Budget proves PCs don’t care about kids
Money does not solve everything.
A budget cannot fix generations of wrongs or a society that has built itself on broken treaties, families torn apart and land taken so that others could come and create a country.
But budgets signal leadership. They can help provide a direction and a path forward, a vision for how society should or could evolve. And, of course, they must provide the money to fund that vision.
When I first glanced at Ontario’s recently released budget, titled, “Protecting What Matters Most,” I automatically thought the Progressive Conservatives must be referring to children. The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable and our most vulnerable are children.
For a brief moment, I actually wondered if the new Conservative budget had gone hard on building a plan that would bolster services for children.
The moment passed quickly as I read about class size increases, changes to autism therapy funding and how bars can now be open at 9 a.m.
Then, my thoughts turned to how Ontario had once again failed Amy Owen. Amy was a 13-year-old girl from Poplar Hill First Nation who died by suicide two years ago this week while she was in state care. As her family’s lawyer, Cara Valiquette, said to me, Amy’s case represents the most extreme version of negligence that can occur in child welfare because she did not survive it. She was supposed to have supervised, 24-hour care but she did not, said her dad, Jeffrey.
On Wednesday, Amy’s family in Poplar Hill were to hold a feast honouring her memory.
When I think about Amy, I wonder about the others who were the subjects of the chief coroner of Ontario’s report last year that looked into the deaths of 12 children in state care. Eight of those children were Indigenous.
I wonder what changes were in the Ontario budget aimed at fixing the multitude of problems the coroner said contributed to their deaths — many of whom were in mental health crisis and had no access to proper services. Of the 12 in the report, eight took their own lives. Now, the deaths of these children each had their own complicated circumstances, but, as the coroner’s report pointed out, those issues were compounded by a lack of access to clean water and sewage, safe housing, access to health care and education.
Where does the Ford budget work to alleviate any of those things? Derek Rowland, press secretary for the ministry of children, community and social services, said three new roundtables made up of those with lived experience in Indigenous child welfare, youth in custody and children in care are currently in development and details will be released in the coming months. I look forward to seeing the results of that process. So far, Ontarians have little reason to trust that the Ford government is truly committed to child welfare.
Take the Ontario Child Advocate. The one office that was supposed to be in children’s corner when everything else failed will cease to exist on May 1, a few of its functions transferred to the overburdened Ombudsman’s office.
The Child Advocate’s office in Thunder Bay, a champion of many vulnerable kids in the city of the Seven Fallen Feathers, is also no more and the funding supporting the Feathers of Hope, a youth advocacy group, has disappeared. Both played an active role in the inquest concerning the seven First Nations high school students who died between 2000 and 2011.
Now Ontario — Canada’s most populous province — is the only province without a child advocate’s office.
“What I worry about the most is who will take the phone calls from young people? Who will stand with them,” Irwin Elman, the outgoing Ontario child advocate, told me. “We would get 4,000 to 6,000 calls a year. Who will they call now?” Elman’s office also fought for eight years to gain the power to investigate deaths of children in care. He won. However, that investigative power will not be bestowed on the Ombudsman.
“I think about Amy,” Elman said. “I really feel one of the reasons youth feel so hopeless is they feel voiceless, they feel no one is listening. They don’t feel like they matter. That is a very dangerous situation for young people.”
And what is the Ontario government telling these children — that their voice doesn’t matter? That buck-a-beer and horse racing is more important than keeping them safe?
Children are not line items to be reduced in order to line pocket books. When will Doug Ford learn that basic lesson?