Whose best interests?
by Stephen Kimber on February 12, 2010 | 1 Comment
For Family Court Judge Beryl MacDonald, the question seemed simple. Does she have the authority to order the minister of community services to provide a service the department, by policy, doesn’t offer? Her answer, delivered during a family court hearing this week, was equally simple. She does not.
The legal issue may be simple; the case is anything but. And her defensible judicial answer may conflict with the ultimate goal of our child protection legislation: the best interests of the child.
The case involves a troubled Cole Harbour teenager whose grandparents raised him. Two years ago, when they realized they could no longer cope—he has serious psychological problems—they sought help from community services. Instead, the government assumed his guardianship and—because Nova Scotia doesn’t have secure long-term youth facilities—shipped him off to Bayfield, an Ontario institution “for boys experiencing difficulties.”
His grandparents objected and began to act as the boy’s advocates. That made them intruders in the government’s and the institution’s father-knows-best care program.
At one point, after the grandmother complained publicly about his treatment, Bayfield refused her a face-to-face visit despite the fact she’d travelled to Ontario just to see her grandson. Bayfield has also occasionally cut off all communications between the child and his grandparents.
These days, telephone contact is tightly controlled and monitored. A recent note from Bayfield staff claims one conversation “was beginning to turn negative as it was ending.” This apparently referred to the fact the grandmother “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”
Doctors at Bayfield, who have prescribed Seroquel XR, an antipsychotic medication, allow the boy to take some of his daily dosage “as needed.” The province has authorized a dosage of up to 850 mg. per day. According to the website healthcentral.com, “the safety of doses above 800 mg/day has not been evaluated in clinical trial.” Drugs.com says Seroqel XR “should not given to anyone younger than 18 years old.”
The grandparents are just as concerned by what they see as escalating “incidents” of violence during which Bayfield staff “restrained” the boy.
My non-legal question is equally simple: Is this boy better off now than he was when he left Nova Scotia? What will he be like in three years when he becomes an adult and Bayfield spits him back out—as it has other Nova Scotia children.
The judge may see this as a narrow legal question. The Minister of Community Services should see it as a larger question. Is what her department is doing in the best interest of this—or any other—child?
Visionless NS Tories look for leader before vision
by Stephen Kimber on February 5, 2010 | No Comments
Tonight, 600 Nova Scotia Tories will gather at the Westin Hotel to pay perfunctory tribute to Rodney MacDonald, their thankfully former, now hardly ever mentioned leader.
After that—if not before—conventioneers will get down to the real, if unspoken business at hand: making sure the party doesn’t blow it again like they did in 2006.
That’s when delegates chose the awkward, inexperienced and visionless MacDonald, not because of what he stood for or what he promised to do, but because what passed for the Tories’ brain trust convinced delegates MacDonald’s youthfulness (he was 33), good looks and cheerful bonhomie could help them sway the youth vote, win back metro from the socialist hordes and restore the party of John Hamm and John Buchanan to its rightful majority in the legislative firmament.
I’d say that worked out rather well for them…
The irony, in retrospect, is there were more qualified candidates. Neil LeBlanc, a former finance minister, for one. And Bill Black, a political neophyte but a successful businessman with clear views on policy.
Their names are now being bandied about again as party members prepare for a late October leadership convention. They’re not the only could-be contenders, of course. Karen Casey, the party’s interim leader, may want the job permanently. But so might fellow MLA and former health minister Chris d’Entremont. Or Cape Breton’s Cecil Clarke. Or—Lord forbid—Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly, who admits he still hasn’t shuttered his political ambitions.
The current front runner, at least according to allnovascotia.com’s political reporter Brian Flinn, is Jamie Baillie, 43, the president and chief executive officer of Credit Union Atlantic. Baillie, a former chief of staff to John Hamm, is a longtime backroom organizer. But his Wikipedia biography was deleted in 2006 as “not a notable enough person to warrant a page.” Ouch.
Still, any of them could do better than the hapless MacDonald. But is that really the question? What the party needs at this point—with at least two-and-a-half years to go before even an early next election—is not a leader but a vision.
They need to distinguish themselves from the increasingly conservative NDP, on the one hand, and the suddenly far less laughable Liberals on the other.
Like Michael Ignatieff’s federal Liberals, Nova Scotia’s Tories need to stop scrambling to find the magic leader button back to power and start doing the hard but necessary work of creating policies and programs that will make voters see them as relevant alternatives.
Don’t hold your breath.
Having our history and swallowing it too
by Stephen Kimber on January 29, 2010 | 3 Comments
So here is our question for today.
Should the Charles Morris House—a down-at-the-heels, 240-year-old wooden structure that once served as the headquarters of Nova Scotia’s chief surveyor but today sits, forlorn, beached and abandoned in a downtown parking lot—be resurrected and spiffed up to serve as a living memorial to the man who is credited with laying out Halifax’s original streetscape (can you say Granville, Argyle, Hollis, Grafton streets et al) and property lines (including landmarks like Grand Parade and St. Paul’s Church, which survive today)? Morris went on to serve as our province’s chief justice. Not to forget fathering future surveyors who took on the continuing task of mapping and shaping today’s Nova Scotia.
Or should this dilapidated old eyesore of a building be demolished instead, perhaps even burned to the ground as a final public acknowledgment of—and overdue mea culpa for—the reality that the self-same Charles Morris also played a role in the brutish Expulsion of the Acadians.
Katie Reid votes yes to the latter option. Intriguingly, Reid is the “eight-generations-removed” granddaughter of the man himself. She says her family discovered a Morris family history in her grandmother’s attic that shows that Captain Charles Morris took part in planning the expulsion of the Acadians, helping devise a scheme “to break their dykes, to burn the fields of crops they’d grown, to burn their homes… Maybe they should burn down [the Morris House] instead.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Peter Delefes disagrees. The president of the Heritage Trust Society of Nova Scotia, which saved the building from the wrecker’s ball in December and still hopes to see it made useful again, acknowledges that Morris did play an “unfortunate” role in the Expulsion. But he is quick to note “other important historic figures also had a hand in that whole process, but I don't think we condemn them on that basis.”
Actually—and unfortunately—we’ve already begun to do exactly that more and more often.
Consider Edward Cornwallis. The once-deified founder of Halifax is now the subject of a persistent campaign to strip his name from public buildings, statues and even street signs because of his treatment of Natives.
Or, to go further afield, Christopher Columbus himself.
Perhaps it’s time we stopped needing to see our historic figures in such stark either-or terms, and publicly celebrate their accomplishments while acknowledging—in equally public ways—their shortcomings. That way we can have our history and swallow it too.
Protecting privacy or covering up?
by Stephen Kimber on January 22, 2010 | No Comments
So whose privacy are they protecting?
On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, sitting on the toilet and smoking a cigarette when Cst. Jeremy Frenette first entered the house. They claim Simon then fled to the kitchen where he grabbed his shotgun. Frenette fired three times, killing Simon.
What was Cst. Frenette doing inside the house without a warrant? And without backup? Especially considering that Simon, at that point, was no threat to anyone except himself.
The Halifax Regional Police, who led what was supposed to be an arms-length investigation into the shooting, concluded he only fired “after reasonably perceiving that John Simon posed a threat of grievous bodily harm or death and believing that he could not otherwise preserve himself from grievous bodily harm other than by using deadly force.”
Simon’s widow and members of the local band council would beg to disagree.
But that’s not the issue here.
Why are the Mounties now refusing to release the report into the incident? Just as importantly, why is it even the RCMP’s call whether to release this supposedly independent review?
RCMP Chief Supt. Blair McKnight told reporters in December the Mounties weren’t “permitted” to release the report under Canada’s privacy laws.
Whose privacy is being protected here? Simon himself is dead. His widow and the local band council—which contract the RCMP to police their reserve—both say they want to read a copy of the report.
Others have seen it. Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister, Ross Landry, for example—himself a former RCMP officer—told reporters this week he has read the report and believes the band council should too before he makes his decision on their request for a public inquiry into Simon’s death. His office, in fact, is trying to help the band get a copy.
But RCMP brass seem happy to hide the report behind the privacy veil.
Little wonder the Wagmatcook band council has decided to replace the RCMP when its policing contract expires at the end of next month. Little wonder too that the council has called for a public inquiry to determine why “policing hasn’t changed in our First Nation territories” in the two decades since the Marshall Inquiry report.
Shipping off troubled kids not a solution
by Stephen Kimber on January 15, 2010 | 1 Comment
The real question, Dr. Charles Emmrys testified, is, “What works?”
What doesn’t work—what research shows doesn’t work, he adds—is shipping troubled kids out of their home provinces, away from family and community, and into residential institutions where they are more likely to be warehoused than treated.
Emmyrs, a Moncton-based clinical psychologist and court-recognized expert in adolescent behaviour disorders, is an advocate for what he calls the “messy stuff.” He argues governments should invest scarce resources in family, school and community supports instead of more buildings. Community-based care, he acknowledges, is “a long and tedious process, but it works.”
Emmrys was testifying earlier this week in the case of a 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy currently in Bayfield, a long-term Ontario treatment centre “for boys experiencing difficulties.” This boy had been diagnosed with myriad psychological disorders: attention deficit hyperactivity, alcohol-related neural development, impulse control. Mostly, he ran. He ended up selling his body, stealing cars, doing drugs.
His grandparents, who’d raised him since he was a toddler, couldn’t cope on their own. In October 2008, they asked the Department of Community Services for help.
Community Services’ idea of helping was to make him a ward of the province and ship him off to Bayfield last June.
When his grandparents tried to visit him in September, they say they were shocked by Bayfield staff’s hostility and unwillingness to let them spend time with their grandson.
They’re now asking Family Court here to order Community Services to bring him back to Nova Scotia.
The real question, of course, is whether the boy is benefitting at Bayfield.
My own anecdotal experience isn’t encouraging.
Two years ago, while researching a story on children who slip through the social welfare cracks, I met a local street kid I called Carl. Carl had spent five years—from age 12—in Bayfield for problems that sound remarkably similar to this boy.
As do his treatments, which included a lot of drug therapy.
At one point, Carl says he was on 13 different psychotropic drugs. “I was like a zombie.” Bayfield officials also discouraged Carl’s mother from visiting or talking with her son on the phone.
Did it work?
No.
After Bayfield spit Carl out at 17, he wound up as a psych patient in Nova Scotia where doctors finally took him off all the meds Bayfield had prescribed. When I met him, Carl was living on the streets, and didn’t have much hope for himself or his future.
What works—and what doesn’t? Good questions. It’s time the government started asking them.
Free-range forums for the crude crazies
by Stephen Kimber on January 8, 2010 | 2 Comments
Mainstream media online comments sections were supposed to be one of those glorious triumphs of citizen democracy in the new Internet age. They offered a public space where ordinary readers could talk back to writers and to the people they wrote about, a free-range forum for spirited, intelligent discussion of civic issues…
Instead, it has come to this.
On Dec. 16, the Globe and Mail hastily disabled public comments on a blog item concerning Nova Scotia Liberal MP Scott Brison’s Christmas card to his constituents. Brison’s seemingly innocuous pastoral-scene card featured the MP, his
same-sex spouse Maxime St. Pierre and their dog Simba standing—at a discreet distance from one another—in the middle of a yellowish autumn field.
“Comments have been closed due to an overwhelming number of hateful and homophobic remarks,” explained an Editors’ Note. “We appreciate that readers want to discuss this issue, but we can't allow our site to become a platform for intolerance.”
The Toronto Star didn’t wait for the deluge to shut off its comment taps. “So crazy hateful people should probably walk away from the keyboard now,” advised its Ottawa correspondent, Susan Delacourt.
Unfortunately, the Brison brouhaha isn’t unusual. Virtually every online news site’s reader comments section has been hijacked by crude crazies of all different shades of intolerant ideology, whose always thoughtless, often venomous upchuckings seem to have discouraged almost anyone else from bothering to post. Including at serious news sites like the Globe’s.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the news sites—partly to avoid having to manage what, in a gentler, less digital era, used to be called letters to the editor, and partly to generate a bottomless pit of cost-free content—have abandoned their own responsibility (except in extreme situations) to identify and vet what people post.
Like the quaint idea that people should pay for content, the notion that individuals should be responsible for what they say now seems hopelessly dated. Pity.
***
A follow-up to columns I wrote before Christmas about the police commission’s failure to pay attention to the city’s alarming number of unsolved homicides. Chairman Russell Walker tells me he has no intention of seeking out two respected retired senior officers—who’ve publicly expressed concerns about the force’s ability to investigate major crimes—and ask them to meet with the commission. “They know the channels,” he says. “They know where to find us.” I’m sure that will comfort the families of murder victims.
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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.