The troubled child and the vindictive state
Is it possible nanny-state community services officials have decided to punish the grandparents of a boy who dared question their decision to send him out of province for treatment by dumping him back in their laps with minimal supports, setting them—and him—up for I-told-you-so failure?
That seems the most rational conclusion after reading the vague page-and-a-half “Service Plan” officials handed the boy’s family earlier this month.
Quick rewind. Two years ago, the grandparents—frustrated by their inability to cope with the then-13-year-old’s running and self-destructive behaviours—asked community services for help. Officials grabbed guardianship of the boy and shipped him to Bayfield, a residential treatment centre in Ontario.
The working-class family went to court—spending more than $20,000 on legal fees and developing an alternative, community-based care plan—to convince the province to treat him in Nova Scotia instead. They failed.
But the ongoing publicity eventually convinced Bayfield it wanted nothing more to do with the boy. In August, it shipped him back to community services, which will be in court today to officially present its new plan of care—and unofficially wash its hands of him.
Before we examine the skimpiness of the department’s proposed “plan,” consider what the province itself previously claimed. The boy has been diagnosed with such a witches’ brew of syndromes and disorders—attention deficit hyperactivity, alcohol-related neural development, impulse control, learning disabilities—they said he needed long-term care in a structured, restricted facility.
During his 14 months at Bayfield, his grandparents claim the boy was treated with powerful drugs—whopping doses of Seroquel XR, an antipsychotic medication, among others—rarely attended school classes and was physically “restrained” on at least 10 occasions. Bayfield officials controlled—occasionally—cut off—contact with the grandparents community services wants to send him back to.
They now want to hand him back to his family, enroll him in a public high school for which he is unprepared and ill-equipped and, well… let’s see what happens. They’re “offering” the ill-defined assistance of a school liaison/tutor, a family therapist and an alternative youth worker, but the “performance indicators” for their efforts are so vague as to be meaningless.
Can you say vindictive?
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Beware Canadian Taxpayer tea party
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right to raise alarms about the growing inequity between generous pensions paid politicians and the reality too many in the private sector have inadequate, or no pensions …
Uh… right…
That isn’t exactly what the libertarian-when-it-suits-them CTF has its knickers in a knot about.
The CTF—which bills itself as a “not-for-profit citizen’s group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government”—opened its new Atlantic office last week with a splashy “study” claiming provincial taxpayers fork out $22 for every dollar MLAs contribute to their pension plans.
If that is true—the CTF is infamous for simplistic statistical jiggery-pokery—it is outrageous. Even if it isn’t precisely true-true, it reflects a larger truth. Over the past few decades, our politicians have quietly created a cocooned world of privilege for themselves. The CTF has been foraging in this fertile swamp of government waste and inefficiency since 1990.
But making governments work better isn’t the CTF’s goal.
The CTF—which takes its ideological cues from American neo-cons—sees government as the enemy.
Public spending on public services like education, health care, highways, social programs, industrial development? Bad. The CTF has never met a tax it thought couldn’t be reduced or, better, eliminated.
Except… the CTF is selectively libertarian. It campaigns against the ”expensive” long-gun registry, for example, but seems untroubled by Ottawa’s much more costly political-sop plan to build more prisons while actual crime rates decline.
The CTF made political hay with last winter’s MLA expenses scandal but barely acknowledged that the same provincial auditor general’s report flagged an extra $52 million Nova Scotia taxpayers shelled out to private contractors for so-called P3 schools.
Though it claims to be non-partisan, the CTF is a revolving door for right-wing Tory hacks. Jason Kenny was CTF’s CEO before becoming a Tory MP. CTF’s current national spokesperson was Reform Party leader Preston Manning’s Research Director. Kevin Lacey, CTF’s new Atlantic Director, previously worked for both Stephen Harper and John Hamm (the latter, interestingly, during the time when MLA pensions got their gold plating).
So, while the CTF raises a valid issue, we should be wary of being invited to its tea party.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Dear Darrell… unsolicited advice
Dear Darrell,
As you begin your second full year—summers don’t count in Nova Scotia—as premier of all you survey, allow me to offer some gratuitous, unsolicited and unlikely to be appreciated advice. (But given your government’s precipitous free-fall from electoral grace, you need all the advice you can get.)
First, stop trying to be a better, wiser Tory-Liberal premier.
Your most significant accomplishments to-date—bringing some painful but common–sensical sense to our have-not province’s precarious finances and the jury’s-still-out decision to invest heavily in the Daewoo “megaproject” vision of industrial development—would look good on the resumés of Stephen McNeil or Jamie Baillie.
No shame in that. But where are the Tommy Douglas-dreams?
My insider friends assure me much is happening in the wonkish workshops-and-visioning-exercises’ world of the public service and that all will be revealed in the fullness of time.
The time is now. Your government needs to lay out its vision for health care, education, economic development, environmental sustainability—not as precious polished policy stones but as works in progress. You need to undertake the kind of province-wide, what-do-you-think-of-what-were-thinking exercise Finance Minister Graham Steele employed so successfully in the lead-up to last spring’s budget.
Speaking of ministers, my second piece of advice—you’re not going to like this—is to bring Howard Epstein in from the backbench cold. Epstein remains your government’s best-least-well-used asset. Whatever real or apparent sin kept him out of your first cabinet, his good-soldier silence since has surely been penance enough.
Given his intellect and background, the importance of environmental sustainability to our future and your government’s own spotty track record—can you say mercury emissions?—make him environment minister.
My third and final suggestion is for you to be you again—or at least that avuncular, street-smart, populist you who carried your party to victory in the last election.
Too often since, you’ve appeared defensive, brittle, entitled to your entitlements.
You need to get out more … perhaps as the host of that new, where-we’re-going road show I suggested. Or at least spend some time down at your local pub or legion.
Time to listen again.
And dream. Before it’s too late.
Sincerely…
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Subscribe
About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.