Foster parents contest decision to move toddler

Girl ordered reunited with older sisters

• A lawyer for Vancouver Island foster parents who hope to keep a Métis toddler they have raised since birth says that moving the girl now would harm her emotionally and mentally.

The foster parents have filed a petition in B. C. Supreme Court to stop the Ministry of Children and Family Development from moving the two- year- old girl to Ontario to live with her older sisters, whom she has never met.

Lawyer Jack Hittrich is asking a B.C. Supreme Court judge for an interim order to keep the girl in the care of the foster parents until a full hearing on their petition can be held later this year.

The foster parents are Métis, while the guardians in Ontario are not, raising questions about whether the girl is better off with her biological siblings or with par- ents who share her cultural background.

Hittrich has told a judge that ripping the girl away from the only parents she has ever known, and then possibly moving her back if the petition is successful, will be psychologically damaging.

But government lawyer Leah Greathead says a judge has already dismissed a similar petition by the foster parents and asking a second judge to rule on the matter is “pure craziness.”