Inquiry needed into children’s stories that don’t end well
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.
What’s race got to do with it?
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.
Welcome to the rat days of summer
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.
Is the boy better off?
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
Mayor Kelly’s Moses moment
What to make of Peter Kelly’s Moses memo to members of HRM Council? Thou shalt not drink to excess… Thou shalt not drive drunk… Thou shalt call 9-1-1 if a fellow councilor violates #2… Thou shalt pause and reflect…
Mayor Kelly issued his I-regret-I-have-to-write-this-however-circumstances-demand-it memo July 9. The ink had barely dried before it showed up in the media, local and national; closely followed by outraged howls from councilors claiming the mayor’s broad brush, father-knows-better innuendo sullied what passes for their reputations; followed by their own temperature-inflating innuendo about who leaked the memo and why; followed by the mayor’s digging-himself-ever-deeper defence to reporters that he’d once intervened to keep a drunk councilor—no name—from driving away from a public event—no name; followed by…
First question. Do Halifax Regional Councilors have a drinking problem? How many? Who?
Metro reporter Alex Boutilier bravely named names—two of them—in a report Thursday. Veteran city hall watcher Tim Bousquet didn’t name anyone but did suggest, in a radio interview, as many as four councilors appear to over-indulge at times; he later refined that to suggest only one probably has a serious drinking problem.
From a personal point of view, one, of course, is too many.
But there are only two legitimate public concerns here. First, is alcohol interfering with the individual’s ability to do the job? Second, is the individual endangering public safety by driving drunk?
If the answer to either question is yes, councilors face the same wrenching dilemma the rest of us do: how, and how far, to intervene in the personal life of another person.
It’s complicated.
As a reporter, I’ve covered politicians who accomplished more for the public good in one night of drinking than others after a lifetime of sobriety.
Several readers who posted to Metro’s website claimed to have seen one councilor drunk at public events and said he drove away after. How many called police? Should councilors—or the mayor—be held to a different standard?
The mayor has raised a serious issue. But his hectoring memo just trivializes it. One more symptom of the sad lack of leadership at city hall. Pity.
Our new governor general and the greasy Airbus affair
David Lloyd Johnston, our soon-to-be governor general of all we survey, is, I’m sure, a fine fellow. Even if he does fit—right up to his blue button-down—every stereotype known to boring, old white guy governors general of the pre-Adrienne Clarkson, pre-Michaelle Jean era.
But hey, I’m a boring old white guy too, and it’s nice to be represented once again in the corridors of ceremonial powerlessness.
Johnston is, of course, a lawyer. Better yet, a legal scholar. A specialist in securities law, something happily impenetrable to the rest of us.
He played hockey at Harvard. Of course Harvard. Better yet, he captained its hockey team. At 69, if you believe his gushing friends, he still possesses the speed and finesse of a young Yvan Cournoyer.
He is a former principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, one of Canada’s most venerable institutions of higher learning, and now a soon-to-be former president of the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s most leading edge—can you say particle physics?—groves of academe.
Of course—of course—he is an excellent family man. Married to the same woman forever. The same woman, it should—and will—be said, who is accomplished in her own right, but will not seek her own limelight like… well, no need to mention John Ralston Saul or Jean-Daniel Lafond.
And the kids? Five of them. All girls. All grown. All overachievers. Did we forget the seven grandkids?
Lovely.
Uh… but there is this one nagging footnote to his resumé that’s hard to forget—or forgive.
David Johnston is the person most responsible for the fact we wasted $14 million on a public inquiry to discover what we already knew about Brian Mulroney—that he is a pathological prevaricator of the first order—but not what we actually wanted to know—which is who really got how much of that $20-million in Airbus grease money?
That Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose Johnston—among all the boring old white guy academic overachievers available—to set the sharpened pencil-point-narrow terms of reference for the inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair says much about Stephen Harper’s prescience.
And perhaps too much about David Johnston’s willingness to go along.
Which is why he will make an ideal governor general... for Stephen Harper.
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in 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 eight non-fiction books.