Motherisk review finds 10 families affected by tests

Inquiry head says indigenous and racialized communities disproportionately affected

Areview of the first 350 “high priority” child protection cases has found that discredited Motherisk alcohol and drug tests played a substantial role in 10 families where children were taken from parents and placed into foster or group homes.

Judith Beaman, head of the Motherisk Commission of Inquiry, released the figures for the first time Thursday during a speech at a legal workshop on child protection. Members of Beaman’s team made clear the 10 cases uncovered so far might be the tip of the iceberg. Motherisk commission lawyer Lorne Glass said he expects another 2,000 cases will be reviewed where the faulty hair tests might have significantly influenced decisions to remove children from their families.

Beaman said the evidence so far also indicates that “indigenous and racialized communities” were most affected by the discredited hair tests, conducted by a now disbanded Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory.

“It’s our belief that these communities were disproportionately impacted by the tests,” Beaman told the Law Society of Upper Canada workshop.

She noted that the Children’s Aid societies in Algoma and Hamilton often used the Motherisk tests on aboriginal parents, while societies in Peel Region and Toronto used them on black people and other visible minority groups. Scientific studies have suggested there could be a racial bias to drug hair tests because drugs seem to be more readily incorporated into darker-coloured hair.

“The problem that has occurred here, I would say, represents a dark chapter in the world of child protection,” Beaman told the lawyers at the workshop.

“And as is so often the case, the wrong has affected people who are already vulnerable and marginalized, who struggle with issues of mental health and poverty and addictions.”

Beaman’s comments are the first glimpse into a likely fraught process with no easy fixes or clear path to justice for families who lost their children because of faulty tests.

“We understand that very few people are going to walk away from this in a better position from where they are today,” she said. “We know that the remedies are extremely few.”

Before it was shut down last year, Motherisk was a primary provider of hair drug and alcohol tests in Canada, serving mainly child-welfare agencies. The results were accepted by courts across the country — in thousands of cases where children were considered at risk of abuse — virtually without question.

Motherisk’s tests were deemed by an independent review last year to be “inadequate and unreliable.” That review was sparked by a Star investigation that found that prior to 2010, Motherisk was using a test that was not considered to be the “gold standard.” Sick Kids CEO Dr. Michael Apkon later apologized to any families who felt they may have been affected. The provincial government then appointed Beaman to review affected cases. The commission began its work in January.

In the first phase of its work, the commission is focused on reviewing what it considers “high priority” cases. They are cases where the Motherisk tests likely played an important role throughout the process to remove a child from their family, including the temporary removal orders made by courts along the way.

Beaman described the 10 cases found so far that fit the criteria as “very few,” but added that “even one case is too many.”

Beaman blamed systemic failure throughout the child protection system. She noted that the Motherisk lab never met the standard applied to forensic evidence used in court.

The tests were a lucrative business — each cost $700 to conduct — and the lab was heavily marketed, Beaman noted. “You could imagine how much money was made,” she said, adding that more than 16,000 people were tested between 2005 and 2015.

Beaman described child-protection workers with societies as sometimes lacking adequate training. She suggested child protection workers used the tests as “levers” with parents. The parent would not get back a child unless a hair test was done, and a refusal to do a hair test “becomes in and of itself” a strike against the parent, she said.

She described a child-protection system where society workers and judges relied on the faulty hair tests as proof the parents were doing drugs, while paying less attention to a parent’s ability to be a good caregiver.