NDP’S CHILD-WELFARE BILL PROMISING STEP FORWARD

But province must stay the course if it hopes to repair cracks in troubled system

The fall sitting of the Alberta legislature is now well into its second week and the NDP government has already introduced seven new bills of various shapes and sizes.

There’s been legislation to change the rules around postsecondary tuition, legislation to increase punishments for health professionals who sexually abuse patients and legislation to remove corporate and union donations from municipal elections.

But if there is one that can be said to be the government’s signature piece of legislation this fall, it is Bill 22: An Act for Strong Families Building Stronger Communities.

Look past the insipid title — who comes up with these names? — and you’ll see the bill is the government’s most comprehensive attempt to date to begin fixing the cracks in Alberta’s troubled child-intervention system. The work is both overdue and urgent because deaths among children receiving government services has continued to grow in recent years.

Many of those deaths — whether it be from suicide, homicide or accidental causes — can be linked to a system plagued by difficulties protecting children from unstable homes, a lack of family supports to prevent breakdowns, and failures to learn from past mistakes.

Bill 22 by itself won’t repair all those issues but will, hopefully, put the system on a clearer conceptual footing. The legislation has two main thrusts.

The first is more explicit emphasis on protection as the prime consideration in any care decision. This was supposedly a priority all along, but officials say the idea is now to embrace a broader view of emotional, psychological and cultural “safety” rather than just physical survival.

That leads to the second major theme, which is greater prominence on keeping a child attached to their family and home community. Part of this involves giving more decisionmaking influence to Indigenous communities, whose children account for more than 60 per cent of the ministry’s caseload.

What’s less clear is how it’s all going to work for staff on the ground in cases when those two leading priorities are in competition.

Take the situation of a young Indigenous child who can’t live with his or her biological parents. Should that child go to a non-Indigenous family that has been assessed as providing a safe environment, or placed in the household of extended family where the risks are a bit more uncertain?

What happens if either household becomes unstable, because a parent has moved out, or lost a job, or suffered an addiction relapse?

How many chances should caregivers be offered to restore stability, or should the boy or girl be apprehended knowing that move can also cause trauma?

Scroll through the investigative reports of the child and youth advocate, and you’ll see these are the types of messy situations regularly encountered.

Ministry officials say the legislation will provide more guidance, by enshrining a “simplified” list of 13 decision-making criteria staff must consider, ranging from the child’s preference of home to the effect of removal to avoiding delays.

But again, there doesn’t seem to be much advice on what to do when those criteria inevitably conflict.

For example, one of the considerations is to try to avoid removing a child from a parent who is the victim of family violence. How should that be weighed against the need to avoid delays and maintain stability for the child, especially if an abused parent needs time to recover?

Those nagging questions aside, there are some indisputably positive aspects of Bill 22.

Included is a change that will make a home study mandatory as part of the private guardianship process.

And Children’s Services Minister Danielle Larivee will have to publicly report every death and serious injury within four days, which will hopefully help to remove some of the harmful secrecy that has surrounded the system.

Yet for all these improvements, it’s important to note that Bill 22 is just one step in a four-year strategy unveiled by the NDP.

Many of the system’s most crushing issues won’t be fully addressed until later, and at unknown cost. This includes the need to make life better for caseworkers and solving the funding disparity of designated First Nations agencies.

We’ll also have to wait for substantive changes to kinship care, in which children are placed with their extended family.

Holes in that system led to the 2014 death of four-year-old Serenity, publicity of which spurred the government to finally get serious about reforming child welfare.

Kinship care seems to be the preferred model going forward, but it won’t work without major changes to compensation rates, assessment and oversight. Those improvements are expected to be revealed by March 31.

Overall, Bill 22 is a promising foundation to repair a broken system, but it is just a start.

The big question is whether Larivee or the NDP will be around to see through the vital moves to come later, or whether that will fall to another party who may have different priorities.

Whoever ends up in charge, let’s hope we finish the job this time rather than subjecting our kids to more deadly delay, indecision and complacency.