CHILD WELFARE ‘ACTION PLAN’ A FAILURE OF VISION, NERVE
NDP has missed a chance to revolutionize the way Alberta delivers these programs
“A Stronger, Safer Tomorrow.”
That’s the title of the province’s new child welfare “public action plan” — its response to the recommendations of the ministerial panel on child intervention, the all-party committee struck after I first reported on the horrific life and death of a four-year-old Cree child named Serenity. The vacuous, cloying title would work equally well as a Donald Trump campaign slogan or an ad for a hybrid SUV. The report feels superficial and scattergun — a grab bag of feel-good ideas without sinew or substance. There are dozens of “micro-solutions” here.
But nothing that takes us back to first principles.
The action plan vows to establish a panel of Indigenous grandmothers, which would meet three times a year. It earmarks $400,000 to set up cultural and educational activities for Aboriginal kids, such as summer and winter camps. It recommends the opening of holistic trauma-treatment centres — without defining what “holistic” treatment would entail.
There are also perfectly sensible recommendations. Better post-secondary scholarships and bursaries to teens who are aging out of the child welfare system. Spending more money on youth suicide prevention. Better outpatient care for kids with disabilities.
But although worthy, those policy proposals don’t cut to the heart of what’s wrong with our broken child care system, where front-line services are contracted out to a patchwork of underfunded agencies without appropriate oversight or accountability, where case loads are absurdly high and families (and workers) don’t get preventive support until it’s too late.
What substantive policy changes the paper purports to promise is largely illusory.
The federal government funds child welfare programs for individual First Nations, but at a lower standard than the province does. Kids and families on reserve get a lower level of support. This report insists Alberta will rectify that institutionalized injustice and provide equal funding and services on and off reserve.
Indeed, when I spoke with Children Services minister Danielle Larivee on Thursday, she stressed that was her “intent.”
Sadly, the report doesn’t actually say that. Nor does it earmark any funds for that purpose.
Instead, it outlines plans to nag Ottawa to pay its fair share.
“It’s time for this jurisdictional dispute to come to an end,” Larivee told me. “It’s completely unacceptable.”
Larivee said their plan is to help First Nations to pressure the federal government to pay its fair share.
“If they fall short, we’re willing to step up and fill the gap. But that’s not going to happen in this fiscal year.”
In other words? Don’t hold your breath.
Then there’s the report’s failure to deal with the conundrum of kinship care.
This whole process was inspired by the sufferings of Serenity, who was removed from a white foster home and placed in kinship care where she suffered malnutrition and horrific injuries. Care workers failed to run proper background checks on the adults who lived in that home. They failed to monitor the care providers.
For Serenity and her siblings, kinship care proved a disaster — just as it was for J’Lyn Cardinal, 4, and Caleb Merchant, 1, two other First Nations children who were killed by their kinship care providers.
Yet the report doubles down on support for the kinship care model as the preferred choice for Alberta’s child welfare system. The document makes no mention of improved screening or of enhanced mandatory training for kinship care providers. It makes no mention of putting the interests of individual children first.
It promises to give kinship care providers more resources and support. That’s long overdue. But it doesn’t address the critical problems that Serenity’s case revealed.
Kinship care has an important place in the spectrum of child welfare options. It’s often a very good choice. But it can be fatally dangerous to assume it’s always the best for troubled families.
And as for foster care? Group homes? They get short shrift. The phrase “group home” never once appears in the document. What a wasted opportunity. This was a chance for Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP government to revolutionize the way we deliver child welfare services in this province, to put children first, to help families before they come into crisis, to hold the system accountable.
Instead, we have this frustrating lack of vision and nerve.
Albertans didn’t elect an NDP government to prop up a moribund status quo. Albertans elected them to clean up the messes of their Tory predecessors — and to protect the vulnerable.
With this vague and wishywashy report, they’ve failed to do either.