KIMBER: ...Mona Clare… again

The taking of Mona Clare... again
By Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News,
September 26, 2004

I know, I know. I should move on. There is, after all, plenty of other stuff I could be writing about: wars, hurricanes, civic elections, American elections, panhandlers, health care deals, health care crises, the new fall television season, the no-new hockey season, the sponsorship scandal hearings, how those fine editors at CanWest managed to make “terrorists” out of “militants” and even ordinary “people” and blah blah blah…

So why do I keep coming back to the strange and twisted tale of Carline VandenElsen, Larry Finck, their daughter Mona Clare, the Halifax Regional Police and the Children’s Aid Society?

Because there is still much about this case that puzzles me, and because the more I learn the less convinced I am that Children’s Aid is acting — as it is supposed to do — in the “best interests” of this child.

Let’s review: At 1:30 a.m. on May 19, Halifax City Police stormed the Halifax house where the Fincks were living with their then five-month old daughter and Finck’s mother. The police demanded they surrender the baby to Children’s Aid, which had obtained a court order for her custody. That precipitated a 67-hour standoff that is now the focus of a dog’s breakfast of charges — and counter-charges — involving VandenElsen and Finck.

But did the police really need to go in with a battering ram and machine guns in the middle of the night to rescue the child?

No. Although VandenElsen did take the baby to visit her sister in Alberta around the time the initial court order was issued in mid-January, they returned to Halifax a month later and had been hiding in plain sight in her mother-in-law’s house for more than two months before police moved in.

In the weeks before the siege, in fact, VandenElsen went for walks in the neighbourhood without Larry. She carried Mona Clare in a Snugli. The police could easily have apprehended the baby in those circumstances without violence and certainly without the standoff that eventually transpired.

We know they could have done that because we now know police knew for some time VandenElsen and the baby were back in town, and were watching them.

In fact, earlier on the night the standoff began, police officers followed Finck and VandenElsen to the local Walmart where they did some shopping for the baby. Mona Clare was at home with her grandmother. Again, that created an obvious window of opportunity for police to seize the child without provoking an incident — if they so desired.

We do not know — and probably never will if we depend just on the criminal trials ahead — why the police acted as they did.

Just as we may never know — without a public inquiry — exactly why Children’s Aid sought the court order to take the child in the first place.

We know the first record in the chain that led to the custody order was a call to Children’s Aid in Stratford, ON, on Dec. 18 from Craig Merkely, VandenElsen’s ex-husband, wrongly informing them VandenElsen had already had her baby in Halifax.

To put his call in context, Merkley and VandenElsen had been involved in a lengthy, nasty custody battle over their triplets, during which — as is often the case in such matters — each side accused the other of poor parenting, even abuse. But there was never any evidence VandenElsen actually abused her kids.

The worst the Children’s Aid there could come up with when it issued its Canada-wide Child Protection Alert a day after talking with Merkley, in fact, was VandenElsen’s “attempts to have the children align with her throughout a lengthy custody and access dispute.”

Now there’s a surprise.

It is true, however, that VandenElsen did take off with the children in the fall of 2000 when she thought she would lose complete custody of them. As a result, she was charged with child abduction. But a jury acquitted her on the grounds of “necessity.” The Ontario Court of Appeal overturned that decision and has ordered a new trial, which is scheduled for this fall. Last October, another court there awarded permanent custody of the children to her ex-husband.

Two weeks after that, VandenElsen moved to Halifax with Larry Finck —who’d served two years for abducting his daughter in a custody dispute — whom she’d met and married during her legal odyssey. Their plan was to start over with their new child in a new city. On Dec. 23, VandenElsen gave birth to Mona Clare.

Were VandenElsen and Finck — whose main run-ins with the law involved highly charged custody disputes — such a danger to their newborn daughter she needed to be taken from them immediately?

Certainly not based on the family photographs VandenElsen included in an affidavit she filed with the Supreme Court in August. They show a smiling baby, playing with stuffed animals, cuddled in the arms of her father, being dressed by her mother and fed by her grandmother.

Photographs never tell the whole story, of course, but consider these reports from doctors who examined Mona Clare.

On Jan 8, 2004, the Children’s Aid Society approached Dr. Dawn Edgar, who’d assisted in Mona Clare’s birth and saw the family on three subsequent occasions, to ask if she had any concerns about “either parent, re: mental health.” According to Edgar’s own notes of the conversation, she told the CAS: “No, no concerns. Both parents appropriate with baby, caring, loving.”

A week later, the Children’s Aid her got an order to apprehend the baby.

Three months later, after Mona Clare was turned over to social workers following the siege, she was taken to the IWK Health Centre “for further observations and investigations for possible non-accidental injury.” According to the discharge report signed by Dr. D. Chowdhury, nursing notes indicated the baby was “doing well on the floor, active, playful and feeding well.” Chowdury’s own impression was that Mona Clare was “a well grown and well developed baby with no clinical signs of any illness.”

So why was Mona Clare taken from her parents?

We need a public inquiry into this case — and plenty of others I’ve been told about since I started writing about Mona Clare — to find out how Children’s Aid really operates and whether it acts in “the best interests” of children.

Stephen Kimber