AN OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED
26 recommendations won’t save a single child in care: Paula Simons
After a year of meetings, after hearing from senior bureaucrats and academic experts, from front-line workers and Indigenous community groups, the all-party ministerial panel on child intervention came up with 26 draft recommendations to improve Alberta’s troubled childwelfare system.
The version I’ve seen features 26 nebulous exercises in selfimportant, politically fashionable rhetoric. They won’t save the life of one single child.
“I think we squandered a golden opportunity to effect real change,” Jason Nixon told me Friday.
He’s now the United Conservative Party house leader, but he was originally the Wildrose member appointed to the panel last year.
“Unless there are drastic changes to the draft recommendations presented to us, we will not be supporting them.”
The confidential draft document, which was obtained by the Journal this week, is dated Tuesday. The final revisions, made at Wednesday’s meeting, are still in flux. Nothing is official yet. Nothing is public.
But unless there are major changes in the offing, this draft document suggests a bitter disappointment for anyone who still cherished a hope that this childwelfare review would be any different or any better than all the impotent reviews before it.
Oh, there are plenty of worthy ideas about respecting the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or about more respect for Indigenous cultural values, or about reducing poverty. There are suggestions to work more closely with Indigenous post-secondary institutions and teach Albertans
Recommendations for more equitable funding on and off reserve? None. Recommendations to improve the training or screening or funding of care workers and caregivers? Nope.
more about Indigenous history. Grand, overarching philosophical principles of the most highminded sort.
As for specific, concrete suggestions to make the system safer for kids, more responsive for families and more accountable to the community? In Tuesday’s version, at least, there are virtually none. Recommendations for more equitable funding on and off reserve? None. Recommendations to improve the training or screening or funding of care workers and caregivers? Nope.
I see nothing practical in this draft that would have saved the life of Serenity. Or the lives of Kawlija Potts or Shalaina Arcand or Traezlin Starlight, or any of the other children who’ve died while receiving protective services in the past few years.
“There is some really good stuff here,” said Nixon. “I want to be positive about what’s positive. But the recommendations are purposefully vague. I know we couldn’t fix the whole system, but we didn’t do what we set out to do.”
“A camel is a horse designed by committee,” said MLA Greg Clark, who represented the Alberta Party on the committee. “None of these recommendations are measurable or time-based. And I wish we could just do this stuff in plain language. But this is a starting point. It’s not a radical departure, I acknowledge, but I think it’s a change in tack.”
Nixon said all the MLAs on the panel, from all parties, acted in good faith. But he felt they were stymied by the bureaucrats from the ministry of Children’s Services, who objected when the politicians tried to propose anything concrete.
Aaron Manton, who speaks for Children’s Services, says the recommendations are not complete. The committee, he says, made substantive changes when members met for a final time this week, although he was unable to provide them to me by deadline Friday.
I hope he’s right. I hope I’m wrong. Yet I deeply fear we’re going to end up with another bland list of platitudes, destined to end up on a shelf with all the other past recommendations.
Children’s Services Minister Danielle Larivee gave a news conference in Ottawa on Friday evening, where she’d been for the federal government’s “emergency meeting” on Indigenous child welfare. Larivee made an impassioned statement, saying Alberta would not sign any agreement that imposed solutions and didn’t include consultations with Indigenous communities.
“We did not reach consensus on a shared statement of principles. Another statement now is not going to fill the need for real action,” she told reporters.
“We’ve known what needs to happen for decades.”
The irony is exquisite. It’s easy to condemn Ottawa’s inaction. But is Alberta any better? Similarly, Larivee had tough words for Ottawa’s continuing failure to increase federal funding for child welfare on reserves, to bring it up to provincial standards.
“Alberta won’t wait,” she said. “We won’t let Indigenous children wait any longer.”
When asked whether Alberta was willing to step in right now, to top up funding for kids on reserve, to end our two-tiered funding system? Larivee was a little more hazy.
But she’s absolutely right. We’ve known what needs to happen for decades. We need real action. Alberta’s Indigenous kids can’t wait any longer.