Child services must improve
Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to describe the sad stories of Lee Allan Bonneau and “Derek” (not his real name), two vulnerable young boys from troubled backgrounds who were repeatedly failed by Saskatchewan’s child welfare system.
When their paths crossed on Aug. 21, 2013, tragedy resulted. Sixyear-old Bonneau died from blunt force trauma and the RCMP suspected that 10-year-old Derek, a child with fetal alcohol syndrome and serious behavioural problems, was responsible. Derek, too young to face any criminal charge, will likely need special care and supervision for most of his life.
If the system had worked as it should have, Bonneau’s death “may have been preventable,” says Bob Pringle, Saskatchewan’s advocate for children and youth. Though Pringle does not use the real names of either boy in his special report on the incident, Bonneau’s name was made public when the basic facts of the case were reported last year.
Bonneau — a non-aboriginal child — was in the care of Social Services and living in an off-reserve foster home. On Aug. 21, his caregiver took him to a social event at the Kahkewistahaw First Nation near Broadview, where Derek lived with his mother. Last seen playing outside at around 8:30 p.m., Bonneau was later found seriously injured and died in hospital.
Derek was transferred out of RCMP custody the same night and remains in a child resource home under the care of social workers and medical staff.
In his report released Wednesday, Pringle said that “failure is not an option when it comes to the lives of children and parents at risk. As this case demonstrates, the cost of untimely and inadequate services is enormous.”
Pringle’s report leaves little doubt that the services each boy received were indeed inadequate. He’s critical of shortcomings in the Ministry of Social Services, which was responsible for Bonneau, and Yorkton Tribal Council Child and Family Services Inc., which provided services on behalf of the ministry to Derek.
Shockingly, it took four and a half years of agency involvement with Derek before the boy “was actually spoken to by an agency staff member,” Pringle says. By that time — March 2013 — Derek’s disturbing behaviour had already been flagged several times by his school and by the RCMP, but the agency did not adequately respond, Pringle says.
If the agency had provided much-needed supports, Derek “may not have been unsupervised” on the night Bonneau died, Pringle says.
Similarly, Pringle found that if Bonneau’s family had received the services they needed, the boy might not have been in care at the time of his death.
It’s disturbing that many problems Pringle highlights are not new, including complaints he heard from social workers involved in these cases about heavy caseloads — an issue prominent in his annual report a week ago.
This is no time for excuses and apologies. The 18 recommendations Pringle makes to tighten procedures and oversight and improve services to vulnerable children and their families deserve the swiftest attention from the provincial government. This flawed system needs fixing now. The consequences of delay could be further preventable tragedies.
The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The StarPhoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper’s editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.