Lev Tahor children can stay in Ontario
Children’s aid society in Chatham will continue investigating the families
CHATHAM, ONT. — An Ontario judge has “grave” concerns about the welfare of children in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect, she wrote Monday even as she allowed an appeal from their parents.
The Superior Court judge ruled that 13 children who are part of the Lev Tahor sect do not have to be sent back to Quebec, where much of the community fled late last year amid a child protection case.
Seven of the children are already in care in Ontario — one set of parents took the rest and fled to Guatemala — and to create further instability in their lives by sending them to foster care in Quebec would have “disastrous emotional and psychological ramifications for them,” ruled Judge Lynda Templeton.
The case will now go back to provincial court to determine whether the children are in need of ongoing protection.
The allegations — which include underage marriages, a lack of education and hygiene concerns — have not been proved in court, Templeton stressed, but cause the court “grave concern about the health and welfare of these children and their protection,” she wrote.
“The circumstances in this case fundamentally beg the question whether the community to which the appellants belong is entitled to foster self-perpetuation by the suppression or limitation of critical thought in its children,” Templeton wrote.
“There is also cogent and probative evidence before the court that the one or more girls younger than 16 years of age have been married in a ceremony sanctioned or performed by a person perceived to be a religious leader of the community.”
Spokesmen for Lev Tahor have denied allegations of abuse and underage marriage, but acknowledge the children are given a religious education.
Lev Tahor, a community of about 200 people, left their homes in ste-agathe-desmonts in the middle of the night after a child welfare agency started a child protection case against a couple of the families.
They settled in Chatham, but the families at the centre of the court case fled the country ahead of an appeal hearing. Some were stopped in Trinidad and Tobago and were sent back to Canada and a 17-year-old mother and her baby were found in Calgary, but six of the children and two parents successfully fled to Guatemala.
Fleeing one province for another to avoid child custody proceedings is to no avail, Templeton warned the parents.
“The state will continue to exert its pressure and influence over the family through its local agencies no matter where they are in order to ensure that the children in that family are not at risk,” Templeton wrote.
The children’s aid society in Chatham shall continue investigating the families, she wrote in her decision.
Templeton’s ruling overturns an earlier decision that Ontario should enforce a Quebec court order that the children be temporarily placed in foster care in that province. She said that the lower court judge erred on a question of law in determining the order should be enforced.
Ontario does not have jurisdiction under common law to enforce the Quebec ruling, as a non-monetary and temporary judgment, Templeton wrote.
There is no provision in the Child and Family Services Act for the enforcement of an order rendered outside Ontario, she ruled. ChathamKent Children’s Services had turned to the Children’s Law Reform Act, but Templeton found that enforcement provisions in that law are not available in this case either.
When a family in such a situation moves to another province, the supervising agency can give evidence in support of their concerns to the agency where the family has relocated “to allow that agency to assess the situation under its own mandate and to apply the provisions of the (Child and Family Services Act) as it sees fit,” Templeton wrote.
But “for reasons known only to the agency” in this case, they have not done that, she wrote.
Denis Baraby, the director of Quebec’s Department of Youth Protection for the Laurentians region, said the decision taken by the Ontario court on Monday means the case is now out of the hands of the youth protection authorities in Quebec.
“All the arguments presented in (Monday’s) decision were arguments made in connection with Ontario legislation. Most of the children are in Ontario for the moment, so for now (the case) ends for us. We will have to leave it in the hands of our colleagues in Ontario,” Baraby said.
“We are disappointed in the sense it was a long process. But I think the judge in Ontario took into account the better interests of the children by saying it will be the (youth protection) representatives in Ontario who will follow (the case) now. I don’t think it was in the best interests of the children to have them returned to Quebec at this stage.”
Baraby pointed out that if things had been reversed, and the families had left Ontario for Quebec, there would not have been the lengthy gap between their arrival and an eventual court decision on how to handle the jurisdictional issue. He said legislation in Quebec allows the province to apply tribunal decisions from other provinces and other countries without the delay that was seen in this case in Ontario.