Kimber: Justice Minister should know better ...

Justice Minister should know better when it comes to Children's Aid

By Stephen Kimber
The Daily News
Sunday, July 10, 2005

Justice Minister Michael Baker is no stranger to controversies over child protection in Nova Scotia.

Which may explain his reluctance to call a public inquiry into last year's Family Court decision to order the Halifax Children's Aid Society to seize the daughter of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen, despite a lack of evidence the infant was at risk.

Baker, a South Shore lawyer before becoming an MLA, served a good-works apprenticeship in the decade or so before he was first elected to the legislature in 1998.

He was vice-chairman of the Lunenburg County Regional Housing Authority, president of the Lunenburg Academy Foundation and - from 1992 to 1995 - a member of the board of Family and Children's Services of Lunenburg County (FCS), "a non-profit child-welfare agency dedicated to the protection of children from abuse and neglect."

In 1994, the Liberal government of the day appointed two Ontario social workers to conduct an independent review of the operations of that same Lunenburg FCS - the equivalent of Halifax's Children's Aid Society - following two shocking incidents in which FCS officials appeared to be the ones perpetrating the abuse and neglect.

In the first case, a five-week-old baby was shaken to death in 1993, three weeks after child-protection workers had received warnings the baby was being abused.

In the second, workers at the agency had ignored complaints that children, in what the agency proudly described as a "very good" foster home, were being sexually abused. FCS actually continued to place children - 20 in all - with the family, even after learning of the allegations. It wasn't until five years after the first complaints that the foster father was finally found guilty - no thanks to FCS - of sexually abusing four youngsters in his care.

In truth, the review of the Lunenburg FCS only happened - three years after the guilty verdict - because Debra Stevens refused to go away.

A single mother who'd been talked into turning her two sons over to children's services in 1985, Stevens became suspicious about the foster home into which her two sons had been adopted, and refused to stop asking questions.

The Family and Children's Services Agency initially ignored her complaints, or dismissed her as a "nuisance" - remind you of anyone, Mr. Minister? - and described her as a "social climber (who) went into a song and dance about being a single parent." The first social worker she dealt with reported that "Hopefully, (Stevens) got the message, as it was obvious that she appeared guilty."

Guilty of what? Caring about her children?

The outside reviewers the province finally appointed to look into what had gone wrong in that and the shaken-baby case concluded - in the words of a simple but telling precis offered by then-community services minister Jim Smith - "the system failed Debra and her family."

Incredibly, when Stevens tried to regain custody of her youngest son after the sexual-abuse charges were laid, FCS opposed the move, dispatching its own lawyers and four witnesses to the hearing to fight to keep the child with the wife of the man who'd abused her children (who was then out on bail).

Supreme Court Justice Walter Goodfellow not only awarded custody back to Stevens, but he also demolished the FCS's claim the woman hadn't known the children were being abused by her husband: "If in fact she did not know, ignorance of such conduct could only be by willful blindness or negligence."

What does all of this have to do with Michael Baker now?

To be fair to Baker, he only joined the board after the courts had convicted the foster father, but that was still a full three years before the province - not the FCS - launched its review.

Knowing what he knows about what went on in Lunenburg, Baker should realize just how fallible children's services can be.

The Finck-VandenElsen case, of course, represents the flip side of what happened in Lunenburg. Instead of under-reacting to allegations of real abuse, the Halifax Children's Aid Society stands accused of over-reacting to vague concerns from Ontario Children's Aid and erroneous information from a not-disinterested ex-husband.

While that may put into clearer perspective the real-life dilemma child-protection workers face every day in trying to determine when a child is at real risk - something even those of us criticizing Children's Aid need to acknowledge - it also strengthens the argument that we need a public inquiry to find out what went wrong in the Finck-VandenElsen case, and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Let's hope it doesn't take another three years this time.

Stephen.Kimber@ukings.ns.ca