The committee met at 11:10 a.m.

[Rohini Arora in the chair.]

Rohini Arora (Chair): Okay. I would like to call this meeting to order.

Good morning everyone. My name is Rohini Arora. I’m the MLA for Burnaby East and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth.

I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting today on the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən, including the SXIMEȽEȽ and Songhees Nations.

This morning, we will be considering the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth’s Annual Report 2023-24 and service plan 2024-2025 to 2026-27.

I would like to welcome the Representative for Children and Youth, Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth, to the meeting, and her team, and turn it over to her for the presentation.

Consideration of Representative
for Children and Youth Reports

Annual Report and Service Plan

Jennifer Charlesworth: Thank you very much, Chair, and lovely to be in our first formal meeting with you.

We’ll be talking today about the Annual Report and service plan, but just before we dive into that I want to put this in context. There’s a much greater lag than is typical for considering a report of this nature. We typically present the report in October but, as you know, other things were happening in October, so there’s a significant lag. The report covers the 2023-24 fiscal year. I don’t know about you but it feels to me like a lifetime ago. A lot has happened in the RCY, in this province and, of course, around the world.

But it’s a statutory requirement that we bring this report forward to you for your consideration. What I’d like to do is to outline the intention of our Annual Report, highlight some of the things there, but recognizing that, in some respects, it’s old history, and we’ve just completed a whole new fiscal year. This might be an opportunity for us to go back to talk to some of the things about the work that we do and how we do it and address some of the questions that perhaps you haven’t been able to address thus far. Hopefully that sounds okay. All right.

It is a statutory requirement that we bring forward an annual report and service plan to you by September 30 of every year. We consistently include information that includes our description of our mandate, the teams, the priorities that we’ve been working on, our activities. We talk about not only our statutory responsibilities but the things in support of our statutory responsibilities, which would include our outreach and our engagement work, our knowledge mobilization work and, of course, corporate services.

All of that is addressed. We also provide, within there, the quantitative data pertaining to our advocacy services, our individual advocacy services, our reviews and investigations and the systemic monitoring that we do.

We also provide qualitative data. If you like Brené Brown’s work, she says stories are data with heart. We bring that qualitative data in and include stories so that you can see from another vantage point the kind of impact that we have on the well-being of young people through individual children’s stories.

We also talk about the projects that we’ve undertaken, that we’ve completed and that we have in progress. Every year we circle back to what we said we were going to do in the previous year and close that circle and say: “We said this last year. This is what we’ve done this year. This is completed. This is not completed.”

If it hasn’t been completed or there are delays and challenges that we faced, we’ll articulate that as well. You’ll always know that we’re threading from past into the future, going forward.

The other thing that’s important, and that I’ll come back to, is we always talk about our key performance indicators. What are the ways in which we measure our success? We have the criteria of relevance, responsiveness, accountability and excellence.

[11:15 a.m.]

But typically in the past, we’ve been using proxies, such as: how quickly do we respond to a caller? Adult callers versus youth callers? How many reviews do we do? How many reports do we produce? How many young people have been involved in our work? How broad has our engagement been?

Last year, and with the previous committee, we engaged in a process to take a look at those to refine key performance indicators away from simply doing outcomes — like, 90 percent of the time we respond within 24 hours with a real human at the end of the line, that kind of thing — to measures of impact. What you’ll see in this annual report that you reviewed is that we’re starting to shift from inputs and outputs only to inputs, outputs and outcomes. But we always review our key performance indicators.

Our structure in the past has always been to include a service plan as well, where we say where we’re going and what we’re working on, what people can expect. Then we present our financial picture, our budget and our expenditures. So those are what you can expect. No matter what, we will provide that information.

Just before I go into some of the highlights, this year we would like to separate out the annual report from the service plan, because the annual report is reflective; the service plan is prospective. We felt it was helpful to separate out the two, and our intention — looking to Sara, because her team is already working on this — is to have the annual report ready for you closer to the end of the fiscal year so you’re seeing things much more closely to the time in which we’ve delivered.

The service plan, then, will be a more detailed document that says, basically, “This is what we’re working on and this is why we’re working on them and this is what you can expect in the next year in terms of our objectives and our goals, etc.” So that’s a bit of what you can expect with any one of our annual reports.

We’re always in that tension. We’re trying to tell you all the great things but not make it overwhelming. We think we’re going to continue to pare things down, but we’re always open to any feedback that you’ve got. If there are things that are in the annual report that you would like more information on or that you’re surprised aren’t in or you think are extraneous, we’re happy to hear your feedback, because ultimately the annual report is a way of being able to tell the story and be accountable to the committee and to the public.

Moving forward in terms of the content of the annual report, we are often known by our reports, our public reports, so we do have a significant feature in there of the work that we’ve undertaken, and I will highlight a few of those areas. One of our strategic priorities has been to lift up the well-being of children and youth with support needs or special needs, kids with disabilities. That has been a theme since the second report that I released in December of 2018.

We’ve been steadfastly working on the area of kids with disabilities and very inclusive of the families of kids with disabilities. We did two reports that related to that population last fiscal year. One was called Still Left Out. The first Left Out was during COVID, and it was the impact of the pandemic on children and youth with disabilities and their families. We wanted to go back to many of those families and find out how things were going and whether there had been sort of a recalibration and a recovery. So that report addressed that.

The other report we did was kind of an intersection between disability and mental health. It was called Toward Inclusion. What we found when we took a look at work in collaboration with the Children’s Health Policy Centre is that many young people with disabilities, particularly autism, FASD, other characteristics of neurodivergence, had more significant mental health concerns — clinical mental health concerns of depression and anxiety — and significant behavioural challenges.

What we wanted to take a look at is: how capable is the system of responding to those situations that are co-occurring? That’s what Toward Inclusion addressed in collaboration with Children’s Health Policy Centre that brought all sorts of great research and data. And then with our analysis and all of our data, we were able to document that this is a population that needs extra care and attention in order to support their substantive equality to be able to thrive.

[11:20 a.m.]

So that’s what we did in disabilities. Moving over to mental health, I’ve mentioned Toward Inclusion. That was part of a series that we’ve done trying to bring a focus to mental health for certain populations.

The first one we did the year before was around children and youth who were in care who, by virtue of what’s happened to them, have significant mental health concerns. But you know what? If you’re a kid in care, you don’t get any special services, for example, on mental health. So you go to the same line as everybody else, even though there may be a number of things that have brought you into care because of the mental health concerns.

If that was addressed, then perhaps there wouldn’t need to be the protective service intervention. So that was part of a series.

We’ve got one more left in that series that will be a focus on Indigenous children and mental health concerns.

The next big strategic priority, of course, for us always is how kids in care are doing, so child welfare. That was a report that we did. It’s called Missing. Sam referred to that a little bit. It took a look at the young people who were fleeing, lost or missing from foster care or residential care. We know that they’re at heightened risk when they’re missing. We were concerned about the way in which government was responding to children who were missing, and we wanted to understand why so many kids are going missing.

We identified what’s called push factors, the things about the care that they were receiving that pushed them out — things like not getting sufficient food or not feeling valued or not having a key and being welcome — and the pull factors, the things that drew them away, which would be things like trying to find their family or be closer to their parents or trying to find a sense of belonging with peers, and sometimes with not very healthy groups of peers, or finding substances.

We tried to identify that. We were concerned about what was going on in terms of the ministry documenting, as Sam referenced, and so identified a number of things that we wanted done within six months. And good news is that was done to try and better understand these kids’ needs.

The next strategic priority was around youth justice and accountability. We worked on missed opportunities, which took a look at the utilization of funds for youth justice and the staffing and, basically, pointed to the fact that the number of young people in custody has gone down significantly. The number of young people that are being served and supported through probation officers is also low. There are relatively few young people that are in custody — sometimes 11, 17, 20 at any day in this province.

At that time, there were two custody centres, and we said surely the millions of dollars that are being spent in the Prince George Youth Custody Centre could be put to better use. The government agreed and has closed that institution and has identified more opportunities to provide youth justice services closer to a child’s home, which is better for their support. So that was one.

And then child rights and belonging. We did a report on The Right to Thrive, which was focused on two-spirit, transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse young people and their right to receive the care and support that they need. Again, that’s one that has obviously received a lot of…. The area of the rights of these young people is a subject that we’re hearing in all sorts of different contexts, but we wanted to come with the evidence and focus on the rights of those children to be supported so that they could thrive. So we addressed that one in the rights and focusing in Attorney General, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Children and Family.

Finally, the last report that we did was called Advocating for Change. It was a five-year retrospective on the progress that was being made on recommendations that we’d made before, because we want to know: are we having an impact?

All of those are outlined in the report, and so you can read away. If you want any further briefings on any of those reports, then we’re happy to provide that for you one-on-one, as well, because of course they’ve already come to the committee.

The other thing I’ll just maybe move into, and then we can open it up for questions too, is that there’s data here. But as we’ve already said, that data is out of date, but it will give you a sense of the kinds of volume of advocacy and reviews and investigations that we did and also the engagement.

[11:25 a.m.]

In that year, we engaged with about 7,000 people. This next fiscal year we can say, confidently, it’s going to be significantly more because of work that we did on a report called Don’t Look Away. So there are numbers in there. We can unpack those if you wish, but just to say that those are out of date and, in all areas, the demand in our services has increased.

The other thing that we talk about in the annual report is where we are going. So a few key areas for you. We see the impact of the toxic drug crisis on children in a very profound way. We see children who are experiencing overdose events, sometimes multiple overdose events of one child within the course of a month. We are seeing children who are losing their significant people in their life, which has a significant impact.

I believe it was about 150-some-odd young people who lost a parent that we knew of. And we’ve just got a slice of it. One or both parents. We’ve got a significant number of people who have lost both parents to this crisis. That doesn’t get talked about.

The other thing that doesn’t get talked about much…. We’ve got so much focus on deaths. There’s a relatively small number of children who are dying, but there is a significant impact on their well-being because of loss, because of what they’re seeing in their communities and their peers.

But overdose events that they’re experiencing affects their brain. It affects their sense of safety and trauma. And often there are situations in which they’re also experiencing things like sexual exploitation, trafficking, physical violence, emotional violence, etc., in conjunction with their substance use. We are working earnestly on that.

Happy to speak with you a bit more about it because we have been working in this area for a while now, and we’ve just done some pretty cool gatherings, and we’ll continue to be working towards a really strong framework and a number of actionable initiatives. That’s one area that we identified last year that we’ve continued to work on.

We identified work that we were undertaking for what we called at the time systems failing girls, but it’s essentially a look at those young women who typically have mental health and substance use and disability and a number of things that are going on in their lives. They’ve often been in and out of care, they’ve been traumatized in multiple ways, and our system is really lousy at meeting those young people’s needs.

We wanted to understand: how we could support those girls better? What does the system need to understand? So that report will be coming up and will be coming to you before you break. We talked about that last year.

We talked last year about a report — what we called a sacred story investigation — we had undertaken on the death of a little boy when he was living with his extended family caregivers, the torture and death. We completed that work this fiscal year, but we talked about it in the annual report that you looked at. We called him Colby in the final report, and that resulted in Don’t Look Away and companion reports No Time to Wait on the Workforce Challenges.

All of that was articulated in the last annual report that you saw, and, of course, much of this has come to fruition in this last year.

I’m going to just stop there because I know you’ve probably got lots of questions. I want to make sure you’ve got lots of time to ask those, whether it has to do with the annual report or the things that we didn’t get to when we were doing the basic orientation.

Rohini Arora (Chair): I just want to say thank you so much for providing us with that overview.

Is there anyone who has questions? Amelia, please go ahead

Amelia Boultbee (Deputy Chair): Hi. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you for this report. I’ve read it several times with great interest There’s a lot of really valuable information in there.

I’m really focused, in particular, on the recommendation progress part of the reporting on pages 52 and 53. We’ve got: no progress, 35 percent; some progress, 39 percent; substantial progress, 11 percent; and complete, 15 percent, out of 72 recommendations.

Adding together some progress and no progress, that’s 74 percent of the recommendations that have either some or no progress.

[11:30 a.m.]

But what I’m wondering is if you already have in existence separate reports where I can see a more detailed breakdown, in particular, triaged by level of urgency on the ones that are outstanding or only have some progress.

Do reports already exist of that nature?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes. Thank you for that question. On our website…. And I should say that we will have a new website launched soon. It was desperately in need of a refresh. You will see something that will be much more accessible. But on our existing website, under recommendations, there are report-specific analyses of progress on recommendations year by year.

We typically monitor recommendations for three years unless I decide that I’m not confident in the progress and I can extend it. There are some that I’ve extended up to five years, but basically, we track for a three-year period. We can send you the link to that. But you can go in and say: “I’m really curious as to what’s happened with the excluded report on FASD from 2021.” You can see the progress that’s been made on the individual recommendations and our analysis of where we think some progress has been made or not and any information that we’ve got.

Just a little bit more on that. We base that on…. Every year we will reach out to the ministries that are responsible, the public body that’s responsible for the recommendations and say: “Please give us an update.” They will often say, “Oh, we’re well on to this,” but we don’t just accept what the ministry says. We do our own analysis to determine. They might say, “We’ve made significant progress,” and we might say, “Not so much. It’s moderate progress” or “It’s some progress.”

Just know that there might be a discrepancy if you were ever to bring the ministry folks here, as has happened in previous committees. They might have a little bit of a discrepancy between what they say and what we say. But we try and provide a thorough analysis based on those recommendations.

What we have tried to do, though, more recently, is take a look at not just the evidence that the ministry provides but also see if we can get a bit better evidence from the people who are receiving the services. Like, what would the kids say? What would the families say? It’s a lot trickier to do that, so we’re working on it, and we’re learning from a couple of other jurisdictions that have done that.

What you’ll see on the website right now is report by report, our analysis over time. You can see how things are going.

The other thing I should say is that every one of our recommendations has a timeline attached to it.

Pippa Rowcliffe: If I can just speak to the…. You use the word “urgency.” I would say that every single one of our recommendations I consider urgent, and we use a slightly different framing, increasingly. You’ll see it most evidently in Don’t Look Away.

Some recommendations are things that can be done in a fairly tight, clear timeline. We would refer to them as more short-term recommendations that refer to things about service or immediate shifts that could be made. Or recommendations that refer to things that are a lot more complex, like a recommendation around rebuilding a system with a foundation of child well-being at the centre. That’s a complex thing to do, and it takes longer. It’s a whole-of-system shift, no less urgent, but it has a different rhythm in terms of timing to it.

Just wanted to pick up on that sort of urgency. Most of what we talk about, I think, is urgent and needed. It’s just there’s a different rhythm to it.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Amelia, go ahead.

Amelia Boultbee (Deputy Chair): Sorry, may I just follow up? Thank you so much, and those answers are great. I’m going to be combing through the website and checking in on those.

But let me just make sure that I understand this correctly. Are you saying that all these 72 recommendations, they are all three years or younger? Or more recent than three years?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Some of these are the very first year, some of them are two, some of them are three, some of them are longer. There are recommendations in here, for example, from earlier in my term, but we continue to monitor them because we want to make sure that they’re implemented.

Amelia Boultbee (Deputy Chair): Right. Okay.

Jennifer Charlesworth: So these cover a range of reports over time.

Amelia Boultbee (Deputy Chair): So some of them can be older than…. I’m specifically thinking of…. I thought one of the outstanding recommendations was that child protection workers be social workers, and I thought that was a recommendation that was, like, ten years old. Is that not contained in the 72?

[11:35 a.m.]

Jennifer Charlesworth: No. It’s not. These are only ones that we are monitoring. We’re not monitoring any from before my term. And we’re not monitoring….

The recommendation that you’re talking about in terms of social work was actually from the Gove inquiry in the 1990s. There hasn’t been anything from the RCY in my term that’s spoken to that until what you will see in this fiscal year. We did speak to that in No Time to Wait, Part Two and recommended that there be a registration process for social workers.

These are ones that are active in my term, where we feel like…. There are some recommendations that I’ve made in my term that we’re not tracking anymore because they’re all done. They’re completed. We’re just tracking those where we feel like the responsibility we have to the young people is to make sure that those recommendations get done.

The other thing that I’ll just say, just to pick up on what Pippa has said too, is that doing recommendations is really hard. You can do the easy ones, like increase the funding here, add more staff there. But the reality is that anything of that nature has pretty much been done. If you think of an iceberg, which we often talk about, the easy stuff, the stuff that we can see, has been done. What we’re dealing with are the much more intractable issues, the challenges.

Of course I want everybody to think that these are the most important things and there’s nothing else to do except for these. But I realize that eight ministries have many different things to deal with. I’m not disheartened when I see some progress, particularly some progress, because it means there’s still an investment in moving things forward.

And I will tell you that most of my recommendations are not easy to do. For example, with Don’t Look Away, we’re talking about building a well-being strategy, shifting from the old, colonial protection stuff that was built on the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. If you want to know the history of child welfare in this country, it was based on prevention of cruelty against animals.

We’re trying to say we want our kids to be well. We don’t want to just intervene when things break, so I’m not making it easy for government to implement. That’s for sure. But for kids, we need to keep saying we’re going to go high. We’re going to try the very best for them.

We’re going to try and make sure that kids with disabilities feel they belong, that kids with FASD aren’t excluded from school because of their behaviour — that they’re understood — that kids that are in care and might be really hard to serve because they tell you to get lost every second sentence are hurt and that we need to keep sticking with them.

None of this is easy work. Sorry. I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Are there any other questions, colleagues?

Amshen / Joan Phillip: Maybe just a quick comment. I was chair of the native police liaison committee for Vancouver police department, and my mom, Jean Carter, was a social worker at the friendship centre. The thing we found out was that 99 percent of youth that came into conflict with the law were either in long-term care of the ministry, had been or were currently in care of the ministry. Is that still somewhat the same?

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: Absolutely. Before I had this role, when I was doing some consulting work, I was consulting with some of the custody centres, and we were taking a look. It was when they were starting to understand trauma-informed care and trauma-informed responses, and 100 percent of those kids that were involved in the youth justice system had experienced trauma in their lives.

I don’t know exactly what the numbers would be. We could definitely find out, but a very, very high proportion of kids have had child welfare involvement in their lives, which is another form of trauma, right? You can have trauma leading into protection. You can have trauma while you’re in protective services care.

[11:40 a.m.]

Absolutely, we do see that, and that’s one of the reasons that when we did Don’t Look Away…. I feel like there’s kind of a missing element here because we didn’t have an opportunity to…. We briefed the other committee on Don’t Look Away.

But maybe if I can for just a few moments, because it’s foundational…. One of the things we talked about in Don’t Look Away was the prevalence of violence and the fact that we often silence violence. And kids that are experiencing violence, whether they are “witnessing it” but not actually…. They are still experiencing violence. That affects their brain. That affects their sense of safety in the world. It affects the way in which they interact.

Violence is a significant factor in many of these young people’s lives. Oftentimes you look at it and you think: “Well, how could that young person be so violent?” Well, they’ve experienced violence, in many cases, for their whole lives. Unless we address the healing and try and interrupt the cycles of violence, we’re going to continue to see those kinds of challenges.

That was really important. The other thing, if we want to talk about that population of young people…. Almost all of those young people, I’ll bet, if we go into their story, we knew that their family was struggling when they were little. Their family didn’t get what they needed in order to support their child to thrive.

Years and years ago I reviewed…. I was running services for the kids. At that time, they used to use this awful notion of…. They’d burn through all the other resources and then come to our intensive resource. Every one of those kids was identified either by a public health nurse, a preschool, or at the very latest, a kindergarten teacher as needing supports. And they didn’t get it. So by the time they were 12, 13, and now we’re into youth criminal justice, or we’re into all sorts of other things or they start to use…. Whatever is going on.

I think there are a few areas that we’re really committed to, going forward, that you’ll keep hearing from me about. We’ve got to end the silence on violence, and we’ve got to address family supports and kin supports in order to help them nurture their children so that protective services don’t get involved, because we see that vicious cycle that you’re talking about.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Are there any other questions?

Heather.

Heather Maahs: Thank you.

So the matter of the early intervention, I’ll call it — is that one of the recommendations that has been fulfilled?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Good question. Well, early intervention is massive. There isn’t one specific thing that we could tick off. But the embracing of this notion of early help and early years and early intervention has been…. Well, all recommendations from Don’t Look Away have been accepted by government, and that is forming…. One of the first things they’re doing is creating the well-being plan, and early help and early supports are very significant in there.

It hasn’t been implemented. It’s a big change to shift from statutory protection services to start to do early help, but there is a very high level of commitment and willingness to do that. So it’s in the “some progress” right now.

But I’m encouraged. And just again, because I’m a scientist and evidence-based, there are jurisdictions that have done that and are seeing significant benefits. I’m really excited about that movement and being able to see if we shift.

Even taking existing social workers and taking away their mandate to remove a child, but giving them the mandate to help a family is profound in terms of the relationship that you can have with a family. Because you’ve no longer got the stick, right? Other jurisdictions have done that successfully. There’s a real willingness right now to learn from those jurisdictions. So it’s squarely in the “some progress.”

Heather Maahs: Thank you.

Pippa Rowcliffe: If I could just add to that. That space of early years, early care and family support is really important to consider in the context of child welfare, but it’s actually a cross-government lift in that the people who often see families earliest are either health care system or kids showing up at school who the system really doesn’t even know about. They show up at school and here they are, and they really haven’t been integrated into any kind of program and service.

[11:45 a.m.]

So implementation, yes, from some perspectives. But for us, this is about actually leaning into a cross-ministerial, cross-sector conversation that is grounded in that sense of coming back to a lot of what we know already about the science of the early years, the profound importance of that good early start, children nested in their families. As a province, we’ve got a really significant body of evidence and group of experts, both First Nations and also within our academic institutions, that really support that work.

It’s important to think about it from a child welfare perspective and to integrate this sense that we need to be thinking about it much more broadly, and programs and services like home visiting from primary health care with littles and doing a lot of really good promotional work that gets us even further upstream, if you like.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Please go ahead, Amelia, and then I have a question.

Amelia Boultbee (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

One of the things I really appreciated about the report is the way you broke down the data based on indigeneity. I have a question. I hope this isn’t a dumb question.

I’m looking at page 40, and I can hand that up if you don’t have a copy of the report. It gives a little table where it shows First Nation, Métis, Inuit and Indigenous unspecified, and there’s critical injuries by indigeneity and care status.

My question is: when it says “in care,” am I to understand that that means in a group home or an institution or foster care and “not in care” means they are not doing that, but they are receiving services from MCFD? Is that correct?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes, with a slight…. So “in care” is deemed not so much by where they’re living but by their legal status. It would be special needs agreement, voluntary care agreement, temporary custody order and a continuing care order. Based on their legal status, the state has a responsibility to that child. It’s based on that.

And you’re absolutely right. If they’re not in care, they’re still receiving services. They might be receiving mental health services or support needs services, something along those lines.

Is that right?

Samantha Cocker: The only other piece that I would add…. I feel like it’s a bit of a false sense of reporting for the number of kids in care, in that the ministry moved kids who are placed within their extended families — who have been taken from their parents, placed with extended family — or kids who are on youth agreements…. They’re deemed to be not in care, even though they’re out of their parental home by a conversation and a plan with the ministry.

So while the numbers of in-care kids look like they’re going down, the numbers of kids with kinship carers are going up. Those are still kids who have been taken from their parental home or been asked to leave because of protection concerns. It feels a bit like a false sense of reporting. Some of those “not in care” kids are kids living with extended family members, not with their parents.

Amelia Boultbee (Deputy Chair): That’s important to know. Thank you.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Thank you.

I was listening earlier to when you were giving that brief overview of some of the reports that have come out. I was interested just because…. I can’t quite remember if I saw this in the recommendations. Were there recommendations that were implemented in the supported child development and Aboriginal supported child development under child care?

Jennifer Charlesworth: In the reports that we’ve done this year?

Rohini Arora (Chair): It was from the child care report. I can’t remember, so I wanted to ask you.

Jennifer Charlesworth: We haven’t done a child care report.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Maybe it was a section that related to child care.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Oh, was it maybe in Don’t Look Away, when we were talking about the supports there? Or disability services…?

Rohini Arora (Chair): Yeah, I wasn’t sure because there was so much information. I was trying to jot it down. Sorry.

I was just curious to know if there were recommendations made that were adopted or in some progress or within supported child development and just that space within child care.

Jennifer Charlesworth: I’m going to have to get back to you on that one.

We certainly spoke in a recent report, Too Many Left Behind, pertaining to Aboriginal supported child development and supported child development.

[11:50 a.m.]

Rohini Arora (Chair): Oh, maybe that’s where it was. Okay. Yeah.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes, it might be that one, which we’re bringing to you in our next meeting.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Got it.

Jennifer Charlesworth: So you may be way ahead of us.

Rohini Arora (Chair): I might have read, yeah…. There’s amazing work you folks are clearly doing.

Then I had one other follow-up question, and we are pretty much at time. You were talking about sort of decolonization or indigenization. There’s kind of a two-part piece I have, which I’m really interested in. I know that there are some recommendations around Indigenous-led healing practices and things like that that are already, as you said, being embraced.

I’m wondering about: what are some of the other modalities outside of that? For example, something like somatic trauma therapy exercises and some of that work, ancient or traditional Chinese medicine, as well as what you would see in yogic practices within the South Asian community.

The reason I say that, as well, for you to consider in your response, is because not all children within MCFD are Indigenous, although predominantly. There are Black and racialized communities as well. So I’m just interested in how that’s looked at or considered.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yeah, such a wonderful question. Maybe I’ll respond with a little bit of a two-parter.

We focused internally in the RCY, very much, on our work with respect to cultural agility, cultural safety and humility, with a primary focus on Indigenous practices, First Nations and Métis practices, because that’s where the majority of the young people — that’s their heritage. It’s incumbent upon us, because of the ways in which the systems often have been very harmful or disenfranchised them. We needed to do our work.

Having said that, we also have a number of racialized staff, and they remind us, too, that we have a responsibility for all kids, so we began work on anti-racist practice and cultural safety in a larger way, in a broader sense. We, too, are on that journey of trying to figure out: how do we make sure that we are being accountable? We’re looking and understanding and mindful of it.

I can say, though, that the system overall is not addressing some of the things that we know are significant therapeutic practices, especially for trauma, such as internal family systems or somatic therapy and those kinds of things. I would say we’ve got a system that’s pretty much, you know, maybe a decade or two or more behind in terms of some of those therapeutic interventions.

Having said that, there are pockets. I was in a place yesterday that had spiritual care. They were celebrating Eid. They were bringing foods in. They were engaging the young people. When you went into their spiritual-care space, there were the medicines from many different heritage backgrounds. Kids are feeling very welcome there with multiple practitioners.

It’s interesting to see, but I think we’re right on the threshold of that. When we talk about healing and grounding the work in healing, that is a mind shift, because it’s a big shift from just protection and risk management and liability to healing, growth and development.

I think all of what you talk about is something that goes in the future. It’s exciting to see, where we’re seeing the re-embracing, the reconnection to Indigenous cultural healing practices. It will need to go further, too, to be more inclusive of kids, but I was very excited with what I saw yesterday. I remain ever hopeful.

Rohini Arora (Chair): Thank you so much for that. I’m really looking forward to continuing the conversation with you.

Is there any other business? No?

Okay. That concludes our meeting today.

I’ll seek a motion to adjourn.

Okay. Moved by Amelia.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:54 a.m.