Courts chasten provincial welfare system
Nova Scotia’s judiciary did its level best in recent weeks to slap some sense into the paternalistic and absurdly punitive provincial welfare system.
In one case, the Family Court denied the community services minister’s application for permanent custody of a child, and felt the need to inform the province that poverty is not just cause for removing a child from her parents.
In another case, the province’s highest court rebuked the province for casting an entire family into absolute destitution because the father didn’t meet an ambiguous order to look for work.
The two cases, as reported by The Chronicle Herald’s Chris Lambie, offer Nova Scotians a clear look at how the province treats some of its least fortunate citizens. The picture is not pretty.
The common denominator in the two cases is the absolute power the province exerts in the lives of its poorest citizens, and the arbitrary way in which that power is wielded, in the name of child protection in one case, and to impose punitive measures that had the opposite effect in the other.
In the child welfare case, the measured tone in Family Court Judge Elizabeth Jollimore’s decision belies the hostility of the “minister” to the circumstances of a family struggling against poverty. The minister, Kelly Regan, is the de facto villain. In custody cases the department acts in the minister’s name.
The department’s child welfare bureaucracy stacked the deck against the family, and then used the lousy hand dealt the parents as reason to try to take the child permanently away.
That the little girl’s parents have been troubled is not in dispute, but poverty is at the root of those troubles and both parents are clearly working to overcome their difficulties. When the province took the child into temporary custody, the conditions placed on the parents didn’t offer them a lot of opportunity to improve their financial straits.
In fact, after the “minister” complained that the parents were missing visits with the child and other conditional appointments, the parents reduced their work hours or left jobs to meet those conditions.
Remarkably, the same government department which holds responsibility for income assistance, public housing and child welfare saw no hypocrisy in using what it deemed as the parents’ inadequate housing situation as a reason to take away their daughter.
Their housing choices reflect their income, reduced to provincial assistance when the father left a decently paid job to meet the conditions imposed by the child welfare authorities. Joseph Heller coined the phrase and titled the timeless bestseller Catch-22 which defines the type of logic the province uses in these cases.
The circle of logical fallacy is completed by the second case, where the government cut an entire family off income support after deciding the father wasn’t looking hard enough for work.
The province’s highest court ruled that punitive action illegal, restored the family’s lost benefits and ordered the province to pay their court costs.
“Simply put, denying innocent people, living in poverty, the funds they need for financial survival cannot be sustained by any reasonable interpretation of the governing legislation,” Chief Jus- tice Michael Macdonald wrote in a unanimous decision from the three-judge Appeals Court panel.
In December 2015, Brenton Sparks, his wife and three children were cut off all income assistance for six weeks when Community Services determined Sparks was not making enough effort to find work. It took two years, but when his appeal finally reached the province’s highest court, reason finally prevailed.
We may be a century and a half removed from The Poor Law and Britain’s infamous workhouses, but the poorest families in Nova Scotia are an unfavourable decision from Community Services’ bureaucrats away from conditions that are no better.
About 300 Nova Scotia households a year suffer the same fate as the Sparks, said lawyer Vincent Calderhead, who represented Brenton Sparks.
Since it first took office in 2013, Stephen Mcneil’s Liberal government has been working on reforms to Nova Scotia’s income assistance system. Calderhead said the province has been penalizing families by reducing their income to nothing for some 16 years.
Surely, it shouldn’t take court rulings, or the outcome of reforms that are proceeding at a snail’s pace, to fix a system that would remove all means of survival from a family, or rip apart a family after the means of survival are removed.