotels, of course, it still happens. It happens for a much shorter period of time. We’re involved if it’s over three days so we can advocate for the individual child involved. I think it’s an example of improvement coming out of a very bad situation.

J. Isaacs: Thank you for that. I would just say there must be…. Whether you contract out or not, or if it’s directly or a subcontract, there has to be some kind of a conduct of care that care providers would have to adhere to. It wouldn’t matter if it was contracted or not. These are the guidelines. These are the rules for that caregiving position.

[11:25 a.m.]

Screening. I’m glad you’ve pointed that out. That’s major, too, especially when we’re working with vulnerable children. Then, also, some kind of formal conduct of care where somebody is reporting and checking in and there’s some oversight that that is actually happening and actually properly in place so that children are looked after.

B. Richard: This may be a good time for me to invite Alan to say a word about this. He was involved in a significant review of contracted residential services, and I’m sure he can add to what I’ve said.

N. Simons (Chair): I would remind members that we have an opportunity to ask the Deputy Minister of Children and Families later on today as well as the director of child welfare, who are primarily responsible for the administration of the CF and CS Act. Bernard’s office is to review their ability to adhere to that. So maybe if Alan wants to respond…. I will also remind members that we will have an opportunity to fully review the Alex Gervais case, as we have not done that yet.

Alan, if you’d like to address some of the…. Or we can come back to it. We’ll give Alan a chance, if he wants to….

A. Markwart: I can just be brief. The issue that you’re speaking to is that if there’s a contracted situation, there are standards of care. There are expectations built into a contract. And of course, we expect that the agency or individuals will, obviously, be there if they’re expected to be there. The issue is ongoing monitoring and quality assurance by the ministry. I think it would be safe to say that that is an area that needs considerable improvement.

In fact, this morning there is a meeting between our office, the Federation of Community Social Services of B.C., and the ministry, beginning to review a residential review project, which was completed in 2012 and made a host of recommendations. That small group is going to be monitoring and, hopefully, holding the ministry more to account in terms of the implementation of those recommendations, which included a number of recommendations about appropriate quality assurance and oversight of contracted resources.

N. Simons (Chair): Thanks for that, Alan. We have a number of people on the list. I’m on the list, and I thought maybe I’d get a chance to ask about the number of critical injuries. It seems to me, if you look at the trend on page 36 of the annual report, it shows that in 2009-10 there were 137 in-mandate cases. It climbed precipitously to 665 in ’15-16 and 754 in ’16-17. That’s not a long period of time, but it seems to be quite a significant increase. Is there a statistical explanation or a process explanation? Or is it simply that there are more critical injuries?

B. Richard: Again, a good point, of course. The difference really is attributed to, I think, a couple of things. We had concerns about what we felt was perhaps an under-reporting. So as the result of discussions with the ministry, training was improved for the front line — guardianship, social workers — so that injuries that might not have been considered as critical injuries…. It really revolved around the definition of “critical injuries.” So both the training of employees and a redefinition of what constitutes a critical injury resulted in that spike. And then it’s been fairly settled since that year that you pointed out, 2009-2010, I think.

We still believe, actually, that there’s an under-reporting of critical injuries, particularly by DAAs, so it remains a bit of an issue. But to be honest, I don’t know if we could handle more than the 2,200 reports that we receive a year. We are certainly…. For instance, would you consider it a critical injury if a child was present when their parent passed away from an overdose, if they were present in the house? At one time, that might not have been considered a critical injury, but now it is.

[11:30 a.m.]

We receive reports of young children being present, sometimes for hours, with a parent who has died from an opioid overdose in their apartment, and because of the potential psychological and psychiatric impact that can have on the child.

N. Simons (Chair): That probably goes a long way to explain the apparent jump.

S. Furstenau: I’m looking at the MCFD Performance Management Report from 2016. One of the things that jumped out at me was that the vast majority of children and youth in care are there as a result of what the ministry calls neglect. Then I’m trying to square the circles.

My question to the representative, really, is: how much work is being done? In your opinion, is there enough work being done to address some of the core issues for why children are being removed and to get them back into their homes, particularly Indigenous children?

We’re looking at all these statistics of what is happening to children when they’re aging out of care. They don’t have roots to families. They don’t have a connection to community. To me, it seems like the root of some of the solution here is getting these children back into their homes. You know, I was actually quite surprised to look at these numbers. These seem like cases where the emphasis for ministry should really be about restoring the conditions in the home so that the children are going back.

Can you comment on that and tell me if you feel that enough is being done on that front?

B. Richard: Well, the short answer is: no, I don’t feel that enough is being done. I mean, it’s an issue for many families, but certainly it’s a significant issue for Indigenous families. It’s a national issue, not just a B.C. issue.

Certainly, before I came here, I worked for three years for First Nations chiefs in New Brunswick to help in the restructuring of their child and family services agency, serving seven Mi’kmaq communities in New Brunswick. These issues were prevalent at that time. We’ve heard so much about it from the TRC and the Cindy Blackstock human rights complaint and the tribunal’s decision on that — and from the Prime Minister down. We heard yesterday from the Minister of Indigenous Services that more funding is coming in the spring budget.

We certainly have to do a great deal more in providing for and, obviously, addressing the root causes — poverty, housing issues, mental health services, addiction treatment support. We have to provide prevention services, early intervention services. We have to improve early childhood development and education, particularly for vulnerable children, and provide family supports.

We have to do more work in when intervention is necessary, and it will be necessary at times. There’s no issue about that. But when we do have to intervene, we have to make a greater effort to place children with extended families, within their communities, so providing support to develop foster families or kinship care and provide the necessary supports, supporting those options, rather than — as often is the case, sadly — taking Indigenous children outside of their communities and placing them in culturally insufficient settings.

We’re not doing nearly enough. If we really want to be serious about addressing these issues, we’re going to have to do much more work earlier. I’ve said many times over the years that even if we had the best child welfare system in the world, it’s still responding to issues that we need to be addressing first and foremost.

[11:35 a.m.]

No child should come into care because their family is poor. Poverty is…. But it is an issue. The government has decided to take a deeper dive into trying to address poverty. We’re actually asking in the statutory review that that be considered designated services as far as children are concerned, so that we can advocate on these kinds of issues as well. We consider these children to be vulnerable — the 30 percent of children that live below the poverty line.

My answer is perhaps too long. Clearly, I think there’s so much more that we can do.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much.

Thanks, Sonia, for the question. Do you have a follow-up?

We’ve got Rick. Rick, go ahead.

R. Glumac: Just a question around the contracting of the residential services. Was there a time when this wasn’t contracted out? When did that change?

B. Richard: The history. Perhaps, Dawn, I’ll let you take that.

D. Thomas-Wightman: Alan may be able to answer this better, with his historical view. Residential resources have been contracted out for years. I mean, I don’t remember a time that there wasn’t contracted staff residential resources. Alan may be able to answer better.

N. Simons (Chair): Also, if I might just add…. I think Rick might be asking about contracted for-profit as well, because that’s another category of contracted services.

B. Richard: Not that Alan is older, but I think he may have the recollection of another time.

N. Simons (Chair): He appreciates that comment. We’ll give him the floor.

A. Markwart: I am, in fact, older. I’m so old, you have to go way back.

There has always been contracted staffed residential resources. However, if you go back — actually, for those who were around at the time — prior to 1984, the Social Credit government, there was a privatization initiative at that time. Before that, there were some specialized government staffed operated residential programs. They were eventually privatized, but even then, most of them were contracted services.

For-profits have always been around, as far as I recall, although I think to a greater extent now than, say, a decade or two ago.

R. Glumac: Okay.

N. Simons (Chair): We can raise that again, Rick, when the ministry is responding to questions later on.

Can I go to Laurie for…? Oh, Rick has a follow-up. Sorry. Go ahead.

R. Glumac: Well, it’s a separate question. I’ll follow up on that one later.

My original question was one that you asked, Nicholas. I just wanted to dig into that just a little bit. Looking at the rise in critical injuries…. When you responded to that, you said that things have been fairly settled since 2009, 2010. What did you mean by that? I didn’t understand that.

B. Richard: We haven’t seen the same kinds of increases. It was clearly a result of a redefinition of what a critical injury is, plus….

R. Glumac: In 2009?

B. Richard: Yeah, I think around that time — 2008, 2009. And improved training of MCFD staff to recognize critical injury and to report. Obviously, we depend on the ministry. The reports that we get, we get from the ministry. So we rely on them for those reports.

Critical injuries…. Typically, you’d think a broken arm or a broken leg, but they include everything — from physical abuse; sexual abuse; mental abuse; drug overdoses, for instance; suicide attempts; suicides — the whole spectrum of what would be considered injuries. It’s still a huge number. As I’ve said, about 2,200 reports a year of injuries and about 800 that are related to services. Some of those can be multiple injuries to the same child. Sadly, we see that all too often, depending on their circumstances. Yes.

[11:40 a.m.]

R. Glumac: Things changed in 2009, 2010. I’m just curious. Why was there such a big spike in the last two years?

B. Richard: That was in 2010 and 2012.

N. Simons (Chair): That’s right, Bernard. You were just a couple of years off, I think, when you saw the change in the reporting. If you look at the actual number of deaths, which has remained fairly close to average, and you see an increase in critical injuries, you can pretty much attribute that to a difference in reporting. The deaths are without any subjective analysis, and the critical injuries perhaps are.

R. Glumac: Okay. So that’s the case?

N. Simons (Chair): I think so.

Alan just wants to add something to this.

A. Markwart: If I could add to that. In 2010, there was a special report done by the representative specifically on the issue of the reporting of critical injuries and the under-reporting of critical injuries, which then led to some discussions with MCFD. In effect, policies were reviewed, and therefore, we saw a substantial increase following that.

N. Simons (Chair): I think that adequately answers the question.

We have Michelle, Deputy Chair. Go ahead.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): It is in regard to the reporting. We speak, and I’ve heard you say it multiple times, of the lack of reporting. I’m just wondering if that has any relevance to…. Is it labour-intensive for staff to do the reporting? Are they doing it pen on paper? Are they using technology these days? How is the reporting done, and why are we seeing a lack of reporting? What is the hesitation for people to report? What’s holding them back?

B. Richard: I think it’s a great question for the ministry, because the reporting is done by the ministry. Certainly, we’ve noticed that there is. We know, because we come and we receive information on injuries that are not reported through the ministry. So we are aware that there is still some under-reporting.

I’ll let Dawn perhaps add a word or two.

D. Thomas-Wightman: It is a good question. They use technology. There’s a case management system that allows social workers to report. Yes, caseload and workload would play into that, because it is an extensive form that has to be completed. Sometimes we get them months later because of caseload issues, and sometimes the social workers will write on the report: “Due to caseload, was not able to report at this time.” The work may be happening in response to the critical injury, but the report isn’t done immediately.

It is important, though, that we get those reports — and for the ministry and social workers as well — to really understand what’s happening in the life of a child. If you get it two or three months later, there may have been another report since that time.

The other point to make. Alan talked about the report in 2010 around redefinition of critical injuries and reporting, but it still happens. There’s a lack of awareness sometimes from social workers of what constitutes a critical injury. With the Paige report, for instance, we found in that report, which was after the 2010 one, that there were 50 incidents where critical incidents should have been reported to our office. There still remains that lack of understanding and awareness by social workers. So training continues and will continue.

The other areas that we see some under-reporting are CYMH, child and youth mental health; youth justice; the delegated agencies. Increased training and focus has to happen with those groups so that we can ensure we have the most accurate data.

B. Richard: Our investigation team reviews these critical reports, but then we can work with our advocates to make contact with the ministry. I want to be honest. Sometimes we’re shaking our heads over some of these reports where critical injuries occur and there’s very little response or inadequate response. It could be as a result of workload. Whatever the reasons, there is inadequate response to those injuries.

It gives us the information we need to advocate in individual cases, to get the ministry to respond. Every month we see cases that cause us to shake our heads and think: “What are they doing? These kids are at risk.”

That’s the role we play. I think it’s the role that Ted Hughes envisioned for our office, and it’s an ongoing role.

The reports are a small part of our work. They get a lot of the attention, the public reports. But the day-to-day work allows us to help individual children in the system and to work collaboratively with the ministry and the ministries in that regard.

[11:45 a.m.]

I think it’s important for us to get the reports. We certainly want the reporting to be as thorough and complete as possible. We don’t want for any child to be more vulnerable if we’re not able to advocate for them because we don’t have the information.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much, Bernard. We do have more people on the speakers’ question list, and we also have the statutory review to go through by 12:30. We’re scheduled to go on to that immediately, but if you want to have a couple of quick questions still, I’m fine with that. Alan is here to present on the statutory review.

I have Laurie and Teresa.

L. Throness: Chair, just a couple of very quick questions.

You have 61 FTEs in your shop. You have 214 media calls a year. That’s about one every business day. How big is your communications shop?

B. Richard: We have three communications staff. Jeff Rud is with me now, and two other people. Of course, the communications staff are not limited to handling media calls. They work on our annual reports, on every one of our public reports. They review the report content. They work on getting photos, if they’re needed, for the annual report.

They help us organize our youth events. They lead our youth social media team, for instance. They’re part of our outreach and youth engagement efforts. They play a significant role well beyond relationships with the media.

Certainly, I would say that Jeff is our point guy in terms of media relations. He knows that community really well, so he’s able to respond quickly to their needs.

The three communications staff do a whole host of jobs in the office, including writing my speeches. I’m invited to speak on a very regular basis. Last Friday I was at the First Nations Education Steering Committee conference. There were 900 people present at the Westin in Vancouver. I mean, it’s virtually on a weekly basis.

They even try to control what I say to this committee from time to time, but that’s part of it too.

L. Throness: I accept that. That’s a good answer.

Another unrelated question. I thought I saw this. I’m not sure if I’m right, but it seems to me that you get coroner’s reports through the ministry, rather than directly from the coroner. To me, this is a bit of an independence question. I’m wondering why you wouldn’t have a direct arrangement with the coroner.

B. Richard: Well, yes. Actually, we do have an arrangement with the coroner, and we do receive coroner’s reports and recommendations. Quite often — I’d say close to ten times since I’ve been here — we’ve received coroner’s reports that included recommendations to consider an investigation in a specific case. Several of those have been related to drug overdoses.

We’re looking to do more of an aggregate kind of work there, because we couldn’t possibly do ten investigations a year. That would be too much of an effort required from our staff. We end up doing three, perhaps four in a year. Some of those will be as a result of recommendations from the coroners.

I’ve met several times with the coroner, Ms. Lapointe, since I’ve been here. Actually, one of our senior staff today is sitting on a coroner’s panel on transitions from care. The coroner sits, as well, on the Children’s Forum, which includes the ministry, ourselves, the Public Guardian and Trustee and perhaps someone else.

So yes, we have an ongoing relationship with the coroner’s office. They don’t report to us, but they send us reports of cases that they believe we should be aware of.

T. Wat: I still want to go back to the tuition waiver. Like you, I’m very passionate about giving the opportunity for every individual to pursue education to lift them out of poverty and misery.

[11:50 a.m.]

I know that we shouldn’t really try to have a quantitative assessment of how well they do, but I do advocate for an assessment of those youth out of care who pursue education, whether it’s trade or academic, to see how well they do and how much contribution out of that educational opportunity they can contribute to our community. By doing that, I think we can convey the message to the rest of British Columbia that we need to spend that kind of money to help youth out of care.

I strongly urge that we need to have some follow-up study of those who pursue educational opportunities by taking advantage of the tuition waiver.

B. Richard: Very briefly. That’s more of a statement than a question, but I certainly agree with the statement by the member that it’s early days for the tuition waiver program. But we certainly should be…. It’s up to the education outcomes to provide all they can so that students succeed in school.

There’s a need to keep track of how well they do after they leave their program, whether it’s a trade, a technical program or an academic program. I’m sure that will be done. Certainly, it’s something that we will be keeping an eye on. But I think, in future years, not within…. We’re still concerned about eligibility and providing the right supports, so beyond even this service plan, I think. But we would be looking at this, for sure.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much, Bernard, and thank you to the members for their questions and for the answers that were provided.

We’re going to move to item 2 on the agenda, which is to consider the Representative for Youth’s submission and presentation regarding the statutory review. I believe, by Bernard’s earlier comments, that perhaps Alan is going to take the lead on that.

A. Markwart: Well, I think Bernard will do the introduction, and I’m here to answer the more technical questions.

N. Simons (Chair): Very good. Bernard, you have the floor once again.

Presentations on Statutory Review of
Representative for Children and Youth Act

OFFICE OF THE REPRESENTATIVE
FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

B. Richard: Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll summarize my thoughts on this. I have a statement. But I guess, to be consistent with my earlier words and thoughts…. Perhaps my communication staff will be shocked that I’m approaching it this way, but let me say this to summarize this whole issue for me.

We’re very concerned about the prospects of any limitation on our mandate. Certainly, several of the Attorney General’s thoughts…. They’re less recommendations. But thoughts that they’ve raised, issues that they’ve raised in their brief, raised concerns for us. There are a couple that we can agree with.

Certainly, any indication that our ability to choose which files we decide to investigate, any limitations on our ability to decide which cases we will report on to the public, any limitations on our ability to interview pertinent witnesses involved in the provision of children services — any of those kinds of limitations — would alarm me. Certainly, we would be resistant to that.

On the other hand, virtually all of the other briefs…. I should say, perhaps, the PGT one raised some relevant issues, as well as the Coroners Service brief, although I really think we’re in a good place with the Coroners Service at this point. Their brief was more relating to a prior, specific case. But several of the briefs would have you recommend a significant expansion of our role.

I think I have to be prudent in saying that some of these recommendations would require us to expand our resources beyond what I think would be reasonable. I think an unlimited mandate….

[11:55 a.m.]

I’ve seen some of the briefs say that virtually every public service to children in B.C. should be under our purview to provide oversight for and to review and to report on. That’s a significant, significant expansion.

We’ve taken, I think, a middle-of-the-road approach, where we’re recommending expansion where we think it’s totally consistent with policy changes and program developments over the year — tuition waiver, AYAs, increasing the age to which young adults can have access to some services, looking at policy development in the area of poverty reduction and its impact on children, for instance. So very targeted kinds of changes, modifications that would allow us to do a bit more work.

I’ll go through my notes very quickly. I’d rather we deal with questions. Actually, I would rather Alan deal with questions, but we’ll get to that relatively soon.

Section 30, of course, requires the committee to conduct a comprehensive review of the legislation every five years. I think that’s too often, personally. We’re suggesting that perhaps every seven years should be sufficient. You’ll decide what to recommend in that regard. It takes quite a bit of effort to prepare for these reviews. We’ve had our legal counsel involved. We’ve had our part-time sage, Alan Markwart, spend quite a bit of hours on this, and our executive has as well.

I’ll just say this. I think some of the numbers that we see, and that I’ve reported on this morning, require us to at least consider if we can do a better job of responding to the needs of the very vulnerable kids in the province. I think we can.

Let me go to the gist of it, then. Certainly, with regards to monitoring, let me be clear on this point. I know that it’s come up now a few times during previous reviews, and it’s been addressed. Ted Hughes presented before the previous committee in late January of this year. I think he didn’t take a firm position other than to say thatif you decide that monitoring is a part of this mandate that needs to stay, perhaps it’s time to make a decision and to leave it there in the foreseeable future, rather than revisiting this issue every five years.

I’ve spoken to the MCFD deputy, spoken to the minister. Both have assured me that they don’t feel that the time is right to remove monitoring from the RCY’s mandate, and you’ll have a chance to ask the deputy this afternoon. If that’s the case, then I think perhaps the time is right to make it a permanent part of our mandate and stop worrying about it every five years.

I’ll take my direction from Ted Hughes and quote from him, from January. He said: “There’s no question about the importance of the advocacy function of the representative’s office. It has been so ably handled and is now in capable hands” — I’ll accept that — “to carry forward, as well as the review and reporting on critical injuries and deaths of children in care.”

Then he went on to say: “The placement, at the time, of the monitoring provision was necessary then. Whether it is now, I don’t know, but I think you’ve got to figure that out. If your final report says that you think this function should stay, that would not upset me. I think that the job has been done, and if that’s where the decision lies, get on with it.”

[12:00 p.m.]

I agree with Mr. Hughes’s take on this issue. I would strongly suggest to the committee that the RCY’s monitoring role is indeed still necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.

With respect to potential additions or expansions of the RCY Act and the representative’s mandate, my office has made a number of recommendations. They’re in our brief. I’ll just zero in on a few of them.

A number of advocate offices across the country have incorporated reference to the convention on the rights of the child. I think the time has come for B.C. to do the same thing. We do our best to operate within the ambit of the convention. We’re really trying to expand our outreach to children and youth to hear their voices, to amplify their voices, to encourage them to speak out on services that affect them more than anybody else in the province. We’ll continue to do that.

I think referring to the convention is something that we should do. It guides our work already. It should guide the work of the ministry and of the entire province in terms of dealing with vulnerable children and young persons.

Canadian courts have held that the UNCRC is not part of domestic law unless it is incorporated by reference into a domestic statute. The Ontario Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth includes reference to the CRC, as do the statutes of Yukon and Nunavut’s more recent advocate offices. I believe it should be included in our legislation as well.

We therefore recommend that the jurisdiction in respect to services to children with special needs should be clarified by amending the definition of “designated services” and adding “services or programs provided or funded by government for children with special needs.” That would clarify our mandate to intervene in that respect.

When the RCY Act was first enacted, the clear intent was for the representative to be able to advocate for and monitor all services delivered to children and youth with special needs. RCY acquired that jurisdiction because all of those services were, at that time, delivered through Community Living B.C. However, in 2009, government removed this basket of services from CLBC and transferred them to MCFD, which was delivering these services. In April 2015, to further complicate matters, a further program reorganization sliced off nursing support services from that basket and transferred them to the Ministry of Health.

A proper definition of designated services is not a mere technicality. If a service is not a designated service, the RCY has no statutory authority to exercise its advocacy and monitoring functions. We think that’s important and needs clarification, not because of anything that we do but because program delivery has changed. The act needs to keep up with those changes.

We recommend that the representative’s mandate in relation to young adults be amended to increase the upper age limit to age 26 — we’ve talked about that in relation to tuition waiver and AYAs — and to remove the requirement that the person must have received a reviewable service within 15 months before the person’s 19th birthday. If a child formerly was in care for 17 years of their life but then not after the age of 17 and received no services after the age of 17, we’re prohibited to advocate on behalf of that child for AYA services, for a tuition waiver, for instance. We think that’s something that should be remedied.

Government recently expanded the age limit for agreements with young adults to age 26. Similarly, the Ministry of Advanced Education has talked about the tuition waiver. In my view, the definition of “young adult” in the RCY Act should align with the obvious intention of government to increase the upper age limit on other fronts. The requirement that the young adult must have received a reviewable service within 15 months of the person’s 19th birthday has been artificially restrictive.

[12:05 p.m.]

I believe RCY should be able to advocate for any young adult seeking to receive prescribed services, whether or not they were previously in the system. We are satisfied that adding the additional cases can readily be absorbed into existing advocacy resources and caseloads.

We also recommend that the scope of prescribed services be broadened for young adults with special needs. Many of the services MCFD delivers to children and youth are also delivered to adults with special needs, but not necessarily under the Community Living Authority Act, the only service that has been prescribed in the regulation. The result is an advocacy gap.

I am asking the committee to recommend that government amend the regulation to fill that gap and ensure that young adults with special needs have advocacy with respect to all services government delivers to young adults, such as disability assistance, housing, mental health and addiction services. This reflects the overarching view that my office should be able to advocate for a vulnerable person in all key areas of that person’s interaction with government.

We also recommend that the representative’s advocacy function should be expanded to include young adults who have aged out of care and that the scope of services be broad, as suggested earlier, for adults with special needs. The poor outcomes for youth who have aged out of care have been very well documented, including disproportionately high rates of homelessness, unemployment, reliance on government assistance, substance misuse, much lower graduation rates. I can add teen pregnancy and a host of others to that list.

Youth who have aged out of care need continued support and advocacy. In my view, this highly vulnerable population needs and deserves the advocacy support that our office can provide. It should be acknowledged that expanding the RCY’s advocacy mandate to youth who have aged out of care would require some additional resources, as there are approximately 1,000 youth each year who age out of care or a youth agreement.

In fact, I tend to be as much if not more concerned about youth with youth agreements. They’re not in foster care. They’re not in their family homes. They are much more vulnerable.

Some of the cases that we are very concerned about concern youth on youth agreements — so-called independent youth. They’re not technically considered youth in care, but in my view, they require additional supports. In a way — and you can question the ministry on this, this afternoon — it allows the ministry to say: “Oh well, the number of youth in care is slowly being reduced.” Yet the numbers show that the number of youths on youth agreement is slowly climbing.

I worry about those kinds of numbers. It’s one of the reasons why I think our monitoring function is so essential to the work that we do.

That’s why we’re recommending that the committee consider RCY’s mandate to monitor, review, audit and conduct research to include prescribed services for young adults; special education services; and the government’s poverty strategy, as it pertains to children and young adults.

Since my appointment, I have reflected considerably on the exercise of the monitoring role going forward. I’ve concluded that, far from limiting that role, the monitoring role should be expanded in these four respects.

It’s my view that, just as designated services are subject to both the advocacy function and the monitoring function, the same should be true for prescribed services to young adults. I see no principled basis for limiting the monitoring role to designated services only, given that similar systemic issues will necessarily arise in connection with prescribed services to young adults.

This would ensure that in addition to individual advocacy, systemic work can be done in order to bring important structural and thematic issues and solutions regarding services to young adults to the attention of government and of this committee.

Second, it is my view that the monitoring role should specifically be amended to enable the representative to monitor, review, audit and conduct research on two key additional areas affecting vulnerable children, namely special education and child poverty. I’m repeating myself now.

[12:10 p.m.]

I won’t give you the numbers. They’re readily available, in terms of the number of children living in poverty in British Columbia. I believe that it is appropriate, as part of any legislative reform, that the RCY Act be amended to enable ongoing monitoring in respect of the government’s poverty reduction strategy concerning poor children and young adults.

There are a number of other issues, but finally, and I mentioned this, I recommend that the committee extend the length of the review period for the RCY Act to at least once every seven years, from the current five-year period. In some provinces, it’s ten years. Some don’t have any review requirement or obligation, compulsory review, at all.

It’s a summary. I’ve keyed in on some of the significant issues. I’ve also mentioned in the brief…. They’re more housekeeping issues.

I really think the time has come for British Columbia legislators to consider bringing in more uniform measures for recruiting legislative officers, providing for their working conditions, the length of their terms, the way they’re compensated, the pension provisions. I was surprised to find out that some officers are ineligible for better pension provisions than others, which is a bit surprising for me because we all have about the same responsibilities and duties in terms of reporting to the Legislature.

By the way, I do mention that I wouldn’t want any of those changes to apply to myself. I consider myself a bit of a transition legislative officer in British Columbia, but I think there is an opportunity to make some improvements. You do have a very robust hiring process, which makes it all that more surprising that I sit in the role, as I present to you today. It is a very robust process, and I think it…. Some provinces have adopted uniform rules for these kinds of things. I think that that would be….

A number of side deals have been made over the years, which are surprising to me. I think that the time may be right, not to make those apply to any of the existing officers…. But looking ahead to the future, the time, perhaps, is right to make some changes in that regard.

That’s all I had to say, or all my communications staff have had me say, but I’m prepared to try and tackle questions.

N. Simons (Chair): All right. Well, thank you very much for that overview.

Maybe, first, I’ll ask if Alan wants to add anything at this point. Or do you want to see what the questions are? I’m taking a list. Are we good…?

A. Markwart: I don’t have anything to add. We’ll just take questions.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. The first person on our list is Michelle, Deputy Chair.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much, Bernard, for the thorough review of the recommendations.

When looking at recommendation No. 2, in regards to expanding the role of advocacy for children with special needs…. I’m just looking for some clarification as to what you are defining as those children. Are you referring to, perhaps, the children in the ministry currently who are receiving, say, autism funding, who are in functional, stable environments at home, being cared for by their families?

When they age out of autism funding, your department would then become an advocate for those children, even though they transfer into Social Development. That being said, they age out of care. They potentially receive income assistance funding, with PWD to help support. We try and find them jobs and support them in training and functional skills to make them as independent as we possibly can in their daily lives.

Are you saying…? I’m just trying to understand what it is you see your role as for those families or those youth who have been raised in a very functional, supportive family — that you would somehow need to advocate for them.

[12:15 p.m.]

A. Markwart: Do you want me to take the question, Bernard?

B. Richard: Yes, yes. I’m very comfortable with you, Alan.

Alan has been the lead on the review, and this is an issue he knows very well. Unless I feel a strong compulsion to step in, I’ll let Alan handle all of the questions.

A. Markwart: Well, if I understand your question correctly…. First of all, this particular recommendation applies to children with special needs, not to young adults with special needs.

The problem has arisen because of the way the legislation is framed. The special needs are tied to services that were offered under the Community Living Authority Act. At one time, if you go back, CLBC had responsibility for the delivery of services to special needs children. Then it moved back to the ministry, and then you had some services — for example, nursing and support services — which moved over to the Ministry of Health.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): And now we have STADD, which is helping with the transition.

A. Markwart: Yeah. So really our issue here is…. It’s raised questions about what is, actually, the jurisdiction of the representative in relation to special needs.

It’s quite obvious that the original intent was that the representative should have a mandate around the capacity to advocate or to monitor services in relation to the whole basket of services for children with special needs, including autism funding, medical benefits, nursing support services as well as those kinds of services that may be provided through special needs agreements under the Child, Family and Community Service Act.

This is really just a matter of clarifying that because programs have moved around across ministries…. It’s a question of how the legislation has been drafted that has created those uncertainties. It’s also raised in the Ministry of Attorney General submission.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): Specifically, you are speaking of not just children in care, who are typically who you work with, support, advocate for, but increasing the role…

A. Markwart: …to the basket of services for children with special needs across the board, yes.

N. Simons (Chair): So reviewable services, designated services, everybody?

A. Markwart: Yes.

N. Simons (Chair): Was that good, Michelle? Okay.

Laurie, you have a question.

L. Throness: A couple of questions, quickly. I may have misunderstood the representative, but it seemed to me that he was saying that the Attorney General or his staff have somehow communicated government’s desire to restrict the mandate of the RCY. Could the representative elaborate on that? How has this been done?

B. Richard: I guess it was February that the Attorney General presented to this committee, so the previous committee, with a number of suggestions of issues that might be addressed through the committee that, for the most part, not all — and we have a detailed discussion of those and are prepared, certainly, to address each of them individually — would have the outcome of restricting our mandate.

I can give you some examples. For example, the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General’s submission raises the issue as to whether this section —11(4) of the RCY Act — should make it mandatory for the representative to disclose the results of a review to the responsible public body.

[12:20 p.m.]

Certainly, we believe the existing…. We have no difficulty in disclosing the results of any review to the appropriate ministry, but we think that the act should not be amended and that I should have the discretion to decide whether we do or not. Reporting, even to the ministry, can involve a significant amount of work. I think, as is more consistent with the independence of the office — sorry, I’m being handed notes at the same time as I’m speaking — that the representative be allowed to exercise that discretion.

There are some cases where we’ve conducted reviews where we’ve seen that there’s no improvement that can be made or suggestion that we could make that would make a difference. In those cases, we don’t review it. If it’s made compulsory for us to report to the ministry every time that we conduct a review, then we think it’s a waste of resources and time.

Let me give you, perhaps, a couple more specific examples. For example, the Ministry of Justice — and MCFD, for that matter — has explicitly disagreed with our interpretation of section 6(1)(b) of the RCY Act that the monitoring function allows us to monitor the directors’ exercise of the quality review function under the CF and CS Act. We disagree with their view. We believe that it would be very undesirable and quite concerning if we could not monitor the way in which the director is exercising the ministry’s quality review function.

I mean, it’s an issue that was identified in the Hughes report and in previous reviews by this very committee, including the Plecas report as well. We think this has to remain in the legislation and the Ministry of Justice certainly has indicated that they thought it might be removed. There are a number of examples from the Justice submission that we find concerning that would have the result of…. I’m prepared to provide a lot more specific input in writing on those issues, Mr. Chair, if that’s preferable.

N. Simons (Chair): Sure. Laurie has a follow-up question.

L. Throness: I was noting, just with respect to the recommendation on the UN convention on the rights of the child, that Canada has ratified that convention. Has the B.C. Legislature ratified that convention or not? What’s the status?

B. Richard: Not to my knowledge. So Canada is the state…. It’s the most ratified convention in the history of the UN. All but two countries have ratified it — Somalia and the United States. So every other country has. But there are ongoing issues.

Canada reports to the children’s committee of the UN on its compliance with the convention every five years. It’s actually late in reporting. The next report is due. I think they’re reporting for two reporting periods by July 1 of next year. It gathers information from individual provinces in reporting. The reporting has been, I would submit, fairly weak in terms of Canada’s role.

I don’t know of any legislature that has explicitly ratified the convention or that they could. But certainly there would be room for doing so indirectly by way of whereas clauses, for instance, in our legislation or in other legislation. Certainly, there would be ways for a legislature to express their support for the provisions and the articles of the convention. I think that would be a desirable thing.

[12:25 p.m.]

S. Furstenau: You spoke to the recommendations from TRC and the Ed Johns report, but I’m wondering if you can also speak to, given the government’s commitment to UNDRIP, what role RCY can play in moving forward with that commitment and how it relates specifically to the work being done by you and also by the ministry.

B. Richard: We do note in our written submission — it’s more of a note, not a specific recommendation — that UNDRIP, as well…. Given the government’s position, we certainly intend to adapt UNDRIP in our own functioning, and we’ve done that, I think, to some extent already. We have a very vigorous recruitment policy, perhaps one of the few organizations in the B.C. government, if not the only one, that has an Indigenous “must” in our recruitment policy over the next 3½ years. So we certainly have adapted our own….

We haven’t mentioned it specifically because it’s not…. Whereas the convention addresses child and youth issues, UNDRIP is much broader in terms of a document. But certainly, in principle, we plan to adopt its provisions in our own operations, given that that’s the government’s own view. Once it’s adopted, and I expect it will be, then it would apply to us as much as to any other organization of government.

D. Thomas-Wightman: I’m just going to add a little bit to that answer. Some of the principles under UNDRIP and recommendations around Indigenous leadership…. We do hold the government to account, including supporting Ed John’s recommendation around Indigenous leadership at the executive table.

In addition, we’ve created the Indigenous Strategies and Partnerships Team in response to some of the principles in UNDRIP. There was no function at our office in the past. Over the last, I guess, two years, we’ve increased that team to a team of four or five, plus a youth team, without any additional funding. We’ve just taken that from budget areas that we’ve saved on in other areas. So those are some of the initiatives that we support under the principles in UNDRIP.

N. Simons (Chair): Thanks very much, Dawn.

I don’t see any other questions on this particular item, which gives us exactly 15 minutes to get the update on the statutory review submissions and the process to date — item 4 on our agenda. Alayna, you’re going to help us out with this.

Statutory Review of
Representative for Children and Youth Act

A. van Leeuwen: Thank you, Members. I will try not to take too much time, as I see that lunch is on the table. Everybody’s probably hungry and looking for a break. What I’ll try to do today is give you a little bit of information and context, maybe particularly for the benefit of new committee members, as to the evidence that was collected by the committee in the previous parliament and how the committee might carry that forward to some degree in their current considerations.

As you know, section 30 of the Representative for Children and Youth Act requires periodic reviews of the act. The corresponding provision in your committee’s terms of reference requires that the statutory review that is currently underway be completed by February 28, 2018. This committee has now received the representative’s statutory review submission and heard their presentation this morning, but we want to ensure that this committee also has the benefit of the evidence collected in the last parliament as well as you move forward in completing your statutory review.

Because section 30 of the act stipulates that the statutory review had to be commenced by April 1, 2017, the committee in the last parliament did undertake some preliminary evidence-gathering. The committee members at that time were conscious of meeting their obligation to begin the review, but they did not want to proceed too far down any paths that would inhibit the committee when it resumed its work after the provincial general election, with what they anticipated could be a changed membership.

Additionally, they recognized that, at that time, Mr. Richard was newly appointed, as of November, 2016, and it would be appropriate for him to take some time in the role before working with his staff to develop a submission on behalf of their office.

[12:30 p.m.]

With assistance from the Parliamentary Committees Office last year, the committee developed and approved a list of people and organizations to contact to solicit written submissions. Nearly 60 organizations were directly contacted in early December of 2016. The committee also used our on-line consultation portal to accept submissions from anyone else who was interested in making a contribution. The portal was open from mid-December 2016 to mid-February 2017, with social media posts and email reminders used to help encourage input.

As a result, the committee received 16 written submissions. This number of written submissions, while not large relative to some other consultations, was similar to what was received in the committee’s 2011-12 open consultation on the statutory review of that year. Some organizations, such as UNICEF Canada and First Call, made submissions both in that previous statutory review and in the current review.

These written submissions have been uploaded to your iPads in a folder called “Statutory review submissions.” In the event you have not yet had time to read each submission, a summary of the submissions was provided to you via email yesterday and is uploaded to your iPads in the folder of materials associated with today’s meeting. Hard copies have been included with your package of other materials for today’s meeting.

In general, the written submissions were very supportive of the role of the representative, with a number of them making suggestions for expansions of the representative’s mandate, either in the form of increasing the age range of youths eligible for assistance from the representative or increasing the number and scope of services that the representative has a mandate in relation to, or some combination of the two factors.

A few of these submissions, as Mr. Richard already referenced, came from organizations that also have a mandate with regard to children and youth, and those provided some specific suggestions on clarifications around procedure, timing or other kinds of issues that may arise in terms of interaction between two agencies with shared mandates. For example, the Coroners Service and the Public Guardian and Trustee made some suggestions in that regard.

In addition to soliciting written submissions, in the last parliament, the committee heard two presentations from expert witnesses. One already referenced by the RCY was from the Hon. Ted Hughes on January 12, 2017. Also, the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General had the Deputy Attorney General, Richard Fyfe, appear on behalf of the ministry on February 22, 2017.

I’ll start first by telling you a little bit about what Mr. Hughes said. Part of his presentation is summarized in the submissions summary document that I referenced earlier. To state it briefly now, his presentation focused essentially and primarily on section 6(1)(b), the provision providing the representative’s “monitor, review, audit and conduct research” function.

Now, for those of you who don’t know already, that provision stemmed from his 2006 report recommending the establishment of the RCY office. Hughes had said at that time that the mandate of monitoring, reviewing, auditing and investigating the performance and accountability of the child welfare system “may not be a permanent aspect of its mandate” and that while “it is unusual to have an external body overseeing the functioning of a government ministry,” it is essential at this time.

To help put Mr. Hughes’s January 2012 presentation in context, I’ll provide some background on the previous statutory reviews. During the 2011-12 statutory review, there had been some specific discussion in the committee involving the representative and the Ministry of Children and Family Development regarding possible discussions under which an explicit oversight function of the ministry could conceivably be phased out.

The ministry’s recommendation, in their written submission on that particular matter in 2012, stated: “After two years’ consideration to ending the representative’s monitoring, review and audit provisions, while maintaining the representative’s current provision for systemic advocacy — as considered in the Hughes report — and research capacity…. This change would be contingent on certain actions by MCFD to the satisfaction of the select standing committee.”

Mr. Hughes had been consulted by the committee during the 2011-12 statutory review, appearing before the committee and answering questions as to his views on accountability arrangements between the ministry and the representative and the child welfare system generally. He said at that time that he considered the concept of re-examining the issue of the monitoring provisions in a few years hence would be a reasonable approach.

[12:35 p.m.]

The ministry ultimately suggested waiting three years, instead of the two years that they had initially proposed, before doing any reconsiderations of section 6(1)(b). Following that statutory review, at the recommendation of the committee, the RCY Act was amended to specifically require a limited review of only 6(1)(b) to be undertaken by April 1, 2015 — essentially, to check in on whether the conditions had evolved such that the committee might reconsider section 6(1)(b) as it stood at that time.

The conclusion in 2015, as you may know, was that the committee supported the ministry’s and the representative’s joint position, expressed to the committee, that section 6(1)(b) should be left as is and potentially re-evaluated, if the committee desired, as part of the general statutory review scheduled for 2017. That joint letter was appended to the committee’s 2015 report and is available for your review if it’s helpful to you.

In light of that context, Mr. Hughes’s January 2017 presentation to the committee mostly discussed section 6(1)(b). Considering that in 2011-12, he had essentially been called to the committee to share his views on that, he felt it would be useful for him to share his views on that and whether those views had changed in the interim. So he focused mostly on that section.

As the representative already mentioned, Mr. Hughes said at that time: “The time has come to put in place a plan to bring about the change and to follow through on its implementation or, alternatively, accept that section 6(1)(b) is in the act to stay on a permanent basis.”

Mr. Hughes suggested in his January 12 presentation that Mr. Richard’s previous experience in New Brunswick — a province where the advocate’s act does not contain similar specific monitor, audit and review language — would position him well to assist the committee in considering the role that section plays in the representative’s mandate.

Now, in terms of the other expert briefing heard by the committee in the last parliament, what was then the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General had their deputy minister appear, to provide a submission. Prior to their presentation, the Ministry of Children and Family Development made two presentations to give a general update to the committee on developments in the child welfare system, current ministry priorities and using data as part of the ministry’s performance management system.

These context-setting briefings did not specifically address or present any position on the RCY Act itself. Rather, at that time, I think MCFD was leaving it to the Deputy Attorney General to present what was government’s general view at that time. The Deputy Attorney General mentioned that while the submission that they provided to us and presented to the committee on February 22 was developed in consultation with a number of interested ministries and agencies, the submission did not preclude any individual ministries or agencies making their own stand-alone presentation or submission to the committee’s process or, indeed, to appear before the committee if the committee so desired.

The ministry’s submission was structured around four optional discussion questions that the Parliamentary Committees Office had provided to stakeholders and ministries to structure their input, should they choose to use it. The questions were general questions, “Are there areas of the act that you feel should be clarified? Are the representative’s powers adequate to carry out the job of meeting the needs of children and youth?” and so on.

The submission the Deputy Attorney General made did not suggest any really specific fixes to the act but, rather, included 13 recommendations regarding areas the committee may wish to explore. For example, the ministry noted the definition of “designated services,” when read with other definitions in the act — such as “young adult,” as defined in section 6 — results in a potential lack of clarity as to what the act covers. Their submission suggested the committee might consider examining areas like that and making suggestions as to what the committee thinks ought to be the actual impact of the act relative to what they think the intent was.

I will not attempt to summarize the submission in any detail today. In addition to the RCY’s submission presented today, the submission from the Ministry of Attorney General was the most technical and wide-ranging submission that we received in the last parliament as part of the committee’s considerations.

[12:40 p.m.]

I will note, though, that with regard to section 6(1)(b), which Mr. Hughes commented on in his presentation in January, the Deputy Attorney General’s primary comment on that section was to suggest a refinement of the section to clarify, for reasons explained in the written submission, that a review by a director, under the Child, Family and Community Service Act, is not subject to review by the representative. I think you’ve already heard the representative’s view on that matter today.

No other comment on that subsection was made, implying the government was not, at that time, proposing any significant changes to that monitoring language or alteration or, indeed, removal of it.

As members’ time allows, I would recommend reviewing that submission. You’ve no doubt noticed that a lot of the RCY’s recommendations comment on the observations and recommendations in the Attorney General’s submission. The Deputy Attorney General said last February that the government would be happy to address any of the committee’s needs for further information or discussion on any issues raised in the submission or any other issues that arise from the committee’s process.

Indeed, for members, it may be worth confirming with representatives of the government, perhaps, such as the MCFD senior staff that will attend this afternoon, if they plan to submit any further formal comment on the act or make any changes or amendments or further submissions with regard to the statutory review.

In terms of moving forward, for the committee’s information as we move forward, I am preparing a document that organizes the evidence gathered by the committee in the previous and current parliaments in accordance with the sections of the act to which the submission recommendations correspond. It is hoped that this will make it easier for members to move through the act section by section and see areas of convergence and divergence in terms of the feedback received on the act, and to see which areas of the act were subject to the most feedback. You would also see, as part of this analysis, that some sections of the act received no comment or recommendation at all.

In terms of the process moving forward, I think that it’s in the committee’s hands in terms of the number and timing of any additional meetings needed to conduct deliberations on the committee’s recommendations between now and late February. The Parliamentary Committees Office is happy to facilitate any further information, including any research items or other processes the committee needs to support your deliberations. For example, if the committee would like further briefings from witnesses, we will certainly assist in arranging that.

In addition to the document aligning recommendations with the act structure that I referenced a moment ago, we will also assist in your committee deliberations, using the direction provided by the committee to develop draft recommendations for your further discussion and refinement and ultimately developing a draft statutory review report for the committee’s review in time to meet the February 28 deadline for completion of the report.

As background on the previous comprehensive statutory review in 2011-12, that review saw the committee hold approximately four meetings of about 5½ hours total to conduct deliberations in camera on the recommendations and the draft report. For anybody who does not already know, it’s common committee practice, when you actually get down into discussing your recommendations and draft report language, to do that in camera, so not in a public meeting.

With that, I will invite Kate to make any additional comment to cover anything I may have missed or any additional comments she might like to make in terms of how we will support you moving forward. I would also answer any questions members might have about the evidence we received in the last parliament.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much for that overview. Very helpful.

Kate, do you happen to have anything to add?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Not at this time. As Alayna said, we have received a collection of submissions to date. We’re happy to provide those to you, summarize them in any way — thematically, as Alayna mentioned — or assist you with a review of the material received to date.

We look forward to working with you in the weeks ahead, given that the terms of reference for the conclusion of the committee’s work on the statutory review is February 28. So we’ll be keeping an eye on that timeline in the weeks ahead.

N. Simons (Chair): Thanks, Kate. I think the committee will have to discuss when possible future meetings can be held, because we do have a lot of work ahead of us. I wonder if there are any questions from Sonia or from anyone at this table at this point, or does the soup smell so good that we need to…?

Seeing no questions, why don’t we recess for half an hour for lunch? Stand by.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): We’ll recess, and we’ll keep the phone line connected, as per our technical advisers. We will speak with you again in about 30 minutes.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay, thanks a lot. We’re in recess.

The committee recessed from 12:45 p.m. to 1:17 p.m.

[N. Simons in the chair.]

N. Simons (Chair): This afternoon’s agenda is centred around the Ministry of Children and Families.

I think we have in the room, over there, Allison Bond and Cory Heavener. I would ask that you take it away.

Overview of Ministry
of Children and Family Development

C. Heavener: Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here this afternoon. I don’t think we were expecting to be here, but we’re glad that we’re actually in Victoria, in the committee room.

My name is Cory Heavener, and I am an assistant deputy minister as well as the provincial director of child welfare. I am going to be doing the presentation on behalf of the Ministry of Children and Family Development today.

I just wanted to begin by saying this is a very positive time in the ministry, as we continue to work collaboratively with Aboriginal leaders and partners, other government ministries, service delivery partners, communities and organizations to collectively reach the vision of the ministry and reshape B.C.’s child welfare system.

Today’s presentation is going to focus on an overview of MCFD and, in particular, on child welfare. We’ll also be talking about some key developments in child welfare since 2011, our engagement with independent officers, as well as a request that came forward about an all-party group.

I’m now on page 3, if you have the handout in front of you. I thought I’d start by going over the vision of the ministry. The vision of the ministry is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and youth in British Columbia live in safe, healthy and nurturing families and are strongly connected to their communities and their cultures.

Integral to our vision is reconciliation with Aboriginal people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, the endorsement of the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples and the findings of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal signify a profound shift in thinking and set the foundation for better collaboration. Working with our Aboriginal leaders and partners, we are embedding the spirit and the goals of reconciliation in all of the work that the ministry does.

If we go to the next page, there’s a little bit about the three goals of the ministry.

[1:20 p.m.]

Our three goals. Our first goal is that the number of children and youth in care and, particularly, the overrepresentation of Indigenous children and youth in the child welfare system will be reduced. Our second goal is that children and youth are supported to reach their potential and grow up as successful young adults able to contribute to the economy of British Columbia. Our third goal is that youth in care or formerly in care have improved well-being outcomes.

On the following page is a little bit of information about the legislation that guides the work of the ministry. I won’t read all of the acts into the record, but I will comment on the first few. The Child, Family and Community Service Act, which we’ll talk a little bit about later on in the presentation, the Adoption Act and the Youth Justice Act are a few of the key pieces of legislation that guide the work of the ministry.

On page 6, there’s an overview of the various services that the ministry provides. The ministry provides early-years services, which include early childhood and child care; services for children and youth with special needs; child and youth mental health services; child safety, family support and children-in-care services; adoption services; and youth justice services.

For today’s presentation, a lot of the focus, with respect to child welfare, will be on the fourth bullet, “Child safety, family support and children-in-care services.”

Now, on page 7, this is a brief overview of service delivery in the ministry. There are approximately 4,825 staff in the ministry. Ministry programs and services and much of the policy are coordinated through the provincial office, which is located here in Victoria. Our services are delivered through 13 geographic service deliveries throughout the province. There are 24 delegated Aboriginal agencies. Of those agencies, 14 have full child protection delegations that provide the full range of child protection services. Seven provide guardianship, resource and voluntary service. And three provide resource development and voluntary service.

I’m now on page 10.

N. Simons (Chair): I think we have different page numbers.

C. Heavener: We thought it might be interesting to provide a few facts. As of November, and this is actually the end of November 2017, there were 6,826 children and youth in care. Of the 6,826, 4,346, or 64 percent, are Aboriginal, and 36 percent, or 2,480, are non-Aboriginal. Forty-seven percent of the children and youth in care are served by a delegated Aboriginal agency, and 3,641 children in care are in care under what’s known legally as a continuing custody order. What that means is that those children are in permanent care, and we’ll be looking at permanent living arrangements for those children.

Also, going back to last fiscal year, 557 children and youth in care turned 19 and left care, and the ministry received 60,780 intakes. What that means is that the ministry actually received 60,780 calls for service, and of those, 39,000 were child protection reports. That just gives you a bit of the scope of the work that the ministry does.

The following slide is a chart that illustrates children-in-care trends over the last 60 years. So it goes back to 1955. You can see in the chart how key policies, legislation and events have impacted children coming into care.

I’m now on page 11. If you look at closer to 1995, you can see that in 1995 — it was actually late in 1995 — a review of the child welfare system done by Judge Gove was released, and the new Child, Family and Community Service Act was enacted in January of 1996. That’s the legislation that is currently in place today. You can see, at that time, there were a large number of children in care.

[1:25 p.m.]

Most recently the number of children in care peaked in June of 2001. Since then, since 2000-2001…. I believe the initiative was called service transformation at the time. There was an initiative in place to really look at: how do we keep families together, how do we look at placements for children when their parents need support or there are concerns about their safety — that are with family, with community or with extended family and friends?

Practice started to shift from more of a risk-based type of practice to more of a strength-based practice. As a result, you can see that fewer children were being brought into care.

However, when we go to the next page, you will see that for Indigenous children and Aboriginal children, that isn’t the case. Page 12 is a ten-year look at children and youth in care. You can see that this graph shows the number of children and youth in care and the trends, broken down by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal status, as I mentioned, since 2007. The green line is the total number of CICs. The blue line is Aboriginal and Indigenous children in care. And the red line is non-Aboriginal children in care.

Since 2007, the number of children in care has declined by approximately 2,000 children. The main reason for the decline has been a greater emphasis on family preservation. As you can see, the decline has mainly occurred for non-Aboriginal children, not for Aboriginal children. It’s been very, very slight.

On page 13, we begin talking about an overview of some of the key child welfare developments in the ministry between 2011 and 2017. I wanted to mention that several reviews and reports have informed child welfare developments in the ministry. These include the review that was done by the Hon. Ted Hughes in 2006. It also includes the Representative for Children and Youth report recommendations, Grand Chief Ed John’s report Indigenous Resilience, Connectedness and Reunification, as well as ongoing consultation with stakeholders and the ministry’s own Youth Advisory Council. We also look at our own data and internal reports.

All of that together has informed the ministry’s shifts in practice and policy. Today I’m going to speak a little bit about each of these.

Page 14, the provincial director of child welfare. The provincial director of child welfare is a statutory position, a designated director under the Child, Family and Community Service Act. The position also has accountabilities that are related to the child welfare practice and oversight in the province. From July 1, 2008, until March 2011, there was no such position in British Columbia. It was reinstated in 2011.

As I mentioned briefly, the provincial director acts as a central position of legal authority and accountability for child welfare services in B.C. and provides oversight to child welfare practice and quality assurance as it relates to the legislation. Those oversight responsibilities extend to practice and quality assurance in both the ministry service delivery areas, as well as delegated Aboriginal agencies. That’s actually the position I’m in.

There have also been a number of key developments in service delivery. I’m on page 15. As far as staffing, the ministry staff complement has increased by 10 percent since 2014. There has also been restructuring of ministry functions to make efficiencies to allow social workers more time to provide direct services to children and families. As some of those changes have been….

There’s an established provincial centralized screening program. This program was phased in during the fiscal year 2015-16. The change was made so that children and families would go through one screening process, and it would improve the consistency and the efficiency of the screening process across the province.

[1:30 p.m.]

Now, any time there is a child welfare concern brought forward in this province, it goes to the provincial centralized screening program. That is 24-7, so any day of the week and any time. It is assessed at that point, and then a decision is made as to next steps. That’s where the linkages are made with the service delivery areas or with delegated agencies that are part of that process.

Another example that we made to ensure there were more efficiencies for social workers is we’ve moved to a central hiring model. This was to address the issues with staffing related to child protection social work positions across the province. We’ve experienced, in the last number of years — and likely, I would say, a decade or so — difficulty with recruitment of social workers. There are a number of reasons for that, including the credential requirements, etc.

A key objective of this process has been to work to take various hiring processes off the desks of the local managers so that they can have more time to actually focus on clinical practice, and the actual hiring of social workers can be done centrally. Obviously, that’s with the job descriptions and the competencies and the assessments processes that have been in place.

The following slide, 16. There have also been a number of key developments over the last few years as far as practice shifts within child welfare. Many of these have occurred since 2012, using out-of-care options and the extended family program as alternatives to care. When a social worker is doing an assessment and there’s concern about a child and there are concerns about risks or there are also concerns that the family may need support, practice is shifting so that we do everything possible to keep the child out of care and to keep the child placed with extended family or in the community, with supports — whether they’re financial or counselling or those types of supports.

Where we’re really moving is looking at a strength-based practice and really promoting family involvement throughout all of our work. We’re also using more collaborative planning and decision-making processes. We know that children do much better, in the long term, as far as their outcomes go and their well-being, if they can be with family, extended family or in their communities.

Another key practice shift has been promoting and strengthening permanency practice for children and youth in care. The permanency options for children in care and children that are in permanent care…. I mentioned earlier the number of children that are in continuing care. The types of options are permanent transfer of custody — so actually looking at how we transfer custody to an extended family member or someone who is of significance in that child’s life…. At times, there’s reunification with families. The situation may have improved, and there are supports in place where we’re able to return children to their families. Or adoption.

We’re also looking at, with our children that are in care, really ensuring that we’re improving and we’re increasing permanency placements right from the moment we become involved with the child or a family.

We’re also working at integrating culture and language into all of their care plans. So for every child in care, it’s required that they have a care plan, and we’re working to ensure that if they are Aboriginal or Indigenous, their culture components are built right into their care plans.

The third point is focusing on family preservation. A great deal of work, and a huge shift we’re making at this time, is really working hard to keep families together when we can and, when there are safety concerns, seeing if they’re able to be addressed within the family, the extended family or the community. Some of the programs around family preservation would be respite care, parenting programs, counselling, homemaker support and those types of programs.

Slide 17. This is a slide about Aboriginal engagement and consultation. To date, the ministry is engaging with First Nations to consider new approaches to child welfare governance. We’re exploring new jurisdictional models. MOUs, memorandums of understanding, have been signed with the Wet’suwet’en and with Splatsin and the federal government. Canada has also joined us in those discussions. We also have discussions that are ongoing with other First Nations.

We’re also looking at how we can work together, with First Nations, Métis and Inuit service providers and Children and Families, within our current legislative framework, with a focus on keeping families together.

[1:35 p.m.]

Within our current legislative framework, the Child, Family and Community Service Act, we’re working together with communities to be innovative and to really think about what types of options are available under that legislation to work to keep families together.

We’re also working with First Nations leadership and the federal government to improve outcomes for Aboriginal children and youth in care. The ministry, First Nations leaders and the federal government of Canada came together, and they formed a tripartite working group to focus on identifying opportunities to implement some real-life, systemic change to B.C.’s child welfare system. This includes making recommendations related to governance and to jurisdiction. It also means improving relations engagement between First Nations, as they relate to child and family well-being, and making recommendations regarding equitable funding.

The final bullet, on slide 17, with respect to the Aboriginal policy and practice framework. All of the work within the ministry and the delegated Aboriginal agencies is guided by this framework. This framework was developed in collaboration with the Aboriginal community members, leaders, delegated Aboriginal agencies and the ministry.

The APPF is an overarching framework intended to improve outcomes for Aboriginal children and youth, families and communities to restorative policies and practices. This means in the ministry it applies to all of our policy and practice across all of the service areas that I mentioned earlier involving Aboriginal children, youth and families. Restorative policies and practices are culturally safe, and they’re trauma-informed, supporting and honouring Aboriginal people’s cultural systems of care and resiliency.

Slide 18 is with respect to quality assurance. The ministry has had a number of quality assurance activities over many years. These are activities such as practice audits, so compliance to standards; case reviews of specific situations; accreditations; reportable circumstances, which are notifications when a child may be critically injured or, unfortunately, passes away.

The ministry is looking at implementing a quality assurance framework that provides a foundation for a ministrywide, continuous quality improvement system that is centred by a culture of quality assurance throughout the ministry. So while we’ve done a number of activities for a number of years, we’re really looking at: how do we embed the learning from what we’re learning through our quality assurance activities throughout the entire ministry?

This approach will inform our services, our policy, our standards, the legislation, our practice and training across all areas of our ministry. As you can see, the framework consists of five interrelated domains where the focus is on ensuring that the work we do is aligned in achieving the desired outcomes for the children and families we serve. The framework describes how quality assurance, the data and information, is reviewed, analyzed and evaluated to inform our policy and our practice and our standards.

We are doing a lot of work right now about reviewing and analyzing. So if you look in the third block: all of our data. We get our data from our audits and from our case reviews and through any of our quality assurance processes, including our complaints, accreditation, our administrative reviews. It’s really trying to look at: what are the trends, what are some of the patterns we’re seeing, and how do we use that information to inform our own policies and practice so that we have better outcomes and we’re providing better services to children and families? That’s box 4, using the results.

Then we have a lot of work to do around evaluating the effectiveness. So what do those outcomes look like for children and families? And this is actually talking to those people that we serve.

Slide 19 speaks to our interface and engagement with external oversight bodies, which we’re pleased to be here with today. The ministry engages with a number of independent officers and public bodies to strengthen services and improve outcomes for children and families in the province. These include the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth, the B.C. Coroners Service, the Public Guardian and Trustee, the B.C. Ombudsperson, the Office of the Auditor General and the provincial health officer.

[1:40 p.m.]

We also have a forum, noted as the Children’s Forum. The Children’s Forum is a collaboration between the ministry, the RCY, the chief coroner, the Ombudsperson, the Public Guardian and Trustee and the provincial health officer — all the agencies that have a legislative public accountability and somewhat, some of them, of an independent reporting role to provide information and advice to the ministry. The forum aims to achieve positive change in the system of services to vulnerable children and youth by ensuring that issues and developments are brought to the forefront and reviewed and discussed as they emerge. The Children’s Forum was actually a recommendation in the April 26 report by Ted Hughes.

The deputy minister currently chairs the Children’s Forum, and the Children’s Forum meets quarterly. They share information, experiences, and we identify how each agency’s work can complement each other’s. We discuss and provide advice on issues and how we can make improvements to the child-serving system. I believe our next meeting is in February. We just met at the end of October.

Slide 20 is with respect to engagements with the RCY. I just wanted to start by noting that we’ve always had a very positive working relationship with the Representative for Children and Youth over many years. We continue to have monthly meetings between the provincial director’s office and the representative’s office to discuss and address issues and to share information.

The ministry notifies the RCY about fatalities, critical injuries and serious incidents involving children and youth known to the ministry or to a delegated Aboriginal agency. In April of this year, a new communication and information-sharing protocol between the ministry and the RCY was signed. We used to have three protocols, one for each function. Now we have one protocol, where we really clearly established our communication and engagement as well.

In January of 2016, we issued a joint report with the RCY on the placement of children and youth in care, in hotels. We worked very, very closely, and we developed recommendations. We actually made a change to a practice directed in the ministry that now guides practice around when children may need to be placed in hotels. Hotels are not a placement option for children, but occasionally circumstances arise, like this past summer with the fires, where we did have a number of children that needed to be placed in hotels.

Currently we’re working with the RCY on two projects. One is on recommendations, and we’re looking at, in the recommendations, all the recommendations that have been made over the past decade. We’re reviewing them together. Obviously, at the end of the day, we provide information, and the representative makes a decision if they’ve been implemented, from their perspective.

We’re also looking at how we work together to develop a collaborative process going forward. I can also say that that process, at least to some extent, has been put in place over the past year. We’re also collaborating on a project related to care plans for children in care.

The last couple of slides are with respect to exploring the possibility of putting together a group or a subcommittee, through this select standing committee, to support improved understanding of the ministry’s child protection services and to look at privacy provisions in the legislation related to case-specific matters, through a collaborative process.

If we go to this last slide, I’ll talk a little bit about the confidentiality and privacy provisions. And CF and CSA and FOIPPA will actually tie in to the slide that I just mentioned. The ministry holds personal information of a very highly sensitive and confidential nature regarding children and their families. The director, under the Child, Family and Community Services Act, is responsible for protecting the information, and only the director is authorized to disclose case-specific information to individuals. This includes sharing information with the minister as well.

Before any disclosure of information under the CF and CSA can be made, the director must determine that there’s compelling rationale to do so, and it must be in accordance with the CF and CSA. The director may disclose information to the minister if the disclosure is necessary for the administration of the act. That’s a component and one of the factors in the legislation that the director would assess.

[1:45 p.m.]

Due to the strict privacy protections in the legislation, both the CF and CSA and FOIPPA, related to disclosing personal and confidential information, the ministry is unable to respond to questions and concerns raised about a case or a family situation, including clarifying factually incorrect information disclosed by others to the public.

FOIPPA permits the ministry to disclose case-related information to a Member of the Legislative Assembly, to an MLA, who’s been requested to assist in resolving a problem by the individual that the information is about. However, beyond that, there’s no legislative authority to share any further information.

Just a little bit about what I mentioned earlier. When the director considers disclosure, given that it’s necessary for the administration of the act, there are a number of factors that the director would consider.

The director would consider the requirement that the provisions of the act be interpreted so the safety and well-being of children are of paramount consideration. The need for the director, as the guardian, to protect the privacy rights of the children in care and act in their best interests. That the public interest is realized through the public knowing that the child system is working, and where there’s a public report of harm, that children are being protected.

Where the test of necessity or imperative need or essential or unavoidable requirement is met, so whether the criticism, in response to reports, some being in the media, of the child protection system is undermining the confidence in the system to the extent that the public participation and support may be at loss, potentially placing further children at risk. The example would be because of what may be being said publicly, the people may not want to come forward, given concerns they have about the ministry, and actually make child protection reports.

Whether, in the circumstances, a public statement by the director or the minister is required to restore public confidence in the child protection system.

And the other consideration around whether it’s necessary for the administration of the act is that the ministers need to know so that the minister knows the act is being administered appropriately and properly.

One of the ideas the ministry would like to explore with, potentially, a subgroup — obviously, that’s for your consideration — is the opportunity to provide information on how privacy and the confidentially provisions work, specifically in the CF and CSA. An opportunity, when certain situations arise, to actually talk about the policy and practice that would be involved with respect to various child welfare practices.

The other part is where there’s an opportunity to have a discussion about how we could approach sharing information and what that would look like, seeking advice that potentially could lead to legislative types of amendments.

N. Simons (Chair): Very good. Thank you very much, Cory. I don’t know if Allison wants to add anything at this point.

A. Bond: Not at this time. I’ll wait for questions.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. I’m sure we’re going to have some questions here. I think, yeah, we all do.

Sonia, do you have question too?

J. Isaacs: I have one.

N. Simons (Chair): We’ll start with Joan.

J. Isaacs: Thank you very much. Thank you for having a PowerPoint. It was very easy to follow along. It’s a pretty comprehensive subject to narrow down, but I appreciate the work done on that.

My question is about this chart, where we’re seeing from 2007 to 2017 the shift where we see a decline in the number of children in care from non-Indigenous. It seems like right about that time was the time we started to do some of your practice shifts, your hiring of staff and some of the restructuring of positions and staff. Then a little bit further, you start to implement some of the family preservation policies, I guess. I notice that that’s made a big difference in the number of people that have been in care.

But it didn’t seem to affect — in fact, there’s a little tick up — the Indigenous children. I’m just wondering: was the same approach taken with Indigenous children, or is there a different approach when we’re looking after those children — and just whether or not there are recommendations of maybe some of those, perhaps, additional shifts that could help with the Indigenous children?

C. Heavener: Thank you for the question. We’re on slide 12, I believe, that you’re referring to.

[1:50 p.m.]

J. Isaacs: Yes.

C. Heavener: Yes, there are a couple of things with respect to practice. It is a time when we really looked at family preservation and really shifted to keep families together. The other practice shift is one that I mentioned earlier around permanency. For children in care, we were really shifting to ensure that children that were in permanent care were able to find and seek permanent living arrangements outside of care.

I also wanted to note that it was around this time as well, November 2014 to about April 2015, where we were in the final phase of ICM, or the integrated case management, implementation — our new case management system. At that time, in our system, it became mandatory…. If a child was Indigenous, it was mandatory and needed to be located in that box. So for some of the families we were working with, from that time on, given that it was mandatory, we did see a slight increase in the number of Aboriginal and Indigenous children as well.

Also, your other point about if we had the same approaches, the answer would be, pretty much, yes. Our family preservation and our permanency approaches were very similar. We obviously know we need to do more work in that area. And that work needs to come from working with the community and working with our First Nations and our Métis and our Inuit communities and partners and stakeholders.

We’ve done some work since 2013 with respect to a program called Aboriginal service innovations, where we were looking to communities to put proposals forward to look at keeping Indigenous children in their communities in order to decrease the number of children coming into care.

We have some promising practices, moving forward, but we know that’s an area, and it’s an area that Grand Chief Ed John touched on as well, where we really need to spend a lot of focus moving forward.

I’ll pass it over to you, Allison, to add….

A. Bond: I’ll add a couple of items. If you look, actually, on the slide before that, 11, I think it illustrates over a longer period of time what you observed, which is that it’s these shifts in policies in some ways that create the peaks and valleys in the number of kids in care. What that tells us and what we know is that it’s better for kids to stay with family, stay in community, stay connected to the people they love and who love them — but to do that in safe environments.

What we see in this other slide, slide 11, is that the number of kids in care seems to be driven less by how many are safe or unsafe and much more by extreme shifts in policy and swings in policy. We want to avoid extreme swings, for sure. What we want to do is focus on how we keep the kids connected to family and connected to community. The other thing, as you rightly pointed out, is we’ve had a lot more success with the non-Indigenous community.

Clearly, what we’ve done over the last few years hasn’t connected the way that it should with the Indigenous community and Indigenous families. We know that from the conversations we had with them.

Prior to just this fiscal year, we had a significant series of consultations, inclusive of Grand Chief Ed John’s report, which told us the areas where we really needed to improve. Over the past, probably, 18 months, I would say, Cory and the service delivery areas have, through their executive directors and their management teams, been required to go out and talk to the First Nations communities, talk to Métis, talk to Aboriginal-serving organizations and do a better job of creating that linkage.

Our view is that that’s the linkage that’s going to help us make sure kids stay with family, that they stay connected to community and that we get better advice on what it is that we need to do differently so that our numbers on the Indigenous side have to be improved from what they are today. We all recognize that the number of Indigenous kids in care is indicative of the fact that how we have done our practice is not working for Indigenous children and families.

Because of that, we know we have to drive to changes, but we don’t want to get stuck in the same peak-and-valley problem that we had before. It has to be driven towards positive outcomes for the kids. And we have to do that in collaboration with our Indigenous and First Nation Aboriginal partners and Métis partners.

That’s the other thing I would add. We’re actually trying to come at this from a number of different directions — so practice on the ground and connections with the communities, better partnerships with communities and First Nations. We’re also exploring this idea of jurisdiction, just to see whether….

[1:55 p.m.]

Many, many communities would like to and have practised having authority and control over their children and families and over child welfare as it applies to their children and families. So how do we make that work really effectively for those communities? That’s something we’re very interested in exploring and have engaged in that with a couple of First Nations.

J. Isaacs: Thank you. It’s going to be very challenging. Well, good work on you.

N. Simons (Chair): Chair’s prerogative here. I believe that a partial explanation for that drop, especially when you see the opposite happening in First Nations communities, is that perhaps there’s a redefinition of some of the in- and out-of-care options.

As well, my second point there would be…. Could it indicate the lack of availability to delegated agencies to offer the same kinds of out-of-care options that ministry offices can provide? Can that partly explain…? We’re talking about…. I think some 40-plus percent of Aboriginal children in care are under the jurisdiction of delegated agencies. Would that not account for some of that disparity between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in care?

A. Bond: I think it’s a terrific question. We’ve been exploring what we can do better with the delegated Aboriginal agencies.

I think the representative had a report on DAAs last year, at the end of March, where they talked about the funding for the DAAs, their ability to do some of the work around prevention and around family preservation, much as you’re pointing out. At the same time, we need to do better work with the DAAs so that we work more collaboratively, as partners, so we can do a better job serving the kids and families.

I think there’s a lot more to explore, to be honest. We continue to do that work through the partnership tables, and we’ve actually brought the DAA management into our operational management so that we’re better connected, just from a communication perspective. That’s relatively new.

I think there’s been a lot of change that’s happened on the practice side as well. For the DAAs, they will tell you…. Some are purely provincially funded, some are federally funded, and some are a combination. So we’ve changed the way we fund DAAs this year, and that will go a long way towards helping them provide the services that they would like to provide.

There’s work we need to do with the federal government, for the federally funded DAAs. I would just point out — it’s important to point this out, and I know that Cory mentioned it — that divide where the blue line sort of goes up a little and the red goes down quite a bit. Some of that is just a data cleanup issue that Cory was talking about, where there were Aboriginal people that were being served but weren’t being counted as Aboriginals prior to the data cleanup at ICM. That’s why there’s such a dramatic split in the blue and red lines at around October to April, where that happens. Some of that is data.

Then the problem that we see, though, is that the blue line flattens out where the red line continues to dip. I think that’s what’s driving us to understand that there’s a significant problem. And you’re right: it’s one that we share with the DAAs. I know when I had an opportunity to talk with some DAAs just a few weeks ago…. They are looking for other tools as well, and resources from us and from the federal government, to do the work that we’re asking them to do.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much.

Michelle, you have some questions.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): I do have a few.

N. Simons (Chair): You could ask them all at once or….

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): Okay. I’ll try and keep them simple and brief. Some of them are statistical; some of them are a clarification that I’m seeking.

Hi, Cory. Hi, Allison. On page 7, when you talk about 4,825 employees, how many of those are full-time versus part-time? And how many of them would be social workers versus administrative staff? Is that something you can get later?

A. Bond: We’ll absolutely get it later. It’s not something we have now. I will tell you that it’s a combination. The 4,825 is staff, the number of staff. Some of those will be part-time. We can get you that number if you like.

If you’re asking about what our administrative staff complement on the front line is…. Is that particularly what you’re interested in?

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): Yeah, Then I’m also curious as to budget. What’s the budget for wages for staff versus services for children?

A. Bond: We’d have to get you that information. We don’t have it here. I’m happy to do that.

Not sure how we would quite figure out a ratio. We might give you a whole lot of information, and hopefully, that’ll answer your question.

Then what we can also do is give you ratios on the front lines. We have a staff-to-supervisor ratio, about 1 to 6, and a staff-to-administrative ratio, which is about 1 to 4.

[2:00 p.m.]

Those are averages. So they’re going to look different in small communities, for example, where you have a smaller staff complement, than in a larger community, where you might actually hit right on the average.

What we’ll do is give you some of that information about how the offices work and what the ratios are. Hopefully, that will try to get to what you’re asking.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): Perfect.

On page 9, you talk about full protection. I’m just wondering if you can define what that is or describe what full protection looks like for a child. How does that come into play for a child, and what might the average length of stay for a child in full protection be?

A. Bond: You’re cutting in and out a bit, unfortunately. Are you asking what the average…?

N. Simons (Chair): I’ll clarify. I think there’s a little bit of a miscommunication. Michelle’s question has to do with the difference between full protection authority versus guardianship versus voluntary services, the three levels of delegation, and has less to do with the nature of the issue being faced. It’s the agency that has the authority to provide all range of services that the ministry provides versus just the guardianship or just the voluntary support services.

Allison, do you want to just explain the delegation process, really briefly?

A. Bond: Delegation to a social worker?

N. Simons (Chair): No, to DAAs we’re talking about — the different levels of DAAs’ authority.

C. Heavener: Sure, I can explain that. As I said, there are 14 agencies right now that have what we call full child protection, 17 guardianship and three voluntary. When an agency comes forward, the first level of delegation they would look at…. Sorry, I’m going to back up.

The CFCSA, the Child, Family and Community Service Act, is the legislation that guides child welfare practice. When an agency comes forward, and there’s a plan put in place and a readiness assessment is done, the first level of delegation they would look at would be voluntary services.

Under the CFCSA, they would have a delegation enabling agreement and their staff would be delegated so that they could work with families to provide support services, and they could also look at working with families around those families that may be interested in becoming foster parents, etc. It’s a certain level of delegation.

If there’s a child protection report or a child protection concern related to that particular area, it would be done by a social worker with the ministry who would work in collaboration with a delegated Aboriginal agency social worker, because they wouldn’t have the authority to conduct a child protection investigation. We have three of those agencies that are voluntary.

Then you move up and you would still be voluntary, but you could also take on additional accountabilities under the legislation and be delegated to provide guardianship services to children in care.

Then the final level of delegation is having full child protection. You are delegated to do most of the functions under the Child, Family and Service Act — the functions I mentioned around family support, providing guardianship services to children — but you also can receive and respond to child protection reports and conduct child protection investigations.

N. Simons (Chair): If I can, having worked in that system, it’s just different levels of authority that these agencies have. When they start, oftentimes the agency wants to get ready and get their voluntary service….

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): It’s okay. I get it now. I just misunderstood.

Two more questions. On page 14, we talk about the provincial director of child welfare was reinstated in 2011. When was it taken away?

C. Heavener: July 1, 2008.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): In 2008? Okay.

The last thing. Talking about care plans, you mentioned and put a fair bit of emphasis on Indigenous and Aboriginal children who are receiving the care plan out of care, ensuring that they are receiving culture and language, ensuring that they’re having that connection to community still.

I’m assuming out of the children who aren’t Aboriginal or Indigenous, there are children in care who are perhaps East Indian or Chinese. I’m just wondering if those children have the same care plan with the same parameters to focus on culture and language as well.

A. Bond: The short answer is yes, but since you’ve given me the opportunity, I’m going to talk a bit about care plans and how important they are.

One of the things that we’ve known — and again, the Representative for Children and Youth has mentioned this in previous reports — is that our completion rates for care plans — in other words, having robust care plans that include strong permanency plans and cultural plans — haven’t been very good.

[2:05 p.m.]

As of this fiscal year, our expectation is that all of the children in care will have completed care plans. So it’s 100 percent completion. We’re going to measure it at the end of the fiscal year and going forward, with an expectation that we’ll get 85 percent on any given day that we seek to measure the completion rates for care plans. And the quality of them has to be great.

Just as you’re saying, it’s not just Indigenous children that need a strong cultural component to their care plan. It’s any child in care. They need to have a strong cultural component. That’s a critical part for the health of a child, particularly a child in care, who needs to stay connected to community and to family.

So yes, absolutely, the expectation is that they have a strong cultural component but also that they have a care plan and that it be a robust care plan and one that actually is kept up to date and is used to help drive to the best possible outcomes for that individual child.

L. Throness: I have a question about slide 11 as well, and I want to point out a couple of things before I ask my two short questions. When you look at the number of children who are in care — in 1995, 6,000 — within a few years of the passage of new legislation, as I understand it, or policy, I’m not sure, it almost doubled. Then it went down again.

According to today’s policy, you could draw a dotted line between that bottom line in 1995 and what it is today, and everything above that line is probably unnecessary. When you think of 3,600 children with a continuing care order, these are all children that we take from homes. That represents an ocean of tears, an enormous amount of unnecessary heartache, and I feel bad about that.

I have two questions. The first is: was it a result of law or policy in 1995 that it shot up so much in a few years?

A. Bond: I think that’s a terrific question, and it’s why we put the slide in so that you could see the peaks and valleys like that. I don’t know what the right number of children in care is. What we do know is that the best outcome for children is to stay connected to their family, whether that’s extended family or their birth parents. So that is something we’re absolutely working towards.

I think what you see on that slide are a couple of different policy changes or reports that happened right around that time. I don’t know that we can say definitively or conclusively that it was absolutely a result of policy, but it sure looks that way from the trends and from what was happening at that time.

What I would also say is that the social workers in the ministry are 100 percent committed to the best outcomes for kids. They have to do that within the legal and policy framework that we’re working within of the day, and the safety of children is paramount. So what we’re looking to now, I think, is trying to find the right balance of law and policy that gets us to a place where staff have the tools that they need to have the kids appropriately connected to their family and to their community, because we know that’s the best outcome for them.

What that best number is I honestly don’t know, and I don’t know that any of us can guess. This is about human beings and family dynamics.

L. Throness: We certainly wouldn’t blame any social worker for doing what the legislation requires them to do. We would blame the government of the day.

My question, a follow-up on this, is: after 2001, was there any legislative change that affected the drop in the numbers of children in care?

A. Bond: We don’t know. We don’t think so.

L. Throness: Okay. My final question is related to slide 16. I’m wondering if the current government, our new government, has committed to the principles in slide 16 — using the out-of-care options, focusing on family preservation, permanency practices, and so on — which are the best practices now but which were not observed, obviously, in 1995. Has the new government committed to these items on slide 16?

A. Bond: If you’re directing the question to the ministry, the ministry is 100 percent committed to these. If you’re directing the question to the government of the day, I think that’s probably a question that’s more appropriate for a different forum. That being said, the ministry is 100 percent using these and has been for some years. The use of out-of-care options has increased over time, and we’re actually doing quite well on the use of out-of-care options.

[2:10 p.m.]

N. Simons (Chair): Perhaps you could define exactly what is meant by out-of-care options.

C. Heavener: Out-of-care options refer to the options that are available to care for children, usually by family members, sometimes extended family members or other significant adults, rather than children coming into care and being placed with foster parents.

The legislation has a number of options where you can work with the family to ensure either that the child is placed on a voluntary basis or, even when a child is removed, that the child does not have to come in to care but can actually be placed out of care, getting the same types of financial and counselling types of supports and resources to the family.

N. Simons (Chair): Could I just add that this emphasizes the difference between the delegated agencies and their funding sources and funding formulas. Out-of-care options don’t count towards a delegated agency on reserve, so to speak, in their funding. So out-of-care options, I would say, are not as available to delegated agencies as they are to ministry offices. I’d just say that that part has something to do with it as well.

A. Bond: For clarity, that’s for federally funded DAAs.

N. Simons (Chair): How many are provincially funded on reserve? Probably zero, right?

A. Bond: We’ll get the information for you. It would be federally funded if they operate on reserve.

N. Simons (Chair): Yeah. So there are 24 on-reserve delegated agencies.

A. Bond: Twenty-four federally funded. Yep.

N. Simons (Chair): By the federal government. That probably accounts for about 40 percent of the children in care.

A. Bond: Forty percent of the children in care are accounted for by all of the DAAs.

N. Simons (Chair): Yeah. Indigenous children in care. I just put that as a caution to Laurie, when he thinks that it’s more about policy than it is about funding arrangements.

Laurie, you have a follow-up question about foster care.

L. Throness: I do. On slide 7, I’m just wondering if staff could take apart the number shown there, the last number — 5,400 contracted community social service agencies and foster homes. How many foster homes do you have right now under age 64 and how many service agencies?

A. Bond: We don’t have that with us. I know where I can get it, though.

L. Throness: I’m sure you can get it.

C. Heavener: We’ll get that information to you as soon as we get back to the office.

We have the number of foster homes, just not the number under age 64. That number is 2,405. That’s as of March 2017.

L. Throness: It would be great if you could break that down for me on a more up-to-date figure — under 65 and over 65 right now. Later.

N. Simons (Chair): What he means by “right now” is later. So he doesn’t need that right now.

L. Throness: I mean currently.

A. Bond: We’ll give you the most current number that we have access to.

S. Furstenau: I have several questions. First to slide 4. This is a question I actually raised with the representative. No. 3 says: “Youth in care, or formerly in care, have improved well-being outcomes.”

What kind of data is being done to measure those outcomes? What kind of tracking beyond when they’re in care as they go into adulthood and what kind of multi-generational tracking is happening?

A. Bond: It’s a great question. The best data that we have that points us to improved well-being and outcomes is actually education data and access to our agreements with young adults program. As you probably know, our takeup on that program is quite low.

We do know that the mandate letter for our current minister talks about improving outcomes for all youth leaving care, not just a few. Right now, really, we only track just a few. We would, as you have noted, recognize that as being a real deficit for us. In order for us to do a better job of understanding how well these kids are doing, we need to do a better job of tracking that data. And, really, we don’t.

I think, other than the education and the takeup on our programming, we don’t really have an ability to track it. That’s something that we’re looking at, and we have been looking at, as we’re developing next year’s plan — to figure out what it is that we can look to that will help us understand what outcomes we could actually track effectively.

[2:15 p.m.]

S. Furstenau: Slide 7. Approximately 4,825 ministry staff. What percentage of the ministry staff is Indigenous?

A. Bond: We don’t have an accurate number for that. The next workforce engagement survey is coming out in January. They’re going to ask that question across the whole public service. Hopefully, when that report comes out, we’ll have a better answer.

It’s all self-reported. There are going to be some reporting issues, for sure, but we’ll have a general understanding at that point.

S. Furstenau: Any idea at a supervisory or executive level?

A. Bond: At an executive level — so at the deputy, ADM, level — we have two individuals who are Indigenous at the executive table. After that, it’s really self-reported. I don’t think I could give you an accurate answer. But hopefully, again, once we get the workforce engagement survey, we’ll have a better sense of that, both for the ministry and across the public sector as well.

S. Furstenau: Okay. On slide 16, again, more on data. I think one of the problems I’m having is that we spent the morning listening to the report from the RCY, which had an enormous amount of data, and then much of this is very anecdotal. Then we have, on the other hand, anecdotal information coming to us from families. So there’s a missing link here.

In terms of the key developments and the practice shifts — again, I know the other MLAs have been asking on this — where is the data to show that this is having an impact, or is there any?

A. Bond: We do have lots of data. We actually publish a management report that’s up on our website. You can have a look at it. It’s on the Internet. That has a lot of data. We actually have a data warehouse. We can pull down data and reports by office on things like the rate of bringing Indigenous kids into care, for example; on the number of kids in care; and what’s happening right down to the office level.

There’s lots of data that goes into it. I’m happy to do a separated…. If we want to have a conversation about…. Maybe this would be a great opportunity to segue to the idea of a subcommittee, because that’s the kind of thing we could really explore at a detailed level at a subcommittee.

We collect a tremendous amount of data. We analyze a tremendous amount of data to understand whether we’re getting anywhere with our practice changes. I can tell you that we have some very positive results on the number of kids coming into care and our ability to keep kids with family and return kids to family. But it’s really just over the last year. I’m uncomfortable talking about the fact that that’s giving us a trajectory until we’ve got a little more time under our belts.

Definitely something we would love to explore with, perhaps, a subcommittee is to talk about what kind of data you think would be interesting. Right now, we publish all of it in a really large report — and a report that, I think, probably because it’s so large, isn’t looked at maybe as much as it could be. It’s across all of our service lines, not just child welfare.

S. Furstenau: I actually spent quite a bit of time on this report. The latest one was March 2016.

A. Bond: That’s right. The annual report.

S. Furstenau: Are we expecting one…?

A. Bond: It’ll be in March.

S. Furstenau: It’ll be in March 2018. Is there a 2017 report?

A. Bond: There should be one already published. We can have a look.

S. Furstenau: Okay. I couldn’t see that.

This is my last question, Mr. Chair. Thank you for indulging me.

Just in that report — this is from March 31, 2016 — the reasons for child and youth in care by court order for protection…. The vast majority of the cases say “neglect,” which, to me, is a pretty subjective kind of definition. It doesn’t break it down much beyond that.

My question is: how are we determining that very subjective definition? I did put this to the representative a little bit. Are we able to pull from that what kind of socioeconomic conditions we’re looking at? Is this, fundamentally, a poverty issue that we’re looking at? How do we ensure that this lens being applied is being applied in a way that we can feel confident about? Again, this report and the RCY’s report do not jive at the moment. I’m wondering where this fits in, this definition of neglect.

C. Heavener: The legislation speaks to neglect somewhat at a high level. It speaks to emotional neglect, deprived of necessary care — those types of things. We do agree, obviously, with the statistics that a number of children do come into care for neglect reasons.

[2:20 p.m.]

The legislation drives the work we do, and then we have policies around what that actually looks like. There are a number of factors that are taken into consideration. We could pull all of that information for you, but to actually go through it all would be somewhat difficult, just given that each circumstance is unique. What I can say is that is definitely an area that we feel we need to pay more attention to. What does that actually mean for a family?

If one of the reasons that the child is coming in is neglect, we’re actually looking at why. Why were those various reasons…? Is there some way we could keep that child in the family, in the home, by providing supports in the home?

We feel that’s an area that we need to explore a lot deeper. We do see it in some of the practice audits that we’re doing. But we also need to look at what supports we can put in the home to support the family so that the child doesn’t have to come into care for neglect reasons.

When you go back and you look at why children came into care — specifically, the legislation that was in place in the ’60s right through to the new CFCSA — many of those children came into care for neglect reasons without a lot of details around the policies, etc., and how that would be looked at. So we think that there’s still a lot of work to do in that area and that you do need to look at culture and you do need to look at a number of factors when a situation comes forward with neglect.

Many of the children that come into care for neglect are Indigenous children as well. That’s one of the areas that we’re actually spending time on right now to see how we do that differently. We have some promising practices in that area, where we’ve actually said: “You need to look at that differently. Is it about respite care? Is it that something in your house needs fixing that would actually make it safer for children?” We know, again, that there’s way more work to do there. It’s a key piece of practice we need to address.

S. Furstenau: If you look at it from a data point of view, this is it. Then you overlay that with the numbers of Indigenous children, and I think you start to unravel something that’s going on here. I would say that ideally, we are putting a lot of emphasis and attention into this particular aspect.

A. Bond: That’s exactly what we’re doing, not just for Indigenous children but mostly for Indigenous children. You’re right. Once you see those two things side by side, the number of Indigenous kids and the reasons, it’s very often neglect — maybe not the only reason but a big reason. We do have recent anecdotes about circumstances where we’ve gone in. It might have been neglect as the reason that there was a complaint, for example. But a bit of investment in the family and in the family circumstances meant that then they would welcome the ministry to talk about other issues that maybe were causing stress in the home.

We know that that’s an area where we think we can make a significant difference for Indigenous kids and families and also for other kids and families, if we could do a different job or a different way of approaching situations where neglect is the primary reason.

N. Simons (Chair): Sonia, that’s a very good point that you raised. I think it would be interesting, at some point during our deliberations in the future, to perhaps get an opportunity to talk to some social workers about some of the cases that have resulted in a child perhaps being removed due to neglect. I think on the form it’s “unable or unwilling” to look after a child. Neglect is a very, very broad term, and it could have everything to do with the capacity of the parent. It could have to do with a number of factors in their life that could be transitory or could be chronic. But chances are, if it’s resulted in a removal, it’s more chronic, if efforts have been made to address the issue.

That was a good question. Laurie had a follow-up question about…. What was it, Laurie?

L. Throness: It’s about the performance report. I wanted to ask the deputy, following up on what Sonia asked…. The latest performance report that’s on the ministry website is from 2015-16. I’m wondering where the 2016-17 report is. I think the deputy suggested that the…. Well, I’m just not sure which one might be up next.

A. Bond: Let me follow up on that. Now that we’re connecting, we’re trying to remember whether it didn’t get up because of the interregnum. I will follow up and will make sure that the updated version is posted.

L. Throness: I do have an outstanding order paper question on that very thing, so I would appreciate the update.

A. Bond: Will do.

N. Simons (Chair): Teresa, you have some questions.

T. Wat: My question is quite simple. I just want to follow up with what Michelle has asked. Maybe you don’t have the answer for me today.

[2:25 p.m.]

I’m glad that the ministry pays attention to the cultural backgrounds of the children in care. I wonder how many of your staff are really proficient in different cultural backgrounds — the three largest, I think, minorities in B.C., meaning Chinese, East Asian and the Filipinos. Are they truly culturally conversant? For some of those, they might be of East Asian or East Indian descent, but they might not understand the culture. Do you have those kinds of figures that you can tell us?

A. Bond: We have social workers from many different backgrounds, but I will tell you that that isn’t what we would rely on in order to ensure that their cultural plan is complete. For example, on the Indigenous side alone, there are many cultures in British Columbia. I don’t think there is a single social worker who could call themselves expert in all of the different cultures, but they may be dealing with a number of children from many different cultures.

For our social workers, the expectation is that they’ll connect with the community, and it’s the community that will help us understand what needs to go in the cultural plan. It isn’t going to be a social worker, hopefully, googling it, for example, and trying to understand it on their own. I don’t think we can expect every social worker to be experts in every culture that they could come in contact with, but they should be experts in figuring out how to write a cultural plan that is going to be relevant to that particular individual child’s cultural connections. That would be the approach.

In fact, this year, we’ve invested funding, through the Indigenous Perspectives Society, so that First Nations themselves can develop it: “This is what should be in a cultural plan if there’s a child from my community in care.” We would hope that…. We have, especially in the Lower Mainland, many, many organizations that represent different cultures, and it would be them that we would look to for the cultural component for other care plans.

T. Wat: Thank you. It is definitely good to connect with the community. I do have some cases in my constituency. In my riding, Richmond North Centre, we have a large Chinese population. They do come to us and say that due to the cultural differences, they find that sometimes there’s a lot of missed dialogue between the parents and the social workers. I just want to hear more about how…. Are there any cases where you have a lot of concern for parents, especially Chinese parents? There have been so many Chinese immigrants in the last few years. I just want to learn more about those.

Another question I just want to throw to you is: do we have a breakdown of the children in care by ethnicity or not?

C. Heavener: Yes. For your last question, yes, we do have a breakdown of children in care by ethnicity.

As to your first point, just to build on what Allison said, many communities across the province are different, based on the ethnicity of the various populations in the communities. At that level, as I think you mentioned, they are connected with various cultural and community organizations, and the social workers do reach out, in the various communities, to those organizations for support. Sometimes that’s for translation services, etc. There is a lot of work done, based on the individual child and the community, to ensure that appropriate cultural supports are….

[Interruption.]

N. Simons (Chair): We can’t hear you. Can you hear us?

[2:30 p.m.]

They’re probably back, I think. Can we hear you? Do you hear us?

They don’t hear us yet. There we go.

A. Bond: How much of Cory’s brilliance did you miss?

N. Simons (Chair): We’re fully informed.

We have a question from Rick.

R. Glumac: My question is also in regards to page 11 and that interesting chart that goes up and down. I guess my question is: what is the optimal level of having children in care? How do we know what’s good?

Obviously, if there aren’t any children in care, that’s the desired solution. But under certain socioeconomic conditions, I think there’s an expectation that there should be an appropriate service level to meet the needs of children that are in that difficult situation.

I think it’s not fair to blame those levels on policy. I think you have to look at the socioeconomic conditions. If things are getting more challenging, if poverty levels are rising, affordability is becoming more challenging for people…. If the socioeconomic trends and challenges are getting worse but the number of children in care is going down, then that, to me, is something to be concerned about. I wonder if you might have some comment on that.

A. Bond: I think the first part of your question was if there’s an optimal number. Our view is that there probably isn’t one. I think that what we need to do is probably focus on the optimal set of policies in legislation so that we do a better job for each individual child and family.

We know what a better job is. We know that that requires, wherever possible, the child staying connected safely to family and community. So that’s the key approach that we’re going to be taking.

Where that ends up on this scale of in and out of care and the peaks and valleys you see on this chart, I think that’s something that is yet to be seen. Like you, I think we observe that as very interesting — how many children come into care at the peaks and how few in the valleys. We know that not taking a child into care, most of the time, is a better answer for that child.

What we’re going to do is keep working on refining our policies and refining our supports so that we do a better job for each individual child. Hopefully, we’ll be able to answer the question: when you have the right combination of policies and practices, what’s the right average number of kids in care?

I’m not sure that we have it right as a jurisdiction, but I don’t think any other jurisdiction has it right either. We continue to use other jurisdictions and some of their best practices to do better by the kids and families that we serve.

We would have some of the same observations as you. I don’t think that we would draw any particular conclusions. I think child and family services are extraordinarily complex, because as we pointed out already, there are economic factors but there are other factors as well.

For us, what we have to do is keep refining those policies, and we have to keep working with our partners, particularly Indigenous partners. We know with absolute certainty that with the number of Indigenous kids we have in care, our policies and practices in that area are not optimal for those families.

We know this number, whatever it is today, should be lower, and it should be substantively lower for Indigenous children and families. We’ll keep working on that.

R. Glumac: Just one quick follow-up. The child-in-care rate per 1,000 — how does that compare, in B.C., to the rest of Canada?

[2:35 p.m.]

C. Heavener: That’s something else we would follow up on for you.

N. Simons (Chair): I have a comment on the goals of the ministry, on slide No. 4. I’m wondering why we…. No. 2 is: “Children and youth are supported to reach their potential and grow up as successful young adults able to contribute to the economy of British Columbia.” What was the reason you chose “economy” and not culture or social fabric? I think economy is an interesting choice of words.

A. Bond: Yeah, it’s interesting because we’re actually reviewing our goals right now. We’ve looked at the language of these few goals. I think next fiscal year you’re probably going to see some changes.

We did quite a bit of consultation on this particular strategic plan. It was the culmination of a fair bit of consultation. I think a lot of the folks with whom we consulted were talking about their ability to contribute fully to the economy of B.C. But our review of the strategic plan for this coming fiscal year has suggested there are a few places we probably need to make some changes, so you’ll probably see those with the next budget cycle.

N. Simons (Chair): The other question I have has to do with the statistics on the number of children and youth in continuing custody — or even in care. When we see the large number, we have to recognize that some might have received their CCO status ten years ago, nine years ago, even 15 years ago. We don’t really have an accurate assessment as to: how many CCOs are being awarded per month? How many CCOs this year? How many CCOs last year? How many removals are taking place per month?

I don’t know if the big statistic that covers children from infant to 19 is necessarily giving us the best picture as to what the current trend is. Even if you look at the number of children in care going down, it could be because out-of-care options are increasing or youth agreements are increasing.

I’m not sure why Child in the Home of a Relative is still in the representative’s report. I thought we got rid of that designation.

I’m just wondering. From a statistical perspective, would it be possible to find more accurate trends if we looked more closely at the month-to-month statistics on — well, we know the number of reports — perhaps the number of removals, perhaps the number of CCOs or temporary custody orders or what have you? Wouldn’t that be a better way?

A. Bond: We could absolutely give you that. We do track that. That’s something that our service delivery areas track office by office, actually: the rate of bringing kids into care and the rate of bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous children into care. They have to do it office by office because it helps to identify what some of the practice issues are.

It’s occurring to me, given the level of interest in data, that it might be interesting for us to bring Martin Wright back to another committee meeting and perhaps do a much more in-depth presentation on the data that we have available to us — what we use to make decisions, what we use to evaluate some of the questions that you’re talking about.

Certainly, we could identify other questions that you might be interested in. If we had a question about kids in care from different cultures, we could bring that along. We could bring in the rates of bringing kids into care. We have that in our data warehouse, and it’s something we can absolutely bring forward, if you’re interested. Or we could take a bunch back and send it in a written format.

I think it might be quite helpful, actually, for you to have a look at, or even get a demonstration on, our corporate data warehouse. You can see just what we can see, and what we can see down at the office level, if that’s of interest to you.

N. Simons (Chair): It is of interest. I think the committee seems to be nodding. I sense that Sonia’s nodding as well, but I’m not 100 percent sure about that.

S. Furstenau: Yeah. She’s nodding and pointing, actually.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. I have some questions about the all-party working group, which was a proposal raised recently. We’ve all seen a letter…. Or we’ve perhaps not seen the letter. But there’s been a request that we establish a subcommittee of the select standing committee which could, perhaps, be privy to details not afforded to the public.

Now, can one of you perhaps explain what the purpose of that subcommittee would be?

A. Bond: I’m happy to do that. What we’re proposing is that we start, actually, with the subcommittee talking about what we can and can’t share at a much more foundational level than Cory has gone through today. She just did a very high-level sort of overview.

[2:40 p.m.]

We’d start with that. One of the observations we would have is that, very often, single cases tend to drive public perception of what we do and don’t do as a ministry. So it would be helpful, I think, to have a bit of a conversation about what we can and can’t share, what the legislation allows us to do and what we could perhaps do differently that would do a better job being able to describe the ministry’s ability to respond on a case-by-case basis or our administrative capacity to manage the cases that we’re dealing with.

What we thought we’d do is start by having the conversation and see whether or not there’s a potential for legislative…. You’d have to do it through legislative change. So whether there’s a potential for legislative change and, if there is, what that would look like, always keeping in mind that whatever we do has to be in the best interests of the children and protecting their privacy. It would more be starting as a conversation.

It would be an opportunity, though, to explore some of the other questions, in detail, that we’ve talked about, in terms of the detailed practice at the ground level, what we do in the ministry that might be better in a smaller subcommittee than in a larger group.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you. I know that there is general agreement among the committee to have such a subcommittee established. And we would see where it went, I suppose. We could start with just discussing some of the limitations that the ministry has around being able to respond to whatever might be a public outcry or a family’s concern raised in a public way. Whether we’d be able to share any more information than that, or if it would simply be a way of reassuring the public that close examination is taking place and oversight is happening, I’m not entirely sure, but we could see where that went.

I’m looking around to see if there are any further questions for the ministry with respect to the overview provided. I don’t see any further questions. I really appreciate the time that you’ve given us this afternoon and the information that you’ve been able to share with us. It’s helpful, and obviously, you can tell we’re interested in the statistical trends and how they reflect, perhaps, government policy or legislation or practice.

I have a question about staffing, if I may. I just forgot that I had it. It’s about whether or not the ministry is at full capacity now.

A. Bond: We’re very rarely at 100 percent fully staffed, and at this very moment, I couldn’t tell you. I know that when we looked a few months ago, we had 300 more FTEs operating on the ground than we had 18 months previously. I couldn’t tell you moment to moment. We’d have to look and give you that number. Are you looking for the front-line staff?

N. Simons (Chair): Yeah, I’m mostly interested in just all of the issues related to what we see as repeated themes as to overwork. When we’re unable to complete the necessary plans of care and such, it’s often explained as a workload issue. So I think workload, staffing — that’s really what I’m trying to drill into a little bit.

A. Bond: I have a longer answer for you, then, because while staffing is a component of workload, it isn’t the only piece. We’ve actually spent a lot of time looking at the workload issue. It was the number one issue, I think, four years ago for front-line staff. As a result, we have added 300 FTEs to the front line. When last I looked, we had those 300 additional FTEs operating on the front line. So it’s 300 more people on the front line than were there two years ago. But that wasn’t the only thing affecting workload.

We had extremely inefficient practices. The centralized screening office, for example, was designed in order to partially improve workload. It meant that you didn’t have to do a screening at the front line anymore, which meant people didn’t have to stay on the phones. They could be out communicating with families and talking to families and making visits instead of always having social workers, particularly in our smaller offices, doing screening on the phone. So that was something that we did to improve workload.

Another piece that we did — Cory mentioned this — was we moved to centralized hiring for our child protection workers. We found, again, in the offices where there is a fair bit of turnover — rural offices, for example — that the supervisors were doing nothing other than hiring. That was basically what they were doing all the time, and it took away from their ability to do the clinical supervision. So that had a huge impact on workload as well.

[2:45 p.m.]

The other thing that we’ve done over the last few years is create a model so that we could determine how many people you need on the front line to do the job that is expected of the social workers. That model is complete. That’s something we could demonstrate for you, if you’re interested. You could have a look at how we came up with that and what the design tells us about where the other places are that we need to make adjustments to how we’re actually doing the work on the front line.

The last thing that we’ve been working on is having a central group of people actually do the work of screening caregivers so that that’s also work that the front-line folks don’t have to do. The idea here is to have our front-line offices focused on face-to-face service delivery wherever possible, and the things that don’t happen face to face happen somewhere else, in an area where it’s much easier to hire. One of our problems, of course, has been that we haven’t been able to easily hire in some offices.

Workload is a combination of all of those things, but I can tell you that we have added the 300 FTEs in. When last we checked a couple of months ago, there were 300 extra FTEs operating in the front line.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. Just to clarify that, I remember when there was an announcement of new hires. The number…. I think it was about 200 new hires.

A. Bond: November of 2014, yes.

N. Simons (Chair): Then there was also an equivalent number of people leaving the ministry at the same time. So it wasn’t a net gain of — I think it was, at the time — 200. I wonder what the attrition rate is and staff turnover and job satisfaction. I’m interested in all those things because they do affect practice.

A. Bond: Yeah. Those are things that we continually monitor as well. Our turnover is pretty consistent with other organizations like ours. That being said, it means that there is turnover and we have to constantly hire. We did go through the centralized hiring process. We were able to catch up and then exceed and add to our front line. So we did have a higher total.

It’s across all of the different types of front-line positions too. It’s front-line social workers. It’s also the supervisors and the administrative staff. And it’s inclusive of the child and youth mental health staff, as well as the child welfare staff. So it’s across the whole front line.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much. If there are no further questions, I think we’re pretty much ready to adjourn this meeting.

Before I do that, let me just thank the representative….

L. Throness: A question, Chair. Is there an opportunity for new business?

N. Simons (Chair): Oh, we have new business. One of our rogue members of the committee has asked about new business. Let me just see if he’s out of order or not. Oh, you’re in order.

L. Throness: It was on the agenda.

N. Simons (Chair): Yes.

Laurie — other business.

Other Business

L. Throness: I just noticed…. I wrote a letter about this to the Chair. The performance report from 2015-16, which is a year and a half old now, mentioned that foster parents under 65 had dropped by 25 percent in one year. Since then, it has dropped more, and there are various indications around different regions of B.C. that foster care is declining precipitously. That’s of great concern.

I wanted to make a motion from the floor, and I’ve sent that motion to the Clerk, although I’m just introducing it now from the floor. I’d like to read that motion into the record, if that’s okay, Chair.

N. Simons (Chair): It’s okay, but I didn’t get any notice of it. So I think you’re out of order.

L. Throness: I don’t think I’m out of order. I asked the Clerk earlier if I could do this, and she said yes, I can. So I’m going to read it. You can be advised, of course, by the Clerk, Chair.

My motion reads as follows: that this committee, due to the precipitous recent decline in foster parents under age 65 and the retirement of those above age 65, immediately undertake a study of foster care in B.C. — including the current state of foster care, the numbers and distribution of foster homes throughout the province, the reasons for the rapid decline of foster homes, the remuneration of foster parents, the recruitment efforts undertaken by the ministry to find new foster parents and any other related issue the committee shall decide — and furnish a report with recommendations to the House no later than April 30, 2018.

I’d like to vote on that motion.

N. Simons (Chair): Could I talk to the Clerk perhaps?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, hello, Nicholas. As I understood the question earlier with respect to notice of motion…. Although notice of motion is required to be provided with respect to proceedings in the chamber, within a committee setting, it’s not typically required, although it is recommended in order to ensure that members are informed and can consider, as best they can, any new proposals or items of business. However, Mr. Throness is quite correct that it is not formally required to be given.

[2:50 p.m.]

N. Simons (Chair): What would the effect of this motion be, which I have yet to see?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): I would recommend…. I’m not sure if Mr. Throness has a written copy of the motion there. It would certainly be in order to have a signed, written version of the motion. I understand that he does have a copy of it there.

As I understand the motion, the committee, upon adoption of the motion, would agree to undertake the proposed study, as outlined by Mr. Throness, and consider a number of particular elements of the motion and any other related issues and prepare a report to the Legislature by the end of April 2018 — April 30, 2018.

R. Glumac: I would like to defer this motion until the next meeting, with a request that we have just a little bit of a write-up of the rationale, because I haven’t seen this or know anything about it. I would like to make a motion to defer.

N. Simons (Chair): Laurie, you don’t have a written copy for us?

L. Throness: I have it in electronic form, Chair, and I would be happy to send that to you. That, I think, would serve the same purpose.

N. Simons (Chair): Do you think, Laurie, in the spirit of this committee, that perhaps we should discuss it at the next meeting?

L. Throness: I think we should vote on it now, Chair.

N. Simons (Chair): Well, I don’t have a problem with that, in that we do have a series of other expectations that this committee is empowered to accomplish, including the statutory review and including our mandate, which includes a discussion of issues around Indigenous foster care, Indigenous children in care. We don’t have a fulsome explanation as to the recruiting challenges or the foster parent deficit that may or may not exist in the province, so I’m not sure it’s entirely of…. We can always….

L. Throness: Well, that would be the purpose of the study, Chair — to find out the reasons for the decline. I think that foster care is in a crisis right now, and I’ve written a letter about a month, a month and a half ago to the Chair about that.

N. Simons (Chair): Yes.

L. Throness: The Chair is well aware of my concerns. I have delivered the motion in accordance with the spirit of that letter and the information in the letter that I transmitted. I think it would be very appropriate for the committee to consider this issue and to vote on it today.

N. Simons (Chair): I find it a little troubling that you are using this approach in our first full-day meeting of this committee. I think it’s a problem because you had received a response from the Chair, and that was to raise the issue around foster care with the ministry to determine if, in fact, it was worthy of further examination. I’m not against it on the face of it. But I do think that our priorities in this committee, especially with a tight deadline to report back by next year, at the same time that we have the statutory review to be completed…. I think that it would get in the way of that.

I also think that it’s disrespectful to the committee members to raise this at this point in the form of a motion that has not been distributed. Whether or not it’s in order, I think it’s contrary to the spirit of the committee, as we have been re-established. I have a serious issue with that process.

L. Throness: Well, if I may, Mr. Chair. A committee is a master of its own destiny. A committee can decide. It’s an independent body. It can decide its own schedule, and I am submitting this motion with the utmost respect…

N. Simons (Chair): No, you’re not.

L. Throness: …toward the Chair and all members of the committee. It is a really important issue, and I think it is something of a crisis in the Ministry of Children and Family Development. So I think…

N. Simons (Chair): Well, it’s amazing, after….

L. Throness: …it would very appropriate for us to vote on it today.

N. Simons (Chair): Order.

It’s quite interesting to me that after everything that we’ve seen — and it’s obviously your concern — about the increase in the number of Aboriginal children in care, the increase in the amount of reportable circumstances, deaths and critical injuries, that you have decided on your own that this is your priority, and because you have that in your mind, you’ve decided that you want to get through with this.

L. Throness: Well, I would simply put it to a vote, then, Chair, and the committee will decide on a democratic basis.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Mr. Chair, may I make a suggestion?

N. Simons (Chair): Yes.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Perhaps, if time permits…. The committee was intended to meet for another full hour or so. If we take a brief recess, I can distribute, electronically, a copy of the motion that I’ve received from Mr. Throness, and then we could reconvene.

It is possible that the committee might choose to adjourn debate on the motion, if a majority of members wish to do so, but I think it might be helpful for members to have a copy of the motion that is being considered at the present time.

N. Simons (Chair): Absolutely.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Okay. May we recess for a few moments?

N. Simons (Chair): Absolutely. The committee is hereby in recess.

The committee recessed from 2:55 p.m. to 3:09 p.m.

[N. Simons in the chair.]

N. Simons (Chair): We’re calling the committee back to order. Sonia, are you there?

S. Furstenau: Yes. I’d like to be able to speak to this, if I may.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. Well, on the floor before us is a motion to defer.

[3:10 p.m.]

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Sorry, Nicholas. Just to be clear then, a motion by Mr. Glumac to adjourn debate on the motion by Mr. Throness. Is that correct?

N. Simons (Chair): I believe it’s a motion to defer debate on the motion by Mr. Throness.

R. Glumac: To the next meeting.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes. So adjournment of the debate on the motion would be in order. Absolutely. That’s just the same effect. That’s the wording that we would employ.

N. Simons (Chair): Okay. To speak on that motion, I guess I call on Rick.

R. Glumac: Okay, I could go first.

In the spirit of…. Given the fact that there was a letter written and given to the Chair on this topic, I think it would be appropriate to have the opportunity to read that letter and to understand some of the rationale behind this motion. I would like to adjourn the meeting and debate this at the next meeting so that I can read that letter and I can understand the context of this a little bit more to vote appropriately on the motion.

I think if we do that, we’re all doing this in the spirit of working together, and I think it’ll defuse some of this tension. So I hope that the committee will do that.

S. Furstenau: To speak to adjourning the debate on the motion, I think the other issue here…. Well, one is that it’s very difficult for me to participate in this debate from over here, but I am right now.

The MCFD staff who were here informed me that there was an October 2014 report done by MCFD on exactly this topic. I think it would make sense to adjourn this debate so that we can all at least look at that report before we make a decision whether to use this committee time to pursue the recommendation by Laurie Throness.

Again, making informed decisions based on all of the information — to make the best decisions — is really important in any kind of parliamentary business. Given that, as you point out, Nick, we didn’t have the motion ahead of time, as Rick points out, it would be good for us all to be able to see the correspondence that went back and forth.

Most importantly, I think we should look at the report that was written three years ago on exactly this topic to determine if there are actually any deficits in that report or if that report informs us enough to be able to put the attentions of this committee onto other matters, particularly given the statutory review that is in front of us right now.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you, Sonia. Does anyone else want to speak to this motion to adjourn debate on Laurie’s motion?

Well, I’ll speak to it a bit. I’ll just say that this committee was established primarily to raise awareness of the child welfare system to the public and to legislators. It was established shortly after the Hughes report recommended its establishment. It was established in order to promote a bipartisan or all-party approach to child welfare issues and, in that spirit, was expected to be a cooperative committee that sought to find consensus with respect to its priorities and its planning schedules.

I find the last-minute introduction of a motion such as the one Laurie has put forward to be highly contrary to that spirit to which I just referred, contrary to the spirit of a cooperative working environment. I think it displaces, or will attempt to displace, the priorities the committee has established as its main focus, which is to raise awareness about the child welfare system to the public and to legislators.

The fact that we have not been privy to a written motion is not due to the lack of toner in the printer but rather to an approach by a member of this committee to subvert what otherwise would be a genial working environment.

[3:15 p.m.]

Because of that, I’m finding it rather difficult to accept, despite the fact that, at the core, there may be some important issues to address, and, at the core, there may be some information that would be helpful to us as individuals and as MLAs. Because of that, I’m disappointed in the extreme that the critic for Children and Families finds the approach best taken by him is one of trickery, minor and playful trickery perhaps, and one that simply diverts our attention from the important issues at hand. It’s one which will completely be appropriately dealt with at the next committee, when the numbers are not in his favour.

Unfortunately, that’s a terribly unfortunate way to begin our serious deliberations about issues that are actually of great importance to the people of this province and, specifically, to the children of this province. This is not a priority that would have been reflected if the full committee were here. As such, unfortunately, it’s a detriment to the member’s intent to raise it now and to have it voted on now.

Because of that and because, perhaps, it is worthy of some further consideration outside of this particular meeting, I think it would be more appropriate to discuss further. Otherwise, it won’t be discussed, probably, at all.

If the member actually wants to get to the bottom of the issue without amendment, then, in fact, I have no problem with a vote on it now. But if he actually wishes to pursue this issue in further detail, with a full analysis of the foster care system that may have already been accomplished in the 2014 report, then that’s his prerogative. In fact, he is within his rights.

It’s entirely contrary to the spirit of this committee. It’s contrary to the convention of this committee. It’s contrary to my personal expectations of an hon. member of this committee.

I think I have expressed my disdain for his approach, a dissatisfaction with the thought that he has put into it, a regret that he finds a cute political trick to be the appropriate way of dealing with what I know to be a core issue for me as a politician, and that is the care of British Columbia’s children. Despite that, he has a right to do what he did.

I would just prefer that we have an opportunity to discuss this as a full committee. For that reason, I will support the move to adjourn this debate. If that’s unsuccessful, we’ll go from there.

Any further comments? The motion on the floor is to defer this, to adjourn the debate on this motion.

Motion negatived.

N. Simons (Chair): When we see the motion in written form, we’ll know what we just voted on.

Now we have the main motion on the floor. Could you please reread your motion?

L. Throness: The Clerk sent it to us: that this committee, due to the precipitous recent decline in foster parents under age 65 and the retirement of those above age 65, immediately undertake a study of foster care in B.C. — including the current state of foster care, the numbers and distribution of foster homes throughout the province, the reasons for the rapid decline of foster homes, the remuneration of foster parents, the recruitment efforts undertaken by the ministry to find new foster parents and any other related issue the committee shall decide — and furnish a report with recommendations to the House no later than April 30, 2018.

N. Simons (Chair): Sorry. Sonia can’t hear us.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Is there an opportunity for Sonia to comment on the motion?

N. Simons (Chair): Sure. Absolutely.

Sonia, go ahead.

[3:20 p.m.]

S. Furstenau: Again, I just want to reiterate that there is a report that addresses, substantively, the questions that are raised in this motion. I think it would be wise to at least have a chance to review that report before embarking on this exercise and using up time and resources, perhaps unnecessarily, which I think would make it reasonable to bring this motion back after the committee has had the opportunity to review that report.

R. Glumac: A question to the member who brought this motion forward: has he read the previous report?

L. Throness: I don’t have to answer that question.

N. Simons (Chair): He has not read that report. The member hasn’t read the 2014 report….

L. Throness: In any case, it’s three years old.

J. Isaacs: Chair, may I say…? I think the intent to try and understand where we are with foster care and where we may be going in the future is a concern. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I feel like I’m missing a piece here for us to make the decisions and look at overseeing things. I kind of need to know what’s going on with the fosters.

Now, if there is a report there from 2014, great. That gives us a template and framework to work from. It’d be great if we could just see where it is now. We saw a lot of policy changes and shifts in practice, emphasis on Indigenous families, and they’re going to need support for foster care in Indigenous cultures.

We saw this change coming into place since 2014, so I think the report would be beneficial for all of us to know where we stand so that we can make appropriate decisions.

R. Glumac: Which report? The one that’s written or the new one?

J. Isaacs: The new one. The 2014 is definitely a template of the kind of information that we want to see in a report, and we may add some in there. It’d be very helpful to have that report.

In addition to that, there have been some significant changes. We’ve seen a trend down for the out-of-care kids that are non-Indigenous. We’ve seen a trend up for the kids that are Indigenous. If we’re going to place children in culturally appropriate homes, that foster care in the Indigenous area is going to be a challenge for us. That can be part of our report — to find out just what those challenges are in that culture.

I would like to also get some of that ethnic breakdown as to where those gaps might be as well. Because we do have a significant and increasing not only Asian but Vietnamese and Taiwan…. We’ve got refugees coming on board. There’s a lot to consider, so I think it would be great that we had something that was up to date that we could measure so that we can make informed decisions as we move forward.

M. Stilwell (Deputy Chair): Just to reiterate and expand, I absolutely agree with Joan. The report in 2014, whether we’ve read it or not at this point, is only going to help us establish what we need today.

You said it yourself. The goal of this committee is to raise awareness, to look at deficits and look at issues. That’s exactly what this information is going to give us — the information that we need.

Knowledge is power, and that is how we are going to be able to make the best decisions going forward in the best interests of the taxpayers, in the best interests of the children, in the best interests of the families. So to be sitting here and debating on whether or not to seek out information bothers me. That is our goal, as Members of the Legislative Assembly: to seek out information so we can make decisions.

N. Simons (Chair): How lovely. Thank you very much.

T. Wat: I totally agree with the comments made by the two members, and I just want to make one simple observation. I think we need to be, as a committee, more proactive, rather than reactive to whatever information that is being fed by us. I think the motion put forward by our member Laurie is a proactive move.

[3:25 p.m.]

I want to emphasize again that that report in 2014 actually is a very good template for us to work on. And also, because it’s a few years old already, it’s about time that we update this report. Given that the foster parents are declining, it’s quite a big concern, because we all know that foster parents are the best to look after our children in care.

That’s exactly the kind of issue that we should work on. I think we should applaud Laurie for bringing this up, instead of saying that he’s getting us by surprise. I totally disagree.

L. Throness: The idea that this might raise tensions in the committee…. This is not designed to raise tensions in the committee. This is designed to address a very real problem in the Ministry of Children and Family Development. The best way we can take care of children in care is through foster care, and foster care is declining precipitously.

I think we need to take hold of this issue, and that could have some very practical, positive outcomes for the children and parents of this province. I think we need to do it, and we should do that now.

R. Glumac: I would just add that the question I asked was whether the mover of the motion read the previous report. I find it highly irresponsible to introduce a new motion on something that has been previously studied without having even looked, not having even opened a single page of that previous study. It’s extremely disrespectful to everyone on this committee that this motion is being brought forward without that work that should have been done by the member. It’s quite frustrating that it was brought forward in this way, and very disrespectful.

I really wish that the member would have taken the time to do the work that he needed to do. Given that he didn’t, I would have wished that he would have given us the opportunity to look into that background before voting on this motion. I think that spirit with which he introduced all of this and did this today is not going to reflect well on the small amount of work that he put into putting this motion forward.

J. Isaacs: Chair, may I say one more thing?

N. Simons (Chair): Yes.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Mr. Chair, may I interrupt?

N. Simons (Chair): Clerk.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Thank you. I just wanted to draw members to correspondence that was distributed by our office on November 29. As you’ll recall, you did receive a letter from Mr. Throness. And in response to him, a response that was then copied to all committee members, it was suggested that the committee undertake the opportunity to explore the issue in more detail with the ministry, such as was done today. But that certainly would continue, I’m sure.

I just wanted to mention the fact that, I’m sure, in the busy closing days of session, that email from my office may have been overlooked among many others in your in-box. So I just wanted to draw your attention to it and also to mention that Sonia would like to make a comment as well.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you. We’ll go to Joan first, I think.

J. Isaacs: My only comment is that the overview that the Representative for Children and Youth was talking about this morning was every five years. In some jurisdictions, it’s longer. But five years for a complete overview is something that he said was a lot of work. But it’s every five years, so it’s timely.

I think that as a new committee, we take another look at this and do a comparison from the work that was done before. Perhaps new issues have come forward. There are new practices once again, new policy, new shifts. We should take that into account so that when we move forward, it’s with the right intention to make sure that we are accommodating the children that need foster care.

It’s unfortunate that some people on the committee are feeling a bit slighted in the manner in which it was brought forward. But I believe that the intent is very genuine, and I am believing in the intent. We are here to help children and help with the two organizations — the ministry and the representative. So I will do whatever work is necessary — reading reports, past or new — to make sure that we’re doing what we have all come together to do.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much, Joan. I would like this committee to go into recess for….

Interjection.

N. Simons (Chair): Sonia, go ahead.

[3:30 p.m.]

S. Furstenau: Just for some clarification there, the five-year review is the statutory review of the legislation that this committee holds in terms of the Representative for Children and Youth. That’s somewhat of a separate issue. But it’s also important to note that the last report on foster parents was three years ago.

I think there’s a larger question here. Of course, we are all on this committee because we share a deep concern for the well-being of all children in this province. I think one of the challenges with this motion going forward at this point is that it hasn’t given the committee an opportunity to spend some time determining together what avenues we think would be most effective for addressing the well-being of children, particularly children in care.

Laurie points out…. He thinks that foster parents are the best to take care of children. But so much of what we heard today from the Representative for Children and Youth was the imperative to move toward children staying in family. Finding ways to massively reduce the number of children in care really is the goal of the Representative for Children and Youth and the stated goal from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, who were here.

I think, moving forward, again, adjourning this debate so that all members of the committee would have the opportunity to come forward with ideas so that we can engage in a constructive dialogue on how we, as a committee, can collectively agree on what kinds of ideas or research would be most effective to undertake at this time in order to see the best outcomes for children who are under the care of the province.

Again, I think an adjournment of debate until the next meeting provides that opportunity for all of us to reflect and to be able to bring our own ideas and insight. It also gives us the opportunity to read the report and really determine if this is the best way for us to spend what is, we can all agree, our very precious and very limited time as MLAs.

In that spirit, I would hope that we could agree to vote this motion down and come back to committee in the spirit of working together and trying to collectively find the best use of our time.

N. Simons (Chair): Thank you very much, Sonia. Any further comments from members here?

I would like to take this opportunity to see if I can canvass opinions of members who are not here to see if they would have any views on this or if they would support this view or not. To do that, I call a recess for ten minutes.

The committee recessed from 3:33 p.m. to 3:50 p.m.

[N. Simons in the chair.]

N. Simons (Chair): We have a motion on the floor, and we will vote on that motion.

Motion approved.

N. Simons (Chair): Any further business?

A Voice: No further business.

N. Simons (Chair): This committee will now adjourn.

The committee adjourned at 3:50 p.m.