I’ve been writing about child protection issues since 2004 when I got interested in the story of a Halifax couple embroiled in a highly publicized, 67-hour, shots-fired standoff with police. The issue: Children’s Aid had seized their five-month old daughter, not because of anything the couple had done to the child—in fact, evidence indicated they were loving, capable parents—but because they’d each been accused of abducting children during acrimonious custody battles in previous relationships.

Their story didn’t end well. The parents ended up in jail. Their daughter disappeared into the often self-serving anonymity of the province’s foster care system.

Then there was the story of the 16-year-old girl whose mental health issues were never addressed in foster or group homes. She ended up in court. The frustrated judge ordered the then-minister of community services—the girl’s legal guardian—to explain the mess. The minister never testified. Instead, the case was shuffled to the sidelines.

I caught up with the girl—now 18—last year. She told me she didn’t get any more help after her court case; instead, as soon as she turned 18, she was spit out into the adult welfare system. Good riddens.

Through her, I met a young man who’d been shipped off at the age of 12—against his parents’ wishes—to an Ontario residential treatment centre called Bayfield where he spent five years. Bayfield, he says, didn’t help. Instead, they prescribed drugs: he was on 13 medications at one point. Like the girl, Bayfield and child welfare washed its hands of him as soon as it could. The last I heard, he was living on the streets.

Which brings us to the current case: the 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy who was also sent to Bayfield. He didn’t do well either. Bayfield has now dumped him, but not before squeezing his grandparents/guardians out of his life—leaving the province, which claims it doesn’t have the facilities to treat him, to decide what to do next with him.

Whatever it does with the boy, the province should do something else; call a public inquiry into how we deal with troubled children and families. Something is clearly wrong.

Nova Scotia’s Community Services Department has upped the ante: last week it severed family access to a troubled Cole Harbour teenager it had shipped off to an Ontario residential care facility last year. It will now apply to family court “to vary the current order with respect to access,” thus legalizing the elimination of the boys’ grandparents from any future role in his care.

Why?

According to an Aug. 19 letter to the grandparents from the department, the Ontario facility—Bayfield Homes—believes “family contact has become an obstacle to providing [the boy] with the treatment he requires in a highly structured residential facility.”

Really?

Could it be that family contact is an obstacle to the people who run that institution, and who profess to know best what is in the child’s now-and-future best interests?

Let’s recap.

The grandparents, who’d raised the boy since he was a toddler and acknowledged he needed help they couldn’t provide, objected—in public—to the province’s plan to send him out of province for treatment.

They went to court in a lengthy but ultimately unsuccessful bid to bring him home.

They enlisted the aid of a New Brunswick child psychologist and other experts who came up with an alternative plan of care that would have seen the boy returned to Nova Scotia and cared for in a community setting.

Two weeks ago, the government turned down their plan.

Last spring, Restoring Dignity, a group advocating for victims of institutional abuse, took up the family’s cause, bringing allegations of mistreatment at Bayfield to the attention of various authorities in Ontario, including the province’s child advocate.

On July 19, the group organized a press conference to outline allegations the boy had been beaten for asking to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Ontario Provincial Police are investigating.

No wonder Bayfield isn’t happy.

The boy’s grandmother, admittedly, can be difficult. She’s relentless, even obsessive about what she considers the best interests of her grandson.

Is that so bad? In three years, when the boys turns 18 and Bayfield washes its hands of him, who will be left to look out for his best interests?

I accept the argument. Those involved in the recent decision to provide a group of—white—residents in Lake Major with keys to an old logging road so they could avoid having to travel an extra 5.5 km through the—black—community of North Preston were providing a small but reasonable favour to those most inconvenienced by a local bridge construction project.

When they—the landowners who provided the keys, Councilor David Hendsbee who facilitated the arrangement, municipal bureaucrats who blessed it—came up with this favour, they weren’t thinking about the race of those involved, or about how those who weren’t given keys might regard this favour.

I accept that.

Just as I am prepared to believe a different set of “theys” harboured no particular ill will to the black residents of Upper Hammonds Plains back in the 1990s when they decided not to extend city water services from nearby Pockwock Lake to their homes, even though main water lines traveled through Hammonds Plains’ backyards en route way to providing water to white communities.

And I’ll buy the claims of other theys that race wasn’t a factor in deciding to locate a landfill in Lincolnville in 2006.

Just as it was not a consideration when they—another different they—dumped an earlier landfall beside the same black community in 1974.

Not to forget the landfill in East Lake in 1992. And the dump in Africville in…

By one estimate, over 30 per cent of Nova Scotia’s black communities happen to be located within five km of a waste dump.

That doesn’t mean the decisions were racially-based.

Race may not have been the prime motivator behind this year’s cross burning in Hants County either.

Or in the torching of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Birchtown in 2006.

And that cop who stopped Kirk Johnston’s car in 1998—triggering a landmark human rights complaint—may not have done so just because the boxer was “driving while black.”

As a white person, I have no difficulty believing race was not behind any one of those specific incidents or individual decisions.

But I can understand why a black person might see a troubling pattern.
 

When did we realize we had finally entered the deeps of the news-challenged rat… er, dog days of summer?

Was it when that story about the number of rats per city block in Halifax—75; You count ‘em, I’ll pass—made CBC Radio’s marquee World at Six news show last week?

Or perhaps it was when we read yet another haven’t-we-read-this-already news story. Can you say Lance Armstrong does drugs?

Or was it when some city councilor started musing about administering lie detector tests to his fellow councilors—why not just put them in a room with the 75 rats!—to find out which politician-rat was spilling their secrets to the press. (Earth to councilor: the best way stop all the leaks at city hall is to stop writing so many silly secret memos.)

Or perhaps we can mark this summer’s real news-less, madness-begins moment as the instant when Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter and his New Brunswick counterpart Shawn Graham launched their choreographed video two-step at last week’s premiers’ conference in Winnipeg. The purpose: to convince Canadians to vote early and often for the “magnificent” Bay of Fundy, the only home-country contender remaining in a New Seven Wonders of Nature competition.

While acknowledging his province had a few pressing problems—“With a small, aging population that suffers from a high rate of chronic diseases, Nova Scotia is forced to find ways to deliver better health care while keeping costs down”—Dexter described his Fundy fun as a meeting “highlight.”

Dexter even managed to invoke the name of Nova Scotia’s iconic Joseph Howe. “Joseph Howe used to brag about the high tides at the Bay of Fundy, and rightly so,” Dexter intoned.

Well, not quite. It’s worth contextualizing what our unwilling Father of the Federations actually said—probably also in the middle of an August heat wave. “Boys, brag of your country,” Howe declared. “When I'm abroad, I brag of everything that Nova Scotia is, has, or can produce; and when they beat me at everything else, I turn around on them and say: “How high does your tide rise?’”

How low can we go? It’s only August 9.

Tough questions get short shrift in Lawrence Scanlon's A Year of Living Generously, an account of volunteering for 12 charities in as many months.

Lawrence Scanlan’s idea was deceptively simple. “I decided I would volunteer with 12 charitable organizations and dedicate a month of hands-on involvement to each one,” the veteran Canadian journalist and community activist explains in the preface to A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Philanthropy.

In January, Scanlan served meals at Vinnie’s, a St. Vincent de Paul Society soup kitchen in Kingston, Ontario. May? Listened to the life stories of people living with HIV/AIDS at Hogar de la Esperanza, a shelter in Costa Rica. October? Built new homes with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

Over the course of 2008, Scanlan covered the charitable/non-profit waterfront: he spent time in homeless shelters, prisons, hospices; he worked with environmental good-doers; he volunteered to teach English to troubled aboriginal kids and journalism to eager women at a radio station in Senegal.

Scanlan is an eloquent, perceptive chronicler and companion on his journey, which is as much psychic as physical. He can be amusingly self-deprecating about his own foibles and follies but also painfully self aware of the limitations of what he is doing. When he talks about the people he meets – the helpers and the helped – he writes, as someone once said of Martha Gellhorn, with “a cold eye and a warm heart.”

Still, I had problems with his “suffering sampler” approach.

Although Scanlan is a talented journalist and an experienced volunteer, a month is just too brief a time to spend and expect to come back with real insights. And, because of the writing skills Scanlan brought to his volunteer work, he often gets asked to serve his volunteer stint on communication and newsletter projects. While that gave him journalistic permission to ask personal questions of other volunteers and clients, it also distanced him from the grit-level experiences of most ordinary volunteers.

Scanlan says he came back from his year’s experience “changed.” He is more comfortable around people who are homeless, he says, more conscious of race, more appreciative of just how difficult it is to turn a life around.

I’m not sure I felt changed reading it. What I felt instead was that the year-of core of the book was often at war with Scanlan’s deeper concerns about the intersection of volunteerism, social activism, and social responsibility.

Scanlan clearly does want to tackle his subject’s darker, more difficult questions.

We live in a time when governments demonstrate an unseemly eagerness to rip the social safety net out from under the poorest and the weakest, Scanlan writes in the preface, returning to the idea in his epilogue. Policy-makers do so on the falsely self-serving assumption that armies of ordinary volunteers coupled with grand individual, idiosyncratic (and tax-deductible) philanthro-capitalistic gestures – can you say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “does” malaria? – will fill the void. They can’t.

In such circumstances, he wonders, do individuals doing good really do good, or do their generous gestures “only serve to prop up the status quo.” If volunteer-run soup kitchens and homeless shelters end up making it easier for governments to wriggle away from their responsibilities, “where does this leave collective action against poverty and suffering?”

But those questions mostly get short shrift through Living Generously’s month-by-month storylines. They do occasionally come up in passing. At one point during the February he spends with Toronto’s homeless, for example, Scanlan channels the “crusty” frustration of a street nurse who complains that “this whole pool of [volunteers who feed the homeless] end up feeling good about helping poor people but none are walking into the mayor’s office and complaining.”

In his epilogue, Scanlan returns to this vexing problem. We won’t solve the world’s problems simply by volunteering, he admits. The epilogue, in fact, reads like a reasoned cri de coeur for social activism. But Scanlan also understands that changing government social policy – changing the system – is daunting, perhaps an impossible challenge for most of us to take on.

So “what does one do in the face of human suffering and need?” Scanlan asks rhetorically, then answers: “All I know is this: what one should not do is nothing.”

It is an inadequate, unsatisfying answer. But it is true. Which makes it all the more frustrating.

From The Mark, posted July 26, 2010

Forget dueling interviews, competing psychologists, contradictory studies, even the difference between physically assaulted and “placed in a position of control.”

Ask yourself one question: is the 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy at the centre of the controversy over his care better off now than when community services shipped him off to Ontario 13 months ago?

A quick recap: the boy, who suffers from an psychiatrist’s brew of disorders, had been raised by his grandparents since he was a toddler. By November 2008, his acting out—running away, stealing cars, doing drugs, selling his body—was so out of control his grandparents agreed to put him in the care of community services.

Instead of treating him here, the province decided he needed secure, long-term facilities it couldn’t provide. Last June, it shipped him off to Ontario’s Bayfield centre.

Is he better off?

According to his grandmother, he’s on heavy doses of drugs, some self-administered (she says Bayfield wants to add lithium to his medical cocktail); he rarely attends classes; and he has been what the reports call “restrained” on at least 10 occasions. Once, he ended up at the hospital; more recently, he claims he was beaten for asking to go to the washroom.

To complicate matters, Bayfield has done its best to cut the boy off from his grandparents, refusing some face-to-face visits, limiting phone calls to two, monitored 15-minute conversations a week and even, at one point, imposing a total contact blackout because the grandmother was “negative” on the phone. How? In one report I saw, the monitor complained she “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”

Last week, Vicki Wood, Nova Scotia’s director of child welfare, claimed “we make every effort to maintain the ties” between child and family. Really?

Wood also said: “There’s a forum for the family to bring forward their concerns. That would be the court, not a press conference.”

The problem is Nova Scotia’s family court seems like an extension of community services. And father-knows-better community services isn't willing to consider alternatives to out-of-province institutional treatment.

The boy is not better off.

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Previous stories

• Whose best interests?
• Shipping off a troubled kid