The committee met at 10:01 a.m.

[J. Sims in the chair.]

J. Sims (Chair): I would like to acknowledge that I am working from the unceded territory of the Coast Salish people, including the Semiahmoo, the Katzie and the Kwantlen. As always, I raise my hands in gratitude for the privilege of sharing this beautiful place.

Many of you may know, and many of you may not, that I chose Canada to be my home, and I have felt welcomed ever since I arrived here in 1975.

To the First Nations and to all who went before us and fought the good fight for what we have today, thank you to each and every one, especially to all the warrior women who went before us.

What we’re going to do today is a little bit different than the…. Oh, the agenda did get changed to say that we are going to be answering the questions first. I have three people on the list. If I’ve missed anybody, I’m sure you will let me know.

Shall we go over to you, Fin.

Consideration of Representative
for Children and Youth Reports

Detained: Rights of Children and
Youth Under the Mental Health Act

F. Donnelly: Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Jennifer, for presenting your report to us, Detained, and also for presenting to us, the committee, yesterday. I hope the recommendations that you have presented are adopted because, obviously, it sounds that they’re very needed.

I’ll add, on a personal note, that in your presentation yesterday when you brought up the voices of the youth, it was just heartbreaking to read some of those comments and those stories. Thank you for really making it real for us.

I’m just wondering about how the ministry would identify a youth who is detained and has a mental illness or addiction. Is there a standard process that the ministry uses? I’m assuming that the courts or the police or the hospital may provide some insight, but is there a standard way? It sounds like the ministry often struggles with that. How do we assist in ensuring that there is a protocol for identifying someone who has a mental illness?

[10:05 a.m.]

If you could explain or shed light, that would be helpful.

J. Charlesworth: Wonderful. Thank you.

I would like to introduce, actually, a couple of folks that have joined us today so that you know they’re there, if you wouldn’t mind.

J. Sims (Chair): Please go ahead.

J. Charlesworth: Also, gratitude to the keepers of the lands that I’m on today, the W̱SÁNEĆ territories. Lovely to be joining you again.

I’ll just introduce so you know who’s going to be speaking in and helping as we go through today. We’re joined again by the deputy representatives, Alan Markwart and Samantha Cocker, and by Jordan Watters, who was the main author of the Detained report. She’s joining us today to provide the expertise on answering a number of these questions.

I’m also delighted to introduce you to Blair Mitchell, who is the executive director of advocacy and was also the lead on the Left Out report, and Pippa Rowcliffe, who’s very new, almost five months in, as the executive director of monitoring and is well connected to the Parent’s Duty report. Just for those of you who may know, she was formerly with the human early learning partnership at UBC. So we’re very fortunate to have Pippa join our team.

Those are the folks that will be responding. Actually, although Blair is here to talk about Left Out, I think he may be able to offer some insights in terms of MCFD’s approach too.

In a general sense, Fin, this is really interesting, because one of the challenges that we’ve got in the mental health system is access. Oftentimes the diagnosis, if you will, or the assessment of mental health concerns — or special needs, for that matter, which you’ll hear about — is delayed because there is a lack of access to the services and supports that might be necessary in order to do an assessment.

Having said that, within the Ministry of Children and Family Development, there is the unit, the child and youth mental health. Alan can speak to this, because he actually used to be the ADM responsible for child and youth mental health not that many years ago.

That is Ministry of Children and Family Development’s unit, with offices throughout the province and with child and youth mental health clinicians with an access to psychiatrists and psychologists who would work with young people who are expressing mental health concerns. It might be anxiety, it might be depression, or it might be something more significant or severe in terms of psychoses, etc. Those practitioners might not…. There might not be a formal diagnosis, but there might be something that is suggesting that this child meets some mental health concerns. That’s kind of in the backdrop. That’s child and youth mental health.

Associated with that too, of course, is the health care system, because there are physicians, and there are referrals to psychiatrists, etc., and then the hospital system. There are a number of different ways in which a child might receive a diagnosis or might receive a plan for their care and service.

Having said that, to get to your question around how anybody knows, how we find out is if a child is receiving services from child and youth mental health or from any other program within the Ministry of Children and Family Development, if a child experiences a critical injury or something significant has happened, such as being detained, then the expectation is that we would receive a reportable. We would get a document that would tell us that that has happened. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. That is the way in which we might learn more about those children. But I’m going to turn to….

Maybe, Alan, you could add more.

Blair, feel free to step in as well.

I’m hoping this is answering your question, Fin. I just wanted to give those broad strokes for you.

A. Markwart: Well, I think you captured it, Jennifer.

There are a variety of different entry points. It depends. If it’s a child who’s not involved in the child welfare system and, say, there is a referral to the child and youth mental health system, as Jennifer described, there are wait-lists often, and that does lead to some delays. There are a number of children and youth who are treated privately, through doctors, through referrals to psychiatrists. There may be private counsellors as well.

[10:10 a.m.]

How they end up in hospital is often — I think about a third of the time — that the police are actually detaining them under the Mental Health Act. Other times a parent may take them to hospital, or it may be ambulances are coming to get them. There are a variety of entry points, and they’re assessed from there, once in the hospital.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you.

Over to you, Susie.

S. Chant: One of the recommendations that I saw is to be sure the child is aware of their rights, etc., as they get in. I wonder….

Maybe this is in there, and I did not put it all together. I also think that there should be an immediate, as they hit the emergency room, access to an advocate of some kind. If a child is badly enough off that they need to be detained for their safety or the safety of others, explaining their rights to them…. I mean, you can’t do it with an adult successfully, really, either.

It is really critical to have somebody there that understands what the rights are and that is thinking in terms of the needs of the child. That won’t always be the parent. The parent may be bringing them in because they can’t do anything else. They’re just going to go: “Yeah. Take care of my kid, please. I don’t know what else to do.”

You really need somebody in there to hear those rights and to be prepared to say: “Okay. As a representative of this child, I will speak this way.” Whatever it is. Unfortunately, things happen very, very quickly at the beginning, and then, in the middle, you can’t get in to them to advocate.

I think that should be something that should be right at the door, which is hard to achieve. The social workers in emerg are lovely, but they’re running hard and running fast. They can’t stop long enough to go through this process effectively.

Just my suggestion.

J. Charlesworth: Yeah. Thank you so much, Susie.

Carly, do you want to speak to that, in terms of their rights and voice? I really think that is at the nub of all of this. An independent advocacy.

C. Hyman: Sure. Just to say that I couldn’t agree with you more.

One of the recommendations in this report is that the Attorney General ensure that an independent body is notified every time a child or youth is detained under the Mental Health Act and that this independent body is mandated to provide both rights advice and advocacy support for young people. Further to that, we also think that Indigenous young people need to be connected with the Indigenous patient navigators in hospitals.

I agree with you. I think that that needs to happen very quickly. Any patient has a right to advice on detention, and what we have seen through this report and what we hear in other reports is that that’s not happening on detention. It may happen at some point later.

I couldn’t agree with you more.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you very much, Carly.

I think that’s the end of my speakers list from yesterday.

Jennifer, I’m going to turn it over to you to do your presentation, and then we will go back to asking questions again.

Left Out: Children and Youth
with Special Needs in the Pandemic

J. Charlesworth: Okay. Great.

Thank you to Jordan and Carly for joining us today and for making sure that we can respond to any further questions.

I was thinking yesterday, too, that it was like you’re drinking from a fire hose. Here we are bringing five reports to you. So if there are things that you’re percolating with and you want further information on, please don’t hesitate. We’ll make sure that we can respond to any questions that you have.

We really appreciate the level of commitment that you’ve shown to these reports. That’s really honouring of the children and youth. I also really appreciate the comment around centring youth voices. That matters a great deal to me as well.

Carly and Jordan, if you need to head off, take care. Thank you.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you to Carly and Jordan. You get a rest now. At least a reprieve from Zoom.

J. Charlesworth: That’s right.

Okay. Great. The first report I’m going to present on today is Left Out: Children and Youth with Special Needs in the Pandemic, which our office released in December.

[10:15 a.m.]

I know that a number of you are new MLAs and a number of you are continuing MLAs. Those of you who have been in your role for a while are probably very familiar with the issues that we’re going to be raising in this report on children and youth with special needs and their families struggling to find suitable supports. For those of you who are new in the role, rest assured that these kinds of considerations will be coming to you in your role.

Certainly, improving the lives of children and youth with special needs has been a priority for our office for many years, since its inception in 2007. It’s been a focus of this committee as well.

The last committee, in October of 2019, released a report entitled Children and Youth with Neuro-Diverse Special Needs that provided 16 recommendations to improve services and supports for children, youth and their families. That committee engaged in community visits and heard from many, many different sources to do this very excellent report. So we’re very grateful for that in ensuring that the interests of children and youth with special needs and their families continue to come to the surface.

Unfortunately, too many of the systemic shortcomings that have been identified over the years by various reports and by the voices of parents and advocates remain shortcomings today.

I’ve shared with you how we’ve been responding to COVID in terms of looking for indications, through our advocacy and reportables, of how children, youth, young adults and families were being affected. As I’ve mentioned, and I’ll just reiterate, we met weekly with the deputy minister and the provincial director of child welfare in MCFD right out of the gate and regularly with other public bodies to share information.

Really, the early months of the pandemic are best described as an all hands on deck time when communication ramped up. We were all trying to figure out what was going on. How did we need to respond in this novel, complex and emergent space that we were in? What we saw that was important was contributing to and supporting the fine work that was done by our colleagues and the legislators to try and figure out how to be most helpful.

Early on our advocacy team noted that families of children and youth with special needs in B.C. were struggling even more than usual. We were hearing that all the challenges that every one of us were facing, especially those with children, during those first months of COVID were compounded for these families.

Concerned about this information, we consulted over the summer and fall with families, family networks and community advocacy organizations. Here it gives you a list of some of our community partners. The intention was to understand the complex impact of the pandemic on these families.

This, by the way, is a photograph of a mom. It just, for me, captures the stories that we were hearing so often. They were just getting exhausted.

This report tells the story, as well as the ongoing and deeply unsettling story, of a piecemeal special needs system that has never provided adequate and equitable support.

We realized that a crucial role for us in this pandemic would be to act as a convenor and to bring together those people and organizations who work so hard for families of children and youth with special needs and to amplify their voices. In that way, this report was a break from our usual practice at the RCY. It was led by our advocacy team under the direction of executive director Blair Mitchell, whom I’ve introduced.

Over the summer and fall, we brought together these community partners and family networks who have advocated for decades. We’re really standing on their shoulders. Many of them had been doing their own surveys in the early weeks of the pandemic, and their data made it clear that families were really struggling with major challenges on many different fronts.

As time went on and we began to gather more information and undertake our work…. Of course, here we were. We were tracking our advocacy requests, the critical injuries. We were asking how families are doing. We took a look at the data. We had these virtual gatherings. Then, towards the latter part, as we were preparing for release, there were some concerns about: “Is this still valid? We’ve done a number of emergency measures. Are these families still struggling?”

[10:20 a.m.]

We undertook to do our own survey to check in on how families were doing eight months in. This three-day survey was opened only over the weekend because we had to move quickly. We were preparing for release. We got 545 families, in three days, that responded to us. It was very clear from their responses that they were still struggling, in some cases even more because the pandemic had gone on for so long.

As an aside, we were also fortunate because Simon Fraser University and UBC researchers were simultaneously doing work, and their work validated the things that we were hearing on the ground. The fact that we received such a substantial response and that it was being validated by other work that was being done in the academy tells us just how desperate these families are to share their experiences and be heard.

In addition to all of this data, we also spoke directly and very intensively in in-depth meetings with ten families from across B.C. whose children were experiencing a diversity of special needs and tried to understand what was going on. Those stories are woven through the report, and it really speaks to what you were saying, Fin, earlier, about the youth stories that when we go more deeply in relationship with the folks that are most impacted, we get a very important aspect of the story that, combined with the data, speaks to what it is that is really going on.

What did we hear? We heard that COVID-19-related closures and physical distancing measures have significantly impacted these families and their children, many of whom lost vital medical treatments, therapies, specialized recreational activities and respite. These families have faced difficult questions around whether to send their child with complex health issues back to school and have had problems accessing services in a time when regular processes continue to be disruptive.

We also found that the extra support and flexibility in services provided to families during the first months of the pandemic…. There were emergency measures put in place. They’d been inconsistently communicated and available, such that many families simply never knew about their options before those key supports were discontinued at the end of September.

Even if they were able to learn about and access emergency measures, families shared with us the challenges of trying to access support for their children. Parents such as Bobby, featured in the report, a mother of a young boy with special needs, said that realizing the overall lack of supports available even before the pandemic was a big “wow” moment for her. She said: “It’s so obvious, now that I’m in it, but it’s not obvious when you’re outside it. I think that’s a big problem in terms of advocacy and services for our families. Our families, collectively, have to make such an intense effort to be seen and heard for British Columbians to know even a little bit about what life is like for us.”

Jackie, another parent, spoke to us and put it: “We know our children best and are the best caregivers for them, but because of the amount of care required, we can’t work. So we live in poverty. It becomes a stressful and exhausting situation.”

For the tens of thousands of families who support their children and youth with special needs, the pandemic served to illustrate a crisis that had been actually decades in the making. As we began to explore the impact of the pandemic on these families, it became obvious that this report would need to be as much about historically inadequate child and youth with special needs supports as it would be about the impact of COVID-19.

Just to take a step back and provide some historical perspective, in the ’70s and ’80s, some of you may recall, an important step towards inclusion was being made in countries all over the world, including Canada, and I’d like to say that B.C. was a leader in this thanks to tremendous advocacy efforts by people like Al Etmanski.

We were closing the door on institutional care as a general practice and making a promise to families that they would soon have all the community and school-based supports they would need to raise their children at home. In fact, I was part of that effort as B.C.’s provincial coordinator for deinstitutionalization during the period, closing down Woodlands and Glendale. It was a profoundly hopeful and optimistic time, as we finally made room in our communities and our schools for children of differing abilities.

In the years since, our understanding of the wide spectrum of lifelong disabilities, neurodevelopmental conditions and chronic health concerns that are collectively known as special needs has grown by leaps and bounds. Advances in medicine, health technology and accessible communications have tracked along with social attitudes that embrace inclusion and set out to create an infrastructure to put that vision into action.

[10:25 a.m.]

However, we have not fulfilled that promise to families of children with special needs. They’ve not been provided with the supports they need to raise their children at home.

I should say that there have been many earnest efforts. It’s not that people have not been trying. There are workers out there who are doing extraordinary work, so this is not to be critical of the efforts that are being made in community. It’s really to recognize that that is hampered by the infrastructure that we’ve put in place because it is a patchwork quilt. I think this is shared with the minister, the ministries and people throughout — that this is high time for us to take a step back.

When we drew in for a closer look at the state of B.C.’s special needs program during the pandemic, we found families at the breaking point. Things that went very wrong for families in April are still going badly eight months later. And this is happening to families who were historically underserved.

For example, one of the most important provincial services for families of children and youth with special needs has the same funding caps for equipment purchases as it did when the program began 30 years ago. This is fundamental equipment we’re talking about, like standing devices and customized seating that keeps children with physical disabilities more comfortable, reduces the need for surgical intervention and supports them to grow into adults with more function and less pain.

We saw, in our work on this report, that B.C.’s uniquely flexible supports for children and youth diagnosed with autism provide a model of support that gives families more control over funding. But at the same time, many therapies that families want aren’t covered, others are capped at rates well below what those therapies actually cost now, and all this is presuming that a family can even find service providers in their community or that they have the ability to recruit, screen, train and manage service providers while also addressing their child’s day-to-day needs.

Long waits for diagnoses are leaving far too many children to pass through their early years with no services unless their families can pay for private assessment so that they can then access the services.

Many families of children and youth with special needs aren’t able to access any supports because their children’s needs or diagnoses don’t meet the current eligibility criteria. For example, the criteria exclude children and youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and complex behavioural needs.

We’ll be taking a deeper look specifically at the challenges faced by children and youth with FASD in a major report that we’ll release in March. That’s part of Pippa’s team’s work.

As I mentioned, it’s not possible to separate the pandemic’s impact on CYSN’s services from the reality of services that have been desperately thin and inequitable since long before the pandemic. The lack of equity in how CYSN families are served in B.C. is a source of tremendous frustration for families and our community report partners. Our report built on the solid foundation of advocacy that these organizations have been engaged in for many years. We thank them for their work and their participation in our report process.

These partners identified eight points for immediate government action. These are the here-and-now actions that will be particularly important in the event of greater restrictions that may be needed to curb spread.

Action was proposed for extending for one year, until fall 2021, all pandemic-related benefits and processes for CYSN families. While there have been challenges in the equities of distributing that, these were important initiatives, and we were learning from them.

The second one is to declare CYSN families essential workers for the purposes of allowing them to access critically important services during pandemic lockdowns — for example, simple things like, if we are back into a lockdown, the hour that you could go early in the morning to get your groceries or get some preferential treatment when going to the pharmacies. Those kinds of things. They said: “If you could declare us as essential workers, that would be really important.”

Another one was to streamline approval processes for all of the funding streams in emergency benefits, with an objective of reducing paperwork for families and confirming that all approval processes are viable even during the mass disruption of the pandemic. That was important because, as you’ll learn from the families, the paperwork is extraordinary. And that’s on top of the likelihood that they might not get anything even at the end of that.

Another suggestion was to collaborate with community public health officials to explore whether bubbles could be created for in-home services such as nursing support services and respite so that families and providers can limit their exposure to others during a pandemic. These are pretty straightforward, simple little solutions.

[10:30 a.m.]

Another one. Work with and fund community organizations that serve child and youth with special needs families to develop activity plans for children losing school- and community-based services. As I’ve mentioned, some families have not been able to send their children back to school due to complex medical needs and vulnerabilities, so these options are needed. The Ministry of Education has advised that they’re tracking this and endeavouring to understand the extent to which these other arrangements need to be made.

Another thing was that a lot can be learned from the experiences thus far. The community organizations proposed that we review, or the system review, virtual service provision — child development services to the families — during the pandemic’s first waves to identify promising practices as well as weak points and see if we can amplify the promising practices and address those weak points.

Finally, they suggested that we needed to stay attuned to the evolving issues and challenges and suggested creating a round table that brings together designated representatives of these family networks, advocacy groups, community service providers and funding ministries for regular and routine check-ins and brainstorming. They really felt that their expertise and their knowledge as family members, as advocates, was not tapped into in the way that they feel could be most helpful.

These measures will help the CYSN families in the short term. However, they are not going to fix the system that, in some cases, has not adjusted special needs support levels in 30 years. They will not fix the unfairness of a system that does not consider a child’s actual needs when deciding what supports they will receive. They will not fix a system that leaves uncounted thousands of B.C. children and youth with special needs with no services whatsoever, solely because they don’t fit into the right boxes for eligibility. That, too, is work that must begin now.

In our 2018 report, Alone and Afraid: Lessons Learned from the Ordeal of a Child with Special Needs and His Family, our chief recommendation was for MCFD to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the actual need for CYSN services across B.C. and the capacity of the current system to meet those needs. The Ministry of Children and Family Development is in the midst of a lengthy process to remake its systems and supports. As a part of the Left Out report, we strongly urged MCFD to immediately re-engage with their community partners on the design, development and implementation strategy for its new CYSN framework.

I’m pleased to say that the new minister shares the view that it’s vital to engage the community partners. We understand that a call for applications for membership on an advisory group has been posted. I’ve been encouraged by information shared in briefings that we have had on MCFD’s plan for a CYSN framework. However, this is a huge challenge. The system that we have is a patchwork quilt, as I’ve mentioned before. Many well-meaning efforts that were made over time have been added to it, but’s not coherent, fair, equitable, accessible or effective, and it will require us all to re-imagine a system.

One of the opportunities we have now is that there are many, many knowledgeable and experienced community partners, advocates and family networks that have come together in ways that are unprecedented, and they are ready to support the work ahead. I think this is one of the things that I feel most proud of in the report: the work that Blair and his team did to bring these partners together. In some cases, they’d never had the opportunity to come together. They found a shared voice, shared passion and commitment and recognized that this isn’t going to be easy and that there is going to need to be motion and movement and give and take. But I am encouraged by where we’re at right now.

Having said that, this is a huge piece of work and something that I think for this committee, given its past and where you’re going in the future, will be something that will be very important to attend to.

That concludes my remarks. We’re open for conversation and questions.

J. Sims (Chair): Susie, take it away.

Then I’ve got Kelly, and then I’ve got Karin.

S. Chant: A couple of things. You’ve talked about Ministry of Children and Family Development being on board — excellent. I also think the Ministry of Education really needs to be on board. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a number of constituents who have children with special needs and/or have been through the process and they now have adults with special needs living in their home.

[10:35 a.m.]

One of the big things that I’ve also heard from teachers and special needs teachers is that quite often, school is custodial care rather than an education opportunity. That, I think, is another piece of the patchwork quilt that needs to be looked at. Also, the piece that, when children are starting school, if they’ve already had a caregiver — not necessarily a parent but a paid caregiver — that paid caregiver is apparently not allowed to follow them into the school environment and to support them in that transition into school. And, the funding drops when they start school on the assumption that the care is being provided effectively in a different place, which has not been the experience.

I truly hope that the Ministry of Education is also…. I’m assuming they are. Having said that, I’m just wanting to emphasize that.

J. Charlesworth: Wonderful. I will say: thank you very much for that, because again, it gets to this as more of a systemic problem. The Ministry of Children and Family Development has a leadership role, but it’s much broader. It includes health as well as education.

The Ministry of Education is on board. In fact, as we were working on this, both the deputies of Education and Children and Family Development offered to meet with the partners. At that time, we were in the interregnum period, so they weren’t able to say very much. The partners said: “Let’s wait and have a conversation when we could have a real conversation about what you’re actually able to do.” So they are on board.

Just very quickly — and welcome, Blair, if you want to add in — I think you make a good point around the school start. Just to emphasize that that autism funding program provides $22,000 prior to school start, and then it drops down to $6,000. The justification of that is that there are more services, then, within the school system. You point out, quite rightly, that that is often not the case. The other thing to point out is that there are many children that receive nothing before or after school starts. I just wanted to reinforce that.

Anything you’d like to add on that, Blair?

B. Mitchell: Just to say — I mean, all great points — that one of our partners, Tracy Humphreys from BCEdAccess, an amazing advocate doing great work, is connected into the ministry. As she has pointed out — never mind the services and supports within the school — there are far too many children that have one hour of school a day, two-hour programming. That puts pressure back on the families because those children are then returning home.

One of the features in the report is just the impact on a parent’s ability to be in the workforce. That’s a great example, where you have a child who isn’t in the school system full-time and it basically puts that back on the parent to have the child at home during those school hours.

J. Charlesworth: Excellent points, yeah.

K. Paddon: I know I keep asking questions. I’ve already asked a bunch of questions when it comes to special needs. The reason for that is that I’ve spent my career, until this new role, working in this field. I was really, really glad to see such honest stories and acknowledgment of the fact that this is not new. It’s just louder. That’s good. It’s not good that it’s happening, but it’s good that it got so loud.

One of the things that I didn’t see…. I know that there’s a lot of systems advocacy in here. There are a lot of ideas for changing things and making them smoother — communication, that drop-off when children become school-aged. I’m not seeing systems advocacy in the next transition, the transition where eligibility doesn’t align. So the already rigid eligibility becomes much more rigid, and then the funding, even if you are eligible, becomes so much less.

My concern is that I didn’t see a mention or an introduction into the fact that we’re going from the rights of the child to the expectations and responsibilities of an adult, which ignores the conversation on the rights of persons with disabilities under the convention. I’m just curious as to whether the advocacy is going to extend into the system there as well. It’s because it’s going from one system — which we can work hard to improve with these recommendations, perhaps — but then it still just creates a bigger drop.

[10:40 a.m.]

J. Charlesworth: Yeah. Thank you for bringing your expertise into this committee, and the history with children and youth with special needs and with young adults as well. You’re quite right. Maybe I’ll cue you up, Blair, because this is something that we talk about a tremendous amount, in terms of advocacy.

You’re quite right. We did not address the transitional space between the child and youth with special needs into the CLBC. It was not a focus of this report. Having said that, I completely agree with you that it’s an issue that we see over and over again, and in fact, I think one member of this committee has already reached out about what they’re experiencing with several of their constituents on that transitional place. So while it’s not a subject of this report, Kelli, it is something that we have in mind. It’s kind of constantly on our radar. It’s not to say that we won’t address it in other ways.

Blair, would you like to speak to the phenomenon and then also…? It’s something helpful for us to know about the things that matter to you as a committee — about bringing forward our future work.

B. Mitchell: Since 2013, we’ve had an advocacy mandate to support those that are transitioning to CLBC services. They had to have been receiving a service prior to their 19th birthday. Although we don’t get a lot of those files, the ones we do get are always very complex. As you’re pointing out, there’s the cliff of service delivery, different funding formulas. Funding arrangements between MCFD and contracted agencies, look differently with CLBC. Often it’s not funded to the same amounts.

You get families that are looking forward to the time when their child can be a young adult making some independent decisions, and what they’re faced with is…. They’re told what they’re eligible for in terms of service delivery, and then as it gets close to their 19th birthday they’re told what’s actually available, and there are massive gaps between what they’re eligible for and what’s actually available. Often what happens is…. Young people, because there’s no day programming as there are long wait-lists, are sort of pushed back into, “Do one more year at high school,” because there’s nothing really actually available for them in terms of day programming.

There are all sorts of challenges and issues with regards to how we support young people to transition between MCFD into CLBC. One of the key things which…. We look at the STADD program and the importance of having a navigator for young people that can actually support that transition from MCFD into CLBC, and I think it should really be extended to families as well.

Parents at that point are…. We’re talking about parents, in this report, that are already exhausted. By the time their child is 18, 19, two things: like I said, they want their child to be a contributing young adult. They’re also exhausted, and they need that support. If they would like that, I think it’s really, really important. CLBC doesn’t provide case management services, and that’s a real challenge in those transition periods especially for families, and I think that they could really benefit with that support.

I’ll just finally say that when we’re working in that space and advocating for young people, our advocacy efforts are curtailed by what we’re not able to actually have access to.

The committee previous made recommendations around our legislation to look at how we support young adults in their whole self. Right now it’s just those that are accessing CLBC services. When we do that, you often have young people that are involved with health services, especially those with high medical needs, mental health services, addiction supports and services, housing.

They are, like any young adult, needing different supports and services to be a successful young adult, but we’re not actually able to advocate for them as that whole person. We’re just in that situation where we can only push CLBC, but quite often we find ourselves a table where it would be particularly helpful to be advocating for those that are accessing specialized health services.

[10:45 a.m.]

J. Charlesworth: Just quickly, to build on that, just so that you know, the select standing committee made recommendations that we would have a more expansive role. Those have not been implemented since the legislative review, and as I mentioned the other day, we’re going to be coming back, and you will be doing another legislative review with us. That will be an opportunity for us to bring these things forward again. So we’ll continue to have those conversations, going forward.

K. Kirkpatrick: One question and one kind of anec­dotal story, a quick story.

The report came out, I think, about six weeks ago, Jennifer. Correct me if I’m wrong. This is a very time-sensitive issue. We’re talking about a pandemic. We’re talking about people in crisis right now. What has the reaction been from government, and have there been adjustments since these recommendations came out?

J. Charlesworth: I think there are kind of two levels.

There has been no dispute whatsoever on the analysis that we have a fundamental issue with respect to the child and youth with special needs services system, if you will, and all of the things that we’ve raised in terms of its inaccessibility, inequities, etc. There’s no dispute with government on those matters. I think these are areas that they were well aware of. We’re not shedding anything new on that, but we are trying to amplify the voice, as Susie was speaking about.

Writ large, in terms of, “Yes, need to rethink children and youth with special needs,” the framework is underway. The ministry will have to do what it does in terms of Treasury Board submissions and cabinet submissions and all of those kinds of things. Of course, we’re not privy to that.

Having said that, there were some immediate things. I think there are some discussions, I understand, on some of those things, like: what about having bubbles, for example, where you have consistent service providers for a network of families that would allow for nursing support?

There was no movement on the extension of the pandemic emergency measures. The principle being that the children were now back in school, and that’s where they got the majority of their services, so that’s been restored. We dispute that. We are concerned that that’s not the case. So there was no extension of the emergency measures.

I would say that the suggestions were received. There has been some movement. The provincial health officer responded within 24 hours to say let’s have a further conversation on some of these elements that are within their authority. But we do have concerns that there are families that are still just hanging on by their fingernails, and it’s not realistic to suggest that going to school is going to solve the problem, because we still have all of those other therapies and the one-to-one personal services that are not restored.

I don’t know if you want to add anything more, Blair, to that.

B. Mitchell: The impact cannot be…. It’s so profound on these families.

This report only captures a period of time at the beginning of the pandemic. But of course we know we’re still in a pandemic. In fact, with new variants, I can only imagine that if you are a parent of a child with high medical needs, you are watching the news and you’re absolutely terrified with what could come in the next month to six weeks.

These families remain very vulnerable. They remain in need of support, particularly financial support. I know that anybody could benefit from financial support, but these families have been impacted. There’s no question that they’re…. Not only have they perhaps kept one child home, but because they’re concerned about that child, they’ve maybe kept their other children at home as well. I know of examples where that’s actually the case, where none of the children are now going to school because they’re concerned about what could come into the home.

Families spoke of just the absolute relief and joy at getting the CERB support, for example, that what that was able to do for them was so profound, in terms of those financial supports that they were able to have access to.

[10:50 a.m.]

The fact that they were able to use the $225 as…. It’s not a lot of money, but it made a big difference. I also just think that it’s a gesture in recognition to these families that government is listening and caring about them and that they want to support them.

We say in the report that to go back to regular service delivery in the middle of a pandemic, in our view, was unacceptable. Apart from the extension of flexible use of respite services, nothing else was brought in.

K. Kirkpatrick: What I’ve been hearing from parents — and it was one of the things I’ll talk to you about later — is this escalation of aggression and violence within some of these young people because they have missed that continued respite, the continued ability to go out and continue to learn.

I’ve got a boy who’s 6 foot 1 and 185 pounds, and his parents have no respite. The respite workers won’t even come anymore because there’s danger to them. The other children in the house have had to go with the grandparents.

Is this something that is more typical now because of the isolation that these young people have had — that now the aggression is getting to a point beyond what it may normally have been if that child had continued to have that support?

J. Charlesworth: Yes. Blair is living and breathing this with a number of the cases that we’re dealing with.

Blair, I’ll just make a comment and then turn it over to you.

Absolutely, Karin, that is what we’re hearing. When you think about it, for any of us, we’ve all been affected. Our whole routines, our relationships and our connections have been disrupted. So if you’re a child with special needs — or, I would also like to add, if you’ve got mental health concerns as well — all of those things that kind of created some space for some assurance, predictability and continuity of relationships, rhythms and routines…. All of that’s been disrupted. We are seeing, absolutely, an increase in behavioural challenges.

I would say…. This is the other report from SFU on the impact of the pandemic on mental health. Same thing — we’re seeing significant behavioural challenges. The child is trying to make sense of a world that is not making sense to them anymore, so it’s definitely escalating those issues and the fear. And then the sad thing is that then that child is the problem, when in fact, it’s the system and our inability to respond to them.

Blair, over to you.

B. Mitchell: Just to add to that, Karin, when a situation escalates like that, we see two things that can happen. It places a family in an even more vulnerable place, where they’re receiving CYSN supports and services, but perhaps a report is made. Now they have child protection services involved in their lives, through no fault of their own. It’s a situation that they’re living in.

They now have a child protection social worker — we have recent examples of this in our advocacy — who is now at their front door. They want to interview the family members. They want to do collateral checks with schools. They want to interview the child or at least see the living environment. That’s a really intrusive experience to go through, and as a parent, it feels like you’re, obviously, being judged. It makes families feel really under the microscope. Some of their other children can be interviewed. It’s a real challenge.

Families — this isn’t a new phenomenon — have long expressed the concern around the intersection between getting to those points of real stress in the family home and then MCFD having a child protection response to that, versus that there’s actually a CYSN worker involved. There’s where they can build on those relationships and how they can understand the family dynamic in what’s actually happening.

Of course, MCFD has a job to keep children safe. We’re not suggesting that that’s not the case. We have examples in our own reports where it was absolutely necessary to keep a child safe. But there can be different ways to go about doing that.

[10:55 a.m.]

Once you, perhaps, go through a process like that or not, the second thing that happens is that families are pushed to those extreme places, and they then open up discussions with the ministry about placing their children in care under special needs agreements. That breaks families apart. It breaks their hearts. They never imagined that they couldn’t look after their child, but without the right supports, they’re just unable to. The pressure of the pandemic has really exacerbated that.

You are seeing situations where families approach MCFD asking for special needs agreements and placing their children in residential resources, some of which are struggling as well. There’s not the accessibility and availability of residential resources, particularly with skilled staff and the right behavioural consultants and behavioural interventionists, to make this happen for families throughout the province. It’s very saturated in the Lower Mainland and south Island, but in other parts of the province, families really struggle to get the right kind of supports for their children. Just to add those two pieces.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you very much.

I’m really going to ask people to keep your questions a little bit more focused and the answers not to become a critique of the whole system. It should really be a response to the question that is being asked. If we keep it that narrow, then we will actually get to discussing the report.

I always want to remind us that when we’re having these meetings, we are not here to critique either the last year or the last five years or the last ten years or the system, per se, but the questions should be targeted for what’s in the report. Then the responses should also be limited to that. Otherwise…. With all of us, this is an area we care very passionately about. I could wax eloquent for about 18 hours — Fin will attest to that — about my feelings about special needs kids and everything about my experience in teaching. I’m a teacher.

I really, really want to remind people what the role of the committee is and what the role of the MLAs is and also for our guests to confine yourself to the question that is being asked. I’m asking with full respect, by the way.

F. Donnelly: Chair, just to add to your interjection there, I can attest we definitely don’t want to hear 18 hours from yourself on this topic. So I absolutely agree with you.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you. Remember, I did 36 hours of filibuster in total.

F. Donnelly: Exactly. She can do it.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you.

Now I’m going to turn it over to Henry.

H. Yao: Thank you, Dr. Charlesworth, for your lovely report. I really appreciate everything you’ve been doing. Like I said, it’s unfortunate we have to go through a pandemic to expose all the issues you are dealing with right now.

I’ll keep my question short. Two quick main points. Is there any way possible for a report to start to explore the economic impact of this kind of situation? As we know, as a government, we must balance every aspect of our governance of our society. Basically what Blair has been saying is it sounds like when children with special needs are being properly cared for, there is economic positivity for our society overall. So that is my first question.

The second question is vicarious trauma. I haven’t read that much in your report about vicarious trauma. You and I both know, which I’m pretty sure Carly can testify to, any staff member who’s been working with youth with special needs knows that when the service falls short, it is the staff who end up burning themselves out to catch up. By the time we see them burned out, it is already too late because there’s a huge gap already created. Are you able to, maybe, in the future, incorporate some of the vicarious trauma into the story so that we understand how it has impacted the service system as a whole?

J. Charlesworth: So just very briefly — thank you, Chair — in terms of the economic impact analysis here and the ways of making sense of “if we don’t do anything, what are the impacts, and if we do do something, what are the impacts on the costs…?” It is something we’ve spoken about from time to time, in terms of what our role is there.

I know that the Ministry of Children and Family Development is actually taking a look and trying to understand and doing an economic analysis as part of the child and youth with special needs framework. We are monitoring that with respect to the economics.

In terms of vicarious trauma, it is absolutely true, I would say, for…. I’m just thinking about the example that Blair shared around other children within the home and seeing the kinds of impacts on the family that’s affecting other children in the home as well.

[11:00 a.m.]

We did not address it in this report, obviously, as you know, but it is something we have talked about with respect to maybe a broader issue around the well-being of the workforce that’s in the child, youth and family serving area and recognizing that there are a number of considerations. It’s very low paid. It’s very gendered. It’s mostly women. There are some significant disparities in the kinds of supports and supervision and professional development that are available. You have, often, in the residential area, the least experienced workers that are trying to provide supports.

We have talked, as a team, about whether we might do something that takes a look at the workforce and the impact on the workforce of this difficult work. We haven’t made a decision on that, but I’d be very happy to hear your thoughts on it.

J. Sims (Chair): I’m going to go…. I’ve got myself on the list, but I’m going to leave myself till the last. So I’ve got Mike, and then I’ve got Susie wanting to come back on the list again. Okay. Then it’ll be me. Then we’re going to take that five-minute break I committed to, but I would like to finish with these three speakers first, just so that we’ve got a natural transition.

M. Morris: More an observation than anything, in reading through all the reports that I’ve got here in my binder. I’ve alluded to it yesterday, and Blair’s alluded to it a few times as well. It’s the critical need to look at some kind of a secretariat or combined approach to all of these. Everything that you folks are doing and you’ve highlighted in all of your reports and the experience that I’ve had over the years dealing with the various ministries as well screams for a more collaborative, integrated approach with all the agencies.

We can’t have your organization or Children and Families separate from Social Services, separate from Health, separate from Community Living B.C. It would be nice to see recommendations coming to advocate for a secretariat with all the ministries at the senior level, but also at the regional level, to the extent possible, as well. I think we’ll see some economies of scale take place once everybody is aware of what all the other agencies are doing.

One of the other things that I’ve seen with experience — and I’ve got family members that are involved in Children and Families and First Nations youth and whatnot — is the reluctance or the fear of sharing information because they might be in violation of the privacy act. The privacy act isn’t all that scary once you get to understand it.

I think we need that collective in there and get people to understand that the ultimate goal is to help an individual, so there shouldn’t be any barriers in place to do that. Really, I can’t emphasize enough the need for that collaborative, integrated service level at every aspect right across the province.

J. Charlesworth: I couldn’t agree more. Just very quickly, I’ve been around long enough to see all sorts of attempts that have been made — in fact, was the secretary to both the deputies and the ministerial committee on social policy many years ago. In fact, Ted Hughes was the chair of the deputy committee where there was an attempt made to coordinate efforts.

Having said that, I think we can look back and see what’s worked or what hasn’t worked with those different levels. You’re absolutely right. One of the critical things is around information sharing. We have to get through that to put the child at the center. So more conversations there, especially as we bring forward our work on working with children with complex needs.

S. Chant: This has been referred to obliquely, which is the impact on other children in the family. That’s another piece that, I think, is not particularly referenced in the report.

Again, we know through observation and everything else that other children in the family…. Their parents are so wrapped up — parents, if there are two — often, in the needs of the special needs child that it is very difficult for other kids. I’d be interested in seeing the longitudinal impact of that overall. That’s me.

J. Sims (Chair): I think we’ll leave that. That’s kind of a request going in.

Coralee, you said that you had a comment? Go for it.

C. Oakes (Deputy Chair): Just building on what Mike said about the whole idea of the integration and the communication, and just maybe a comment or a suggestion. We have a tremendous team in government. It changes names often, but it’s the LeanBC team. It used to be the red-tape-reduction team. They keep changing the name.

[11:05 a.m.]

At one time, we looked at the one-stop business registration and the mobile business office. It was really a team that was cross-government that worked with every ministry and pulled in information on how to make bureaucratic processes easier to function. They are a tremendous team of public servants that do a remarkable job. I don’t think, sometimes, people understand how they function in government and how they work in all ministries and poll. They had a project at one time where they looked at how to simplify forms that government was putting out.

Maybe that’s a suggestion, too, when we’re linking in other ministries, to perhaps look at…. I think it’s now the LeanBC team.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, Coralee. I think, once again, that was more information. Thank you for sharing that. There will be people on the committee who would not be aware of some of that, and all of us have a different perception of the red-tape committee. We’ll have a private conversation about that sometime.

The one comment I want to make — and I’m going to keep it really brief because I know people are desperate to stand up and stretch and do their yoga for two minutes — is that I’m always very, very concerned when we start talking about kids with special needs and we start talking about systems and programs.

We start using terminology that sounds really good. It’s inclusive education. The term I like is “responsible inclusion,” because inclusion is not just putting a child in an educational setting or in a social setting and then just saying: “You’re there.” Responsible inclusion is where it’s done with the full support and to make sure that it’s child-centered and that it leads to success.

Anyway, that’s my comment. Once again, thank you for your work to you and your whole team.

We will be back. We decided on a little comfort break — five minutes at the max.

The committee recessed from 11:07 a.m. to 11:13 a.m.

[J. Sims in the chair.]

J. Sims (Chair): We will go over to you, Jennifer, so you can go on to the next report. If you have additional staff we’ve not met yet, please let us know.

A Parent’s Duty: Government’s
Obligation to Youth
Transitioning into Adulthood

J. Charlesworth: All right. Thank you. No additional staff, but I will let you know that Alan Markwart, whom you know, was the lead in this report. So he will be adding the colour commentary after I do my remarks.

This report deals with another subject that’s of significant importance. Actually, over the course of these two days, you’ve seen the really top priorities for us around mental health, children and youth with special needs and now transitions into adulthood — all, of course, encompassed by concerns about the well-being of Indigenous children and youth.

In this report, the issue that we’re taking a look at is: how can youth who have been raised in government care be better supported as they move into adulthood? A Parent’s Duty: Government’s Obligation to Youth Transitioning into Adulthood was also released in December.

For the hundreds of B.C. youth in care who turn 19 each year, there’s nothing gradual or smooth about the transition. Their 19th birthdays are events to dread. We often see that in case notes, actually, where the young people are talking about how frightened they are. That’s the day when government supports for youth in care come to an abrupt end, whether the young person is ready or not.

[11:15 a.m.]

These young people are suddenly left to figure out everything about their lives: their housing, their budgeting, how to cook, how to do work in school, where to find a dentist or a doctor, how to put an application together, etc. So these young people are expected to go from being considered a teen one day to adult in a mere 24 hours.

We’ve got research and reports going back decades in B.C. that have said…. This is with credit to Fostering Change, hosted initially by the Vancouver Foundation and now First Call. These reports have said, over and over again, that the abrupt end of government care is wrong. It’s wrong for human development, wrong for the future health of the province, wrong in terms of cost effectiveness.

Most of us know that instinctively. We know it from our own experiences or parents, being aunties, uncles, grandparents, family friends and even employers. Each of us is connected in some ways to young people who are in these wonderful but challenging years of self-discovery and learning. I myself am the parent of a 26- and 28-year-old who are awesome and growing and developing still.

We know that young adults still need us. They need us to give them time and space to grow, develop and figure out who they are. It’s not an overnight process. It requires flexibility, love, forgiveness, support, respect, thinking about the future, creating a strong sense of belonging and connection to culture and family and really sensing: where is this young person at? Where are they at developmentally? What are they ready for?

They need our love. They need our advice and support. They need the spare bedrooms, some walking-around money, and they need to know that they can take a risk and fall and that somebody will be there to help them up.

That’s the essence of this report and our recommendations. We are calling for supports for young people coming out of care that more closely resemble the kinds of experiences that exist in our own families that help young people transition into adulthood. We’re asking government to strive for processes that mimic how families provide those supports that lead a young person towards independence.

This report reviews existing research, previous work on the issue of young people transitioning to adulthood. It specifically focuses on the more than 800 young people who age out of a youth agreement or out of care in B.C. every year. That number fluctuates, but it’s been pretty stable at around 800 a year.

This doesn’t address young people with neurodevelopmental disabilities, who will be transitioning into Community Living B.C. — so the area of concern that you have, Kelli — because that’s a relatively small group, and it requires a different kind of important consideration. But there are lessons to be learned from this report as well.

Because the government doesn’t systematically capture longitudinal data on experiences and outcomes of young people transitioning into adulthood, sort of checking back to see how they’re doing a year or two years or three years along, we’ve had to rely on other government data and research studies that have been completed in B.C. and other jurisdictions to paint a picture of that transition into adulthood. A number of those studies, by the way, have input directly from young people with lived experience, and ours also does.

Despite that absence of rigorous, systemic, longitudinal data collection by government on the experiences of young people transitioning into adulthood in B.C., there’s more than enough evidence from other work to understand the experiences of young people transitioning. Available data collected has been included in this report, and that takes a look at high school completion rates, rates of accessing income assistance, participation in programs such as agreements with young adults or the provincial tuition waiver program. Our review of available provincial supports to young people has been drawn from government websites and other government documentation.

We’ve also included a number of case examples from the work of advocacy and our reviews and investigations team, and it’s also a review of literature on topics such as promising practices for youth transitioning into adulthood, emerging adulthood cost-benefit analysis — Henry — and policy and practice in other jurisdictions. Just so you know, pseudonyms were used for the youth in our case examples to protect their identity, and one of our cases, Jack, is presented as a composite.

We also held focus group consultations and one-on-one conversations with key stakeholders, including youth from care, front-line service providers, foster parents, community service agency representatives and staff representatives from the First Nations Leadership Council, Métis Nation and Delegated Aboriginal Agencies.

[11:20 a.m.]

There’s no question that young people transitioning out of government care are actively harmed by their abrupt and artificial transition to adulthood. B.C. youth with backgrounds in care are disproportionately represented amongst young people living homeless. They have poor educational outcomes and earnings. Many struggle with trauma and mental health issues that bring them into contact with other systems of care, and these are vivid indicators of how badly we’re failing these young people right now.

It’s when you talk to the young people themselves about this abrupt transition that you really come to understand how much of our current processes are putting them in harm’s way. For example, one young person said: “Would you treat your own kids the way you’re treating us?”

These young people are disproportionately First Nations, Métis, urban Indigenous and Inuit. About two-thirds of the children and youth in government care in B.C., as you know, are Indigenous. Many of those young people spend longer periods of time in care than non-Indigenous children, as they’re more likely to be aging into adulthood, out of care. The impact that our system of care has on Indigenous people can’t be overstated, nor can the impact on the futures of these young Indigenous adults who are often being thrust unprepared into early independence, often disconnected, because of our practices, from those supportive adults, community and their culture.

An important place to start is to enhance preparedness and foster those natural supports and connections, as families do, long before their 19th birthday precipice. In this report, we recommended that transition planning for young people in all forms of care, and youth agreements, be improved so planning starts early, by age 14, and is extended past their 19th birthday. That planning needs to engage youth so they’re true partners in the process. It has to be developmentally appropriate and focus on the relationships.

For Indigenous youth, it must be supported by the reclamation of culture and identity, because these are critically important restorative elements. We’re focused on those areas in other RCY projects we are just bringing to conclusion now, too, including our review of the planning for children and youth who are in the care of government that we’ll be releasing reports on in the spring and early summer.

Now, the government has introduced some promising measures to aid the transition to adulthood for these young people in recent years, including enhancements to the agreements with young adults program, AYA, providing 48 months of [audio interrupted] support and medical benefits to eligible young adults up to their 27th birthday.

The provincial tuition waiver program, something to be very proud of, has enabled more than 1,000 former youth in care to access a post-secondary education. In truth, the eligibility criteria of the AYA program are so restrictive that fewer than 10 percent of the total number of eligible young people between the ages of 19 and 26 were receiving it as of March 2020, and while, last year, 40 percent of eligible young people accessed AYA at some point in their first year after turning 19, that’s a significant improvement over past years. This might be for just a few months, and we know little to nothing about outcomes.

Perhaps, most importantly, this means that 60 percent of youth that were transitioning just last year were not able to access any aspect of the AYA program even for a few months. No matter how you look at the numbers, the vast majority of eligible young people are not benefiting from the program.

Access to AYA varies widely around B.C., as well, region by region, from a low of 15 percent or so up to about 60 percent. These differences are actually unexplained. We’re not entirely sure, and we don’t know why there are differences on gender, education levels and even what type of government care a youth is in.

Our report actually recommended that, instead of a young person having to proactively request AYA, they be automatically enrolled. This is quite a bold recommendation, but we recommended automatic enrollment for every youth who turns 19. They can opt out if they wish. But we feel that that’s an important starting point, and it really holds us to be accountable, to provide that continuity of support so that there is a good runway into a positive adulthood.

[11:25 a.m.]

Tuition waiver is making a real difference for those ready to enter into post-secondary, but as we probably know from our own families and with our own youth, not every youth coming out of care is ready. Even when he’s ready, he needs help to figure out how to find a place to live and how to cover household expenses and take care of things.

We know from our own families and personal networks, of course. Sometimes it takes time for young people to get ready for post-secondary studies or a trade or even just to get a better sense of what they want to be when they grow up.

Then, of course, some young people, especially those that are coming out of care and have experienced significant trauma, are not universally ready to begin their transition to adulthood. We often see that young people enter into poverty, which significantly limits them on a number of levels. Of course, government is working on a reduction of poverty, but we also need to realize those intentions by reducing poverty among its own children as the parent.

Our report recommends the creation of specialized transition workers through community agencies, especially Indigenous agencies and entities, who can accompany young people from the time they turn 19 until they turn 27. It might not be ongoing throughout that period of time but somebody who has built a relationship and can walk alongside as they navigate those tricky growing-up territories, much as we do for our own kids.

I’ve met so many amazing young people with histories in care whose resilience and resistance in the face of all challenges of their lives is truly inspiring, and they’re bringing tremendous voice and leadership to the issues that we’ve laid out in this report. But our system of care should not be something that has to be survived. It should be flexible, diverse and humane support, trauma-informed, culturally appropriate and all of it resolutely focused on helping a young person figure out life as an adult.

Due to the trauma they experience, both before and during their time in care, the young people we wrote about in this report understandably have higher rates of mental health challenges than their non-care peers, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression. They need help tailored to their circumstances and their unique needs, including their cultural needs.

Another recommendation is we’ve asked that Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions secure that needed help by taking the lead in developing and implementing a plan for enhanced services that are trauma-informed and culturally appropriate. That plan can then be incorporated into the Pathway to Hope, which is the roadmap for improving mental health and addictions services.

Another thing that’s happened — actually, some good experimentation — is that youth in care who turn 19 this year, during the pandemic, have been temporarily allowed to stay in their placements. That’s actually been very beneficial to a number of young people.

We recommend that government analyze the results of that emergency measure to determine if there’s value in it being a more permanent change. We don’t know how it’s been beneficial or how it’s been utilized, but we think there’s a good opportunity to benefit from that learning. Not every youth will want or need to extend their placement, but also, not every youth is ready to be living independently on the day after their 19th birthday.

This takes us to housing. We all know that affordable housing is a major issue for so many young adults anywhere in B.C. and addressing housing for young people transitioning out of care is critical and another of our recommendations. It’s an unsettling number of young people that have told us of turning 19 and ending up on the streets or couch-surfing. That’s partly due to the lack of transition planning and assistance and the circumstances of poverty.

One young adult that we consulted with went through college on a tuition waiver while living in their car, parking close enough so that they could use the college gym washrooms. We feel that dedicated subsidized housing for these vulnerable young people is urgently needed.

We actually dedicated this report to Katherine McParland. You may have heard me choke up a little bit yesterday. Katherine was a former youth in care herself, and I mentioned her in the context of our From Marginalized to Magnified: Youth Homelessness Solutions from Those with Lived Experience. We dedicated this report to her because it was just before we released it that she passed, very sadly.

She talked about being in care and leaving care as “the superhighway to homelessness.” We feel very strongly that the issues around homelessness and housing for young people in that transitional space be considered and addressed and that we collectively honour Katherine’s memory.

[11:30 a.m.]

Our report details some previous comprehensive research in B.C., by Fostering Change, which concluded that investments in appropriate services now will not merely be offset but will, in the long run, result in considerable cost-savings to government. These same kinds of significant cost benefits have been verified in research studies in several jurisdictions.

We cannot afford not to implement these recommendations. In fact, to ignore them would actually be a more costly option. To move forward with the recommendations, we need better data so that we know whether the changes we are recommending are actually improving outcomes. Right now we simply don’t know, in any kind of systematic way, what’s going on for these young people, how many are accessing post-secondary education, how many are on tuition waivers, what happens when they enter the workforce, etc.

We did recommend a cross-government initiative to define and launch a new tool to track these key indicators and include disaggregated data within that tracking. I think it’s really important that we bear in mind that this has been called for in a number of different ways, including by the Human Rights Commissioner, because it’s so important, if we’re making these changes, that we know that we’re actually having good return on investments. There have been some significant improvements, as I’ve mentioned, with eligibility for the AYA program being expanded and the tuition waiver program, but we also know that more needs to be done.

We also know that MCFD actually is very committed to helping these vulnerable young people succeed, but the gaps and gulfs in the government system of post-majority supports create profoundly inequitable and difficult access for youth who could benefit. The lack of data prevents us from really fully understanding what’s going on, and the transactional nature of B.C.’s post-majority services right now actually doesn’t bear any resemblance to the wraparound, familial sorts of supports or community supports that young people need.

That’s why we felt it’s really important to bring light to this and the need for thinking about this in a different way, as…. If we raise these children up in government care, we are their parents as the state. So how will we continue to support them? Interestingly, just last week, the report from the British Columbia expert panel on basic income was released. As you know, the panel didn’t recommend universal basic income but, rather, a more limited approach, by targeting supports to particularly needy groups. One of those was youth from care transitioning into adulthood.

I was very pleased, actually, that in addition to recommending a comprehensive system of financial supports for young people leaving care — we actually didn’t even consult with them, so we were quite delighted when this came forward; it just shows the synergy that’s emerging now — the panel’s other recommendations echoed many of the themes in our report, including better planning and case management supports, core funding for community organizations to provide those continuing supports, etc.

I will leave it there. I’m open to questions.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Dr. Charlesworth, for the lovely report. I could emphasize that in the first half I read, I was very truly moved and almost a bit shocked by the challenges of youth in care you are addressing.

Many of your recommendations start at the age of 14, creating more employment-based programs to help them develop a proper life skills set. You also refer to the importance of reducing the overinvolvement of child protection and actually allowing more of a family-focused strategy when the kids are young, before they are being brought into youth in care.

One more thing you also mentioned that I found to be interesting…. I think it echoes our traditional saying that it takes a village to raise a family. May I ask, from your perspective — I know you gave a few good examples already, with a case study — what kind of village-based strategy do you most recommend?

[11:35 a.m.]

Maybe instead of…. I know that strategies are provided around solving today’s problems, but like you said, we would like to invest early enough, if possible. What can we do to create villages around these youth or around these children or even around a family to ensure that we’re putting everybody in the correct path, based upon recommendations similar to what you have in your report?

J. Charlesworth: I love that question and comment. Thank you so much.

One of the things that I want to make sure the committee knows is that I am actually not a proponent of just adding more professional services into a child’s life. I think that actually what we want to be doing is trying to create those more virtuous, as you say, village-based natural care networks and supports, supporting families so that they can care for their children, and supporting communities that support the families so that they can care for their children in those natural support networks.

That was one of the reasons we spoke about earlier transition planning. Then you start to find out who that child is connected to and what some of the activities are that are meaningful to them that would actually be more protective, etc.

That notion of a village-based or a relationally based practice is, I think, so important, because the more that we can wrap around our kids, the better, so that they are not dependent only on professional services. In fact, we’ll be bringing you a report forward, likely in April, that speaks to those elements of belonging for a child. We’ll speak much more intensively into that and the ways in which we build those natural support networks.

I think that transition planning and then thinking differently of not just maintaining the child in their placement but what it is that that child needs in order to be well connected is critically important. Of course, we can learn a tremendous amount from Indigenous communities that have, generations upon generations, historically, done village-based raising of their children. There’s a lot at the First Nations Leadership Council. Métis Nation B.C. and Delegated Aboriginal Agencies are also very alive to that and taught us a tremendous amount.

Alan, is there anything…?

Pippa, too, because Pippa, of course, is working in this area of more holistically raising your children up. Anything else to add to respond to Henry’s comment?

A. Markwart: Well, it can be done. Actually, I think there’s a good example in the report. It’s in a text box on page 16. It talks about a housing project.

This is a new initiative by the Métis child welfare agency that is putting together independent living apartments — youth in care and young adults from care along with Indigenous Elders, all together and supported by transition workers and community workers. It’s kind of looking at the whole package of services and supports.

There are other examples out there — Aunt Leah’s Place — but it is a patchwork of here and there. Thankfully, there are some great examples of local initiatives, but there is not a systemic approach, a provincewide approach, to this issue, which is what we’re asking for.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you very much.

K. Kirkpatrick: I might be incorrect on this, Jennifer, so I apologize. My understanding is that there will be an expansion of age for your office to be looking at — up to 26. Is that correct? Okay. We know that the emotional and brain development for young people continues far after 18, and we know a lot more now than we did even five and ten years ago.

Is there an appetite for MCFD to expand their services? I know there was a bit of mention about that. But the reality of moving those services to hold those young people for a longer period of time — do you think that’s a reality? Can that happen?

J. Charlesworth: This would be a very good conversation for you to have with Ministry of Children and Family Development. And of course, you can do that.

K. Kirkpatrick: Oh, I will be, yeah.

J. Sims (Chair): Yeah, Jennifer, I was just going to say that. I think that’s not the question for our guests. That’s a question for a different location. Thank you for pitching it back at us.

[11:40 a.m.]

K. Kirkpatrick: Madam Chair, I just didn’t know if conversations were…. It wasn’t critical of MCFD — certainly not.

J. Charlesworth: No, no. I will say, Karin, that we have had some good conversations with the ministry all along in this process. I would say that there are…. I mean, they’re seeing the significance of not supporting it. So I remain hopeful, but of course there are lots of hoops that they have to go through. We’ve had good conversations, so I’m encouraged by that.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, Jennifer, and thank you to your whole team. You guys have been very patient with us. We are a new committee. So we’ve had lots of questions. As you’ve said, you’ve done a gargantuan amount of work — five major reports. Each report could keep us going, if we were allowed to free-flow, for about a full day, two or three, or even a week, because there is so much substance in there.

I want to, on behalf of the committee, thank you and your staff for the work and for also taking your valuable time and coming to share it with us. It means a lot. I look forward to our next conversations, either online or offline, to see how we can continue to do what we were all either elected or appointed or hired to do, and that is to serve British Columbians — in this case, I would say, our most precious British Columbians, our children and our youth. Thank you so much to you.

I want to thank Susan for taking care of all the logistics for us.

Susan, you’re amazing, and you keep us on track.

To each and every one of you committee members, thank you for your commitment and the great questions and being good today. Not being good, because being good is asking questions…. Because we only have two reports today — guess what — you get an extra 15 to 17 minutes added to your life. So go and enjoy it.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you so much for the wonderful questions and your engagement. We feel so encouraged to have a relationship with you and look forward to continuing to do good work.

J. Sims (Chair): I can’t just let everybody go like that.

Moved by Coralee and seconded by Kelli that the meeting adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:42 a.m.