Ford government to blame as aid society’s board quits

That the board of directors of Brant Family and Children’s Services announced its intention to resign, en masse, Friday, should be of no surprise to anyone following the fate of the children’s aid society in Brantford or the politics of pain practised in Queen’s Park.

For several years, the board has warned the provincial government, starting with the Wynne Liberals, that cuts and continued underfunding were undermining the society’s work: Wages frozen, on-call pay slashed, 26 staff laid off. The latest insult was a June report from the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services that said the Brant agency should eschew its innovative community model, under which satellite offices were established within the communities Brant most serves, such as the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

The model Brant created goes beyond the mandate of investigating cases of alleged abuse and neglect in favour of prevention, aiming to support parents and children, and avoiding family breakups. According to the Brant board, a review team from the ministry, then under the leadership of Lisa MacLeod, now the tourism minister, never examined the model.

When the Ford government went on its Shermanesque burn-everything-in-its-path funding cuts, $28 million was taken from children’s aids societies across the province. Brant cut 29 jobs, including the 26 layoffs, to save $1.7 million.

As MPP Monique Taylor, the NDP critic on children and social aid issues, said, vulnerable children would be the ones to pay the price. Yes, suffer the little children. The news of the pending board resignation in Brantford came on the same day the Toronto Star reported on the workings of a child pornography watchdog group, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, based in Winnipeg. The watchdog hunts out online child pornography and reports it to internet service providers to have the offensive material deleted. In the past two years, the centre has scanned 80 billion images on the internet and found 10 million of them as suspected photographs of children being abused.

The sites associated with these photos are followed by people who detail and share their techniques for grooming and abusing children, many of them writing about acts of incest.

The centre also runs a national tip line called Cybertip.ca, which, in 2016, analyzed almost 44,000 child pornographic images and video. It found that 78 per cent of them depicted acts perpetrated on children under 12, and of those more than two-thirds were on children under 8.

That the Ford government should reduce funding to children and at-risk youth by $84.5 million, including the $28 million it’s cutting from children’s aid societies, creates opportunities for children to be further abused. There were 31,000 runaway children in Canada in 2018, each and every one of them a target for abuse.

Plus, the Brantford area had the highest rate of emergency-ward visits for opioid overdoses in Ontario (141 per 100,000 versus the provincial rate of 54). It is not overreaching to believe that a good portion of that number are children.

Suffer the little children. It’s an oft-misunderstood quote attributed to Jesus. Suffer, in the gospel context, means “to bear” or “to carry.” Jesus had been saying “bring the children to me.”

Ontario’s children need not suffer. Children’s aid societies are here to protect them and, in the case of the innovations of the Brant Family and Children’s Services, to foster nurturing family environments.

That children do suffer is a burden all of us carry. Now, because of Ford government decisions, the load just got heavier.