Child protection is community’s obligation
TORONTO — Protecting kids is not only the job of children’s aid societies, but it is “every citizen’s responsibility,” a coroner’s jury said Friday as it recommended sweeping changes to the child welfare system in Ontario.
Jeffrey Baldwin was a healthy baby when he and his siblings were placed in the care of their grandparents, but over the next few years the boy fell multiple times through society’s safety nets and starved to death, locked in a cold, fetid bedroom.
When he died just shy of his sixth birthday his weight was that of a 10-month-old infant.
The jury in the coroner’s inquest into Jeffrey’s death issued a broad slate of 103 recommendations Friday, aimed at closing various gaps in the system so no other child meet’s Jeffrey’s fate.
The most glaring oversight in Jeffrey’s case was the failure of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society to check out Jeffrey’s grandparents before giving them custody of the boy and his siblings.
Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman had both previously been convicted of abusing children — Bottineau was convicted after her first baby died and was found to have multiple fractures, while Kidman was convicted after a beating sent two of Bottineau’s other children to hospital.
But when Bottineau came forward to the CCAS and offered to care for her grandchildren, she seemed wellmeaning and workers didn’t look deeper, said Mary McConville, the executive director of the CCAS in Toronto.
“We should have known who Elva Bottineau and Norm Kidman were,” she said after the jury’s verdict.
“The entire child welfare system at that time had a collective blind spot around extended family.”
Standards surrounding so-called kinship care have changed since Jeffrey’s death in 2002, but the jury’s recommendations suggest there is much more to be done.
For one, the Ministry of Children and Youth Services should “fully deliver on its pledge” to implement a Child Protection Information Network within two years to all children’s aid societies across the province. The system would allow societies to access each other’s information and advocates say it has been promised for a long time.
“There was a call for a shared database, CPIN, after Jeffrey died and it’s more than 10 years later ... we hear that the ministry is perhaps six to seven years away from that,” said Irwin Elman, the provincial advocate for children and youth.
“If we’ve decided that that’s an instrumental change that can better protect our children, do it for goodness’ sake.”
A spokesman for the ministry said the initial rollout of the system to seven agencies should be done this summer, and after that it will be phased in at the remaining children’s aid societies.
Another recommendation said the ministry should also allow workers to access CPIN and the child abuse registry when they are assessing an alternate caregiver, such as a relative, and not just when investigating a child protection concern.
The jury also recommended that once CPIN is implemented, the ministry should study the feasibility of amalgamating all 46 individual children’s aid societies into one co-ordinated agency.
The minister for children and youth services said her ministry will review the recommendations and “take all necessary steps to further improve the child welfare system.”
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne vowed that CPIN would be implemented.
“One of the things that is clear is that there has not been enough sharing of information among the CASs and so that is of paramount importance that we get that system in place,” she said.
And once a child has been placed in the care of a relative, the jury recommended: “The kinship service standards shall be amended to require an annual kinship service home visit for children five and under residing with alternate caregivers and following the closure of the case file,” the jury recommended.