RELATED NEWS: Children's Aid Watch

Children's Aid Watch

This website has lots of material concerning some Children's Aid agencies in Canada and the damage they cause on families who could do without the "help" and "protection."

Helps to give some perspective to Carline and Larry's ordeals. It's not about these two persons, but about how the governement gets away with destroying families through a morbid need to be in control of the families who happen to come on their radar for whatever reasons...

JEFFREY: ...in case she falls into a coma...

VandenElsen still not eating; living will puts Finck in charge
By Davene Jeffrey
The Halifax Herald Limited
Thursday, May 26, 2005

Carline VandenElsen, who's in Day 5 of a hunger strike, has prepared a living will in case she falls into a coma, supporters say.

Ms. VandenElsen, 42, and Larry Finck, 51, are in custody and will be sentenced next month on several convictions after holding police at bay for 67 hours during an armed standoff in Halifax just over a year ago.

The siege began after police went to the couple's home to enforce a child apprehension order.

Ms. VandenElsen has said she expects to die and has vowed not to eat until an inquiry is announced into her case.

In the meantime, she is drinking liquids and has prepared her will, says friend and supporter Marilyn Dey.

Ms. VandenElsen wants medical intervention used to keep her alive and has given her power of attorney to her husband, states an Internet site devoted to Ms. VandenElsen's hunger strike, which she calls Starving for the Children. Updates are posted at http://starvingforthechildren.blogspot.com.

Following jail policy, officials will not confirm whether Ms. VandenElsen is on a hunger strike. It is also policy to refuse media access to prisoners on hunger strikes, jail superintendent Sean Kelly has said.

Ms. VandenElsen's fast began Saturday, the anniversary of the day the standoff ended, the last day she saw her infant daughter and the day her mother-in-law, Mona Finck, died.

The family had barricaded themselves inside 6161 Shirley St. Mrs. Finck died of natural causes during the standoff.

Throughout the couple's many court hearings following the standoff, they had complained the system was out to get them.

In a letter written by Ms. VandenElsen from the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Dartmouth, and released to this newspaper Wednesday, she continued to rail against authorities, including police, child-welfare officials and lawyers.

"It's the lawyers in the driver's seat, profiteering on the backs of babes in a multibillion-dollar family law system," Ms. VandenElsen wrote.

She and her husband have both referred to the child-welfare system as the buying and selling of babies.

"No one is minding the kiddy store," says the letter. "One-third of the population doesn't know what's going on, a third knows but can't do anything about it and the other third either knows but doesn't care or knows but isn't making (a stink) because they're too busy making (it) rich."

Ms. VandenElsen also recounts a tragic tale she claims was told to her by a fellow inmate who lost her baby to authorities.

"She'd been walking down the street, pregnant. The cops pick her up, tell her there's a warrant for her arrest, take her to the hospital, where she's induced and children's aid are there to take her newborn. Police release her and she never sees her baby again."

Her letter ends "My baby was stolen and I want her back" followed by her signature.

By DAVENE JEFFREY / Staff Reporter

ANDRE: Should the Media Have Asked Questions

=======

Should the media have asked questions? Surely. But should not people now ask questions too?

Can the media help?

All media have ethics. Many have ethics that extend as far as their lawyers are able to keep them out of trouble, which means: they make their money being a billboard for tragedies and frivolity. And for too many yet, tragedies are but news. Now, most serious media also have moral ethics.

Many of those media fail at times to contain their excitement that there is a "story." If they smell a good lead that will help their reputation and the media sales, then the temptation (read: the practice) is very strong of bringing an "exploitable angle" to the public to create and maintain interest (read: the dynamics of the bottom-line).

Thankfully, some media believe in their medium so much, that they will go the extra mile to make sure that not only was the story “news” for them, but that they also covered it with integrity, looking at both sides of the issue. However, it is hoped that it's not just to cover their butt and be able to say: "Oh but we presented both sides of the issue..." when in fact they simple asked questions from both sides. Some really do not present the issues of either sides, but present both sides saying something about their issue, sound bytes statements that were then edited before publishing.

And it is then shared with their readers ansd viewers. And by keeping the story present and giving it visibility, they silently tell people that this particular story is worthy of their attention. Or so they might assume to some degree, otherwise they might not run it at all.

This can be one of the best services they render to the families and individuals who are involved in a tragedy, because it gives readers and the audience the responsibility to think for themselves and hopefully ask the obvious questions anyone would ask. This contributes to inform and helps us in the processing of that information against our values and social consensus.

Serving to preserve our dignity and integrity through the gathering of a momentum as our righteous sense of civic duty compels us daily to get involved in asking for truth to come out and justice to be served, the participation of the media is crucial in informing and inspiring the people, the strength of our democracy, to speak up and ask for accountability on the part of those who make and enforce the law.

When government officials act in a way that seems to be detrimental to the values we have agreed, as citizens and voters, to see protected and nurtured, then we have the right to ask questions, hard questions, annoying questions, redundant questions, until we are satisfied with the answers. And so does the media.

CONTINUED...

JEFFREY: Jailed mother prepared to die

VandeNelsen launches hunger strike to protest loss of baby
by Davene Jeffrey
The Halifax Herald Limited
Saturday, May 21, 2005

Carline VandeNelsen says she's ready to die to change the system.

"I am launching a Starving for the Children campaign," she said in a news release Friday.

The 42-year-old was convicted earlier this month of abduction in contravention of a child custody order, obstruction and a series of weapons-related offences.

She is in custody at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Dartmouth and awaiting sentencing late next month.

She and her husband, Larry Finck, 51, held police at bay for three days a year ago after they barricaded themselves inside Mr. Finck's mother's home at 6161 Shirley St. in Halifax.

The standoff ended when the couple emerged carrying the body of Mr. Finck's mother, Mona, on a stretcher. She had died of natural causes during the standoff.

Ms. VandeNelsen carried their baby strapped to her chest.

Today marks the first anniversary of the end of the armed siege, the day Mrs. Finck died and the day the couple lost custody of their baby.

Today is also the day Ms. VandeNelsen vows to stop eating.

"We're very concerned for her," says supporter Marilyn Dey.

Jail officials have refused media access to Ms. VandeNelsen for fear she will continue the hunger strike.

As of Friday afternoon, prison superintendent Sean Kelly had not received notice from his staff that Ms. VandeNelsen is refusing to eat.

Word of the intended hunger strike was announced through supporters.

A letter released on Ms. VandeNelsen's behalf says she will not eat "until Premier John Hamm and Justice Minister Michael Baker agree to investigate the actions of police and child welfare authorities and the disappearance of her baby."

Ms. VandeNelsen writes: "I do not anticipate my survival. However, I see (no) alternative."

Mr. Baker issued a news release late Friday afternoon saying that unless new information becomes available, he has no plans to order an inquiry into the Halifax standoff.

He said the government will do what it can to "make sure that Ms. VandeNelsen's health is not jeopardized by her actions."

If she stops eating, Mr. Kelly said, his correctional staff will do whatever they can to keep her healthy. The jail has dealt with other hunger strikes in the past, the superintendent said.

It is the jail's policy to call a hunger strike "decreased nutritional intake."

"We've had a number of different scenarios over the years," said the superintendent, who estimates that on average, one inmate per year launches a hunger strike.

Prisoners have devised varying food or liquid intake plans, but most have been short-lived, he said.

Some don't make it past the first skipped meal, he said.

None of the hunger strikers at the facility has ever gone to the point of being in physical danger, he said.

When a hunger strike is launched, prison staff monitor the inmate's health and offer nutritional supplements and counselling, Mr. Kelly said.

In Ms. VandeNelsen's release, she spells out her troubled past with children's aid organizations and family law courts in Ontario and Halifax.

In 2000 she fled with her triplets, then age seven, before a court appearance she feared would cut off access to her children, who now live in Ontario with their father.

Ms. VandeNelsen is scheduled to be in court in Ontario this fall to face a retrial for allegedly abducting those children and fleeing with them to Mexico.

More than a year ago, Ms. VandeNelsen left Halifax after a family court judge granted temporary custody of her newborn to the Halifax Children's Aid Society. When officials were notified that Ms. VandeNelsen had returned to the city with the baby, police went to Mrs. Finck's home to apprehend the infant, sparking the standoff.

The pair were convicted by a 12-member jury after almost 10 weeks of trial and two days of deliberations.

Ms. VandeNelsen and her husband were both convicted of abducting a baby in contravention of a child custody order, obstructing police, possessing an unregistered shotgun and possessing a shotgun dangerous to the public peace.

Ms. VandeNelsen was also convicted of using a shotgun while committing an indictable offence, threatening to use a shotgun in committing an assault on police and careless use of a shotgun.

By DAVENE JEFFREY / Staff Reporter

LASKEY: Public inquiry needed

Siege of Shirley Street: Public inquiry needed
Heather Laskey
Saturday, May 14, 2005
The Halifax Herald Limited

(Original posting with pictures HERE)

Well now, let's get this story right about the Siege of Shirley Street. According to an RCMP officer's testimony reported in The Chronicle Herald early in the trial, this is what we are to understand took place in Halifax last May: It's after midnight when police go to the house with a child apprehension order on behalf of the Children's Aid Society. Inside is a man, his elderly mother, his wife and their five-month-old baby. Members of the RCMP emergency response team position themselves on roofs and inside neighbouring houses in this residential area. They are armed with semi-automatic machine guns. I repeat - semi-automatic machine guns.

The welcome mat isn't out, so they try to break down the front door of the house, by using a battering ram. Yes, a battering ram. Then there's a shotgun blast from inside the house. It whistles over the head of one of the police officers through the window of the opposite house.

You may recall what happened next. Shirley Street was cordoned off; neighbours were awakened, told to hide in their basements and not to leave their houses. The area was crawling with all kinds of police in all kind of get-ups, and all kinds of vehicles. It was as though they were trying to raise the level of public hysteria.

Or put on some kind of a show, or movie set - with the character parts being played by the man and woman. The "action" included the woman breast-feeding the baby on the porch roof, and the emergency response team propelling a robot towards the house loaded with baby diapers, milk and medicine for the man's ailing mother. Her doctor was not allowed to make a house call.

The public, many of whom knew the man who'd grown up locally, remained bemused. There was a general feeling, reflected in the letters column of this newspaper, that the attempt to remove the baby from its parents was simply wrong.

Sixty-seven hours into the drama, the couple emerge from the house. On a makeshift stretcher, they are carrying the body of the man's mother. She, not surprisingly, appears to have died of a heart attack. It is seen that there is a shotgun strung over the man's shoulder; the baby is in a carrier on the woman's breast.

According to the Mountie's testimony at the trial, as the couple carry the stretcher down the block, a dozen police officers converge on them "carrying drawn weapons." The policeman says that they forced them to the ground. "She had her arms wrapped around the baby with a tight grip. She would not release the baby." He said he therefore drove his thumb into the "fleshy area" of the woman's shoulder until she loosened her grip. As the police struggled with her, she cried, "Don't take my baby!"

In what the policeman describes as a "chaotic" struggle, another officer, who is wearing body armour, uses a knife (my italics) to cut the Snugli, with baby inside, from the woman's chest and he carries the baby away. (No description is given of the infant's vocal response.)

The policeman continued, "At this point, we're concerned that she hasn't been properly searched for weapons." She doesn't comply with a police demand to release her arms from beneath her body, so, the Mountie said, one officer "shocked" her twice with a Taser gun. "I've been Tasered," says the policeman, "and it's painful, but it lasts five seconds and it's over."

Here's a question: Had the police gone crazy? For what precise purpose did they intend to use semi-automatic machine guns? Who, for heaven's sake, OK'd the use of a knife to remove the baby from the mother?

There should never have been an armed confrontation. Reflecting on the mock-siege scene, with the trucks and the intelligence centre and multiples of police wearing masks and battle gear, two points were clear not only to me, but to everybody I heard talking about it.

The first was that the police response had nothing to do with the situation in hand - a Children's Aid demand for the baby to be handed over to them at birth (apparently because the woman had previously absconded with her triplets from a previous marriage). And yes, the couple clearly were odd-balls, but that was not an adequate justification.

The second point was that the whole performance - and indeed, it was a performance - obviously had another purpose. The most logical explanation I heard, and with which I concur, is this: The situation was being used as an exercise in the deployment of Emergency Response Teams in urban areas in the event of a real threat from terrorists or a gang of violent criminals. In fact, it was a hysterical melodrama in the worst possible taste.

And while we're at it, will the Children's Aid Society please tell us, the members of the public, what was their justification for demanding the removal of the baby from its mother from the moment it was born. It had better be good. Really good.

We need a public inquiry. And fast. Cost? Not a fraction of what that ill-conceived and dangerous circus cost us last year.

--------------------

Halifax author Heather Laskey has written extensively on the abuse of children in institutional care, including a ground-breaking book (Children of the Poor Clares: The Story of an Irish Orphanage) and articles and radio documentaries on Indian residential schools, and the child immigration movement.

LIGHTSTONE: ... under scrutiny

Child protection system comes under scrutiny
May 22, 2005
Michael Lightstone/Staff Reporter
The Halifax Herald

Expert says laws up to date, despite criticism of cops' handling of standoff

(Original story with pictures: HERE)

A year ago, a three-day police standoff in Halifax involving a five-month-old girl, her parents, her grandmother and heavily armed officers thrust child-welfare issues in Nova Scotia into the spotlight.

During a controversial nighttime effort to enforce a court order authorized under provincial child-protection laws, police were rebuffed by the youngster's despairing parents.

An officer rammed the front door of 6161 Shirley St. about three times before a shotgun was fired at police from inside the house.

The 67-hour siege ended with the death of the baby's 79-year-old grandmother, Mona Finck, due to natural causes.

Larry Finck and his wife, Carline VandenElsen, were eventually charged and recently convicted in connection with the incident. They'll be sentenced in late June.

The couple's child, now 17 months old, is in foster care.

Mr. Finck and Ms. VandenElsen are in custody awaiting their fate. Ms. VandenElsen began a hunger strike Saturday to protest her plight.

She said she sees no alternative.

"My husband and I are the first Canadian parents to be convicted of acting to protect our offspring," she said in a strongly worded release.

Critics of how police and child-welfare authorities handled the case have said the province's child-protection laws need to be changed to keep more families together.

Dalhousie University law professor Rollie Thompson, who helped with the task the last time the legislation had a major revision (1989-90), said Nova Scotia's statutes are in line with other jurisdictions in Canada.

"It was a significant modernization from the 1976 statute," he said.

Mr. Thompson said that compared to Ontario, which made major changes to its law that allowed authorities to take many children from their parents, Nova Scotia is doing well.

"The Ontario child-welfare system is clogged with children who've been taken into care or been placed into care after a court order," he said.

Mr. Finck and Ms. VandenElsen had run afoul of the law before. He's done time for abducting a daughter from a previous relationship in Ontario in 1999; she has triplets from an earlier marriage who are in the care of her ex-husband in Ontario.

Ms. VandenElsen was originally acquitted of abducting the triplets, who are now about 12 years old, but she will be retried in Stratford, Ont., this fall.

That acrimonious custody battle has long played out in Ontario courts. "It is unlikely (the three children) can remember a time when their parents were not fighting over them," a court document says.

In Nova Scotia, aside from well-publicized criticisms of how Halifax Regional Police and child-welfare officials handled the standoff, there have been calls for an inquiry in the case.

Last summer, Ms. VandenElsen urged Canadians to demand a public probe - an investigation rejected by the provincial government - into the neighbourhood episode that made headlines across the country and prompted letters to the editor of this and other newspapers.

"Let us all ask ourselves what we would have done if we had been confronted with the same situation," a Halifax woman wrote this newspaper in July. "Just being awakened in the middle of the night is terrifying enough, without the purpose and the episode that followed."

The siege was also punctuated by unorthodox behaviour by Mr. Finck and Ms. VandenElsen. Police never fired a shot but used a robot to make deliveries to the house.

The couple's contempt for the child-protection and justice systems was front and centre in the form of a sign Mr. Finck placed outside a window. It said All to Hide the Criminal Abuse of Children by Lawyers.

Theresa Brien, a spokeswoman for regional police, said recently the department doesn't "have any reason to believe that we didn't follow proper procedure" during the standoff.

"However, we do conduct an operational review of . . . major incidents, and this would be included in that," she acknowledged.

Ms. Brien said the internal review is ongoing but she couldn't say when it would be finished.

She said operational reviews are done to examine police conduct and learn potential lessons from a particular incident.

Though some Shirley Street residents praised the actions of police, others who followed the event in news reports felt the department mishandled the situation.

"This confrontation surely underscores the need for a searching public debate to examine policies governing the creation and use of militarized police emergency response teams," a Kings County man said a year ago in a letter to this newspaper.

He said such public scrutiny would ensure deployment of emergency response teams "is consistent with fundamental principles of restraint and proportionality in the use of force."

At trial in Halifax, Ms. VandenElsen was described as a protective, loving mother. Court heard her lawyer at the time, Burnley (Rocky) Jones, stop short of saying her cause justified her means.

"It always boils down to the fact that she has this undying deep love and connection to her children, and because she has taken certain actions as a mother she is now facing these serious criminal charges," he said.

On May 12, Ms. VandenElsen and Mr. Finck were convicted of several charges by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court jury. The verdicts came after two days of deliberations following a nine-week trial marked by outbursts and accusations by the defendants.

Nova Scotia's child-welfare and family-services staff deal with about 14,000 families in the province, a government official said last May shortly after the Shirley Street standoff ended.

Of those, some 700 cases a year appear before the courts. About 30 cases involve a youngster being taken into protective custody, the province has said.

The Children and Family Services Act sets out 14 situations in which a child requires protection. But the law stipulates that details of individual cases are to be kept confidential which, critics have charged, makes it difficult to know if the system is working as it should, and who's to be held accountable if it isn't.

Asked about the Finck/VandenElsen case, a spokeswoman with the Community Services Department declined comment.

"This matter is actually still before the courts, on appeal, and because of that fact . . . we're not really able to provide any further information," Terri Green said recently.

Mr. Thompson didn't want to comment on the child-welfare system in the context of the Halifax standoff because, he said, it is so unique.

"It's like talking about a moon that comes through the solar system once every so many hundred years."

He said the case "tells us nothing at the moment. In terms of the broader system and the day-to-day parents that I've represented and other people represent, . . . it tells us nothing about that."

Speaking about provincial legislation, Mr. Thompson said child-protection laws are "a kind of a check" on resources and "the approach" of social workers in the field.

"Legislation isn't what drives the system," he said in an interview. "What drives the system is resources and the approach of child-welfare authorities - the resources they have available to them to do their job, and the general social-work culture and approach in child protection."

Mr. Thompson said in general, "there's not been a demand for massive changes in (child-welfare law) in Nova Scotia at this point."

What's important, he said, is "that on a day-to-day basis what matters is the . . . services available to parents. The statute is not that helpful in that subject."

On May 13, Mr. Finck served notice he wanted their convictions stayed, claiming he and his wife were entrapped by police, but Justice Robert Wright ruled against his motion.

Court documents filed three days later confirmed what many observers predicted would be the next chapter in the saga - the couple are appealing their convictions.

KIMBER: Best interests of ...?

Best interests of the child or Children’s Aid?
By Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News,
February 27, 2005

What is in the best interest of a child? And what is in the best interest of the agency responsible for protecting that child?

Those were the first questions that jumped into my head last week when I learned that the Children’s Aid Society of Halifax now wants the courts to grant it permanent custody of the daughter of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen.

The Society says it believes it must seek permanent care and custody of the child because — in the 12-and-a-half months since it won its first apprehension order for the then-infant in January 2004 — “the parents have become more enveloped in their own theories of conspiracy and system abuse, and have shown a continued and increasing inability and unwillingness to acknowledge mental health issues, parenting concerns and their own involvement in activities which place the child at risk.”

Whoah.

Rewind.

We need to remind ourselves of how we got to this point in the first place.

Start with Finck and VandenElsen. They do each have a history of conflict with child protection authorities, it is true, but neither has ever been convicted of abusing or neglecting their children.

In the heat of custody disputes with their former spouses, both took off with their kids. In 2000, Finck was convicted and served time in jail. That same year, VandenElsen ran off to Mexico with her triplets because she was afraid she was about to lose all access to them. An Ontario jury later acquitted VandenElsen of child abduction, agreeing with her argument that she believed losing contact with their mother would cause the children irreparable harm. But the Crown has since successfully appealed that verdict and VandenElsen is now awaiting a second trial on those charges.

In the fall of 2003, after VandenElsen became pregnant with their child, she and Finck returned to her new husband’s hometown of Halifax, and moved in with his mother.

The event that apparently triggered the wild legal and emotional rollercoaster that is still rolling over both of them was a phone call to Children’s Aid officials in Ontario on Dec. 18, 2003, informing them that Carline was in Halifax, had had a baby — she didn’t until a week later — and that it could be in danger.

The call came from Craig Merkley, VandenElsen’s ex-husband, the one with whom she’d had the bitter custody dispute. Hardly an unbiased observer.

Based — so far as we know now — on that self-interested call and on the Ontario CAS’s blatantly obvious conclusion that Carline had attempted to “have the children align with her throughout a lengthy custody and access dispute” — it relayed a “child protection alert” to Halifax Children’s Aid, which then sought an apprehension order to take the child from its parents.

Children’s Aid went ahead with its application even after interviewing a Halifax doctor who’d helped deliver the baby and had met with the family on three separate occasions before and after. She told them she had “no concerns” about their parenting at all.

Which hardly clarifies why Halifax police officers, carrying a machine gun and battering ram, showed up in the middle of one night last May to execute the CAS order.

While Finck’s and VandenElsen’s refusal to hand over their child in such circumstances — and the bizarre 67-hour standoff that followed — might explain the CAS’s reference in its permanent custody application to the couple’s “involvement in activities which place the child at risk,” it does not even begin to explain why Children’s Aid triggered the chain of events that put the child at risk in the first place.

The more you look under the rock of the CAS’s initial decision-making, in fact, the easier it is to understand why Finck and VandenElsen might become enveloped in “theories of conspiracy and system abuse.” Although those theories — Children’s Aid as an adoption factory for white babies, or in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry to over-medicate children in care for greater profits — might indeed be outlandish, and their blizzard of legal challenges and lawsuits against anyone and everyone even remotely involved in their case may be a time-consuming annoyance to the courts, the reality is that all of this started because of what appears to be the unjustified actions of the Children’s Aid Society.

Given that, you can begin to understand why Finck and VandenElsen might be reluctant to “acknowledge mental health issues [and] parenting concerns” when all they did to trigger this torrent of officialdom was have a baby.

Did Children’s Aid really take this baby because it thought she was in danger? Or as an act of bureaucratic vengeance because VandenElsen and Finck — who already believed the agency had treated them unfairly in the past and had made their feelings known loudly and often — rubbed its workers the wrong way?

And does CAS now want its original custody order made permanent to protect the child? Or itself?

Before any order is granted, we need answers to those questions.


Stephen Kimber

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

KIMBER: The crime of being a pain

The crime of being a pain
By Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News
September 19, 2004

So is Canada’s judicial system now punishing Carline VandenElsen for the high crime of being a legal pain in the ass?

Last week, an Ontario judge turned down VandenElsen’s request to delay until next March her upcoming retrial on charges that, during an ugly custody battle with her ex-husband in 2000, she grabbed her triplets and took off to Mexico.

On the face of it, her request hardly seems unreasonable, or unusual.

Anyone who has spent any time inside a Canadian courtroom will know just how much valuable court time is sucked up as lawyers and judges sweat over their Daytimers and Palm Pilots trying to find a date, any date, often months in the future, when they’ll finally all be in the same place at the same time — and there’ll be an unoccupied court room available for them to use — so they can attend to whatever are the pressing legal matters at hand.

One could argue that it takes way too long to get justice in Canada, but that is another issue and another column.

The simple fact is that delays are the way the system works.

And VandenElsen had good cause to ask for a delay.

Her case in Ontario is set of begin with a pre-trial hearing on Tuesday. But on Friday, VandenElsen was supposed to be here in Halifax in Family Court for the continuation of a hearing to review the status of a temporary custody order involving her baby daughter. That hearing was expected to last into this coming week (although the judge has since ruled, without VandenElsen present, that her baby will, in fact, remain in temporary foster care).

Even with custody off the table, VandenElsen still has plenty of other legal matters on her plate to keep her fully occupied in Halifax. For starters, of course, she and her husband must prepare their defence against a blizzard of criminal charges — and legal counter-claims — relating to a three-day standoff in late May when police arrived at their home in the middle of the night with a battering ram and machine guns to enforce a court order taking their baby away from them.

That case is supposed to go to trial in January.

The charges are serious, and VandenElsen doesn’t have a lawyer. Rocky Jones, who represented her at her preliminary hearing this summer, withdrew from the case because he said provincial Legal Aid doesn’t pay lawyers enough to handle complex criminal matters.

Before her life became an escalating series of legal battles with the established order, it’s worth noting that VandenElsen was a middle-class mother of three, a teacher, a homeowner, someone “who could afford a glass of wine when I wanted one.”

Today she is living rent-free in her late mother-in-law’s home on Shirley Street, barely surviving on the $175 a month she gets from welfare and the supplementary support of friends. She can’t afford a lawyer, can’t even afford a phone, and she gets around — mostly from court house to court house — on a borrowed bicycle.
So how is she supposed to be able to afford to fly back and forth to Ontario for her upcoming retrial and legal hearings in Halifax? (She managed to make last week’s court date in Ontario only because her sister bought the ticket.)

Judge Bonne Wein didn’t answer that when she ordered VandenElsen to be back in court in Stratford this week.

Just as she didn’t explain exactly what it was about this particular case that made it so pressing it had to go forward immediately.

VandenElsen has already been tried once. She was acquitted when a jury bought her argument she was not guilty by reason of necessity, forced to abduct her own children to prevent the courts from denying her permanent access to them. The Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the jury’s verdict, ruling the judge had made a mistake in letting her make the necessity argument in the first place, and ordered a new trial.

So VandenElsen must faces those charges again, but there is no urgency about the matter. Since her original trial, another court awarded permanent custody of the children to her ex-husband. She hasn’t seen them since Sept. 2003.

Even the Crown, in a June letter, said it believed the more serious “Nova Scotia matters should be concluded” before her retrial.

So why the urgency?

Could it be that VandenElsen ruffles too many legal feathers? Last week, she angrily called a Nova Scotia Children’s Aid Society lawyer a bitch and loudly informed the judge in her Ontario hearing she wouldn’t be back for the court-ordered jury selection.


Over the past decade, it’s fair to say VandenElsen has become so embittered by her experiences with Canada’s legal system she fails to show the due deference our courts believe they’re entitled to.

But since when has it been a crime to be a pain in the ass.

Stephen Kimber

KIMBER: Unanswered questions

Unanswered questions from the Shirley Street Standoff
by Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News
Aug 15, 2004

What to make of the latest bizarre twists and turns in the tempestuous, tortured and terrible — not to forget, in these news-less dogs days of summer, terribly titillating — saga of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen?

Last Tuesday, the Halifax couple at the centre of May’s infamous 67-hour Shirley Street Standoff were finally committed to stand trial in connection with the incident. They are each charged with breaching a court order for refusing to hand over their infant daughter to the Children’s Aid Society, forcibly confining their baby to keep her out of the hands of CAS workers and, finally, obstructing well-weaponed police officers — they showed up at Finck’s family home in the middle of the night packing a machine gun and battering ram in their arsenal — attempting to enforce that order.

Finck is also charged with six different weapons offences in connection with a gun shot allegedly fired from inside the house at the beginning of the standoff, even though — as became clear during the preliminary hearing — the Crown no longer believes he fired the gun.

And so it goes.

When they first appeared in court after their arrest, VandenElsen and Finck demanded an immediate preliminary hearing in order to get the facts of their case out quickly (not to mention asking for safe haven in Iraq).

But then last week, in the middle of that very hearing, they suddenly volunteered to waive their right to the preliminary and move directly to trial. Given that preliminary hearings are mainly intended to provide the defence with the outlines of the Crown’s case so the defendants can prepare for the trial, giving up on the hearing before it had concluded seemed… well, unusual.

Even more unusual, however, the Crown opposed the request. In part, that’s because Crown attorney Rick Woodburn wanted to present evidence to convince the judge there were grounds for charging VandenElsen instead of Finck as the trigger-person in the alleged shooting.

But Judge Castor Williams ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to support those charges, meaning the Crown is still prosecuting Larry Finck for firing the shot they no longer believe he fired.

Uh, OK…

In the midst of all this, we learned from the papers that Finck’s mother — who died of natural causes inside the barricaded house during the incident and whose body was then carried out by the couple on a stretcher when they ended the siege — had bequeathed Finck a grand total of just five dollars out of an estate worth three-quarters of a million dollars.

Tee-hee…

It is easy — too easy — to get caught up in the weirdness of all of this and lose sight of the important issues at the heart of this case.

Should Children’s Aid have been given a court order to take custody of Finck and VandenElsen’s infant daughter in the first place? Did Halifax Regional Police’s handling of the initial stages of this incident help provoke the confrontation that led to the standoff.

Both VandenElsen and Finck have a “history;” each has faced charges of abducting their children from previous relationships during custody battles. But there has never been any indication in anything I’ve heard or seen to suggest either of them was ever an abusive, or negligent, or otherwise unfit parent.

So why would Children’s Aid want to take their new baby away from them? Hiding behind its usual “protection of privacy” shield, the Society has had little to say about the circumstances that led them to seek the order but we have learned, as a result of the court proceedings, that it followed a call from VandenElsen’s ex-spouse, the one with whom she had the custody battle. Hardly a disinterested party.

And the police? While the force deserves credit for its patience and restraint during the standoff, it has now become apparent that the initial police actions — arriving in the middle of the night, heavily armed, and using a battering ram to try and gain entry to the house — may have been at least as responsible as VandenElsen and Finck for the way events so quickly spiralled out of control.

Carline VandenElsen is absolutely right. We do need a public inquiry into the way Children’s Aid and the Halifax police dealt with this case from the beginning. Because we won’t find the answers to the most important questions from the court cases.

Stephen Kimber

KIMBER: Shirley Street Stand-Off

By Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News,
May 30, 2004

The recent 67-hour standoff between Halifax Regional Police and a couple who refused to hand their infant daughter over to the custody of the Children’s Aid Society showcased the former at its professional, level-headed best but has raised troubling questions about the role of the latter in controversial child protection cases.

Start with the police.

The police had little choice but to enforce a Jan. 15 apprehension order for Mona Clare VandenElsen, the then three-week-old daughter of Lawrence Finck and Carline VandenElsen. But when officers went to the family home in late January to get the child, VandenElsen had already disappeared with her daughter.

Police learned earlier this month that the mother and child had returned to Halifax, so officers were dispatched to the house again at midnight on Wed., May 19. Though one can certainly question the wisdom of trying to serve such an order in the middle of the night, the police were legitimately concerned — based on their own experience in January as well as the couple’s track record in violating custody orders in previous relationships — that one of them might take off with the little girl again.
This time, however, the people inside the Shirley Street house refused the officers entry, barricaded the door and, at one point, when police tried to enter a second time, allegedly fired shots out the window.

That was the beginning of a tense two-and-a-half days of SWAT teams, neighbourhood evacuations and ongoing, seemingly never-ending negotiations. Punctuated at one point by a police robot improbably delivering diapers to the house and at another by the couple’s impromptu appearance on the home’s roof to denounce Children’s Aid and breastfeed the baby. But as Halifax Police Const. Kevin McLellan put it to reporters at one point during the siege: “As long as we’re talking… we are moving forward.”


The police were smart enough to recognize that this was not a situation that required the recklessness of Rambo so much as the patience of Job. On Friday night, their staying power was rewarded when the standoff ended two days and 15 hours after it began — bizarrely but without additional violence. (While Finck’s elderly mother, who was inside the home during the standoff, did die during the siege, officials say it was of natural causes.) We owe the police a debt of gratitude for the way they handled what could easily have turned into a horrible tragedy.

But, that said, what are we to make of the Children’s Aid Society’s decision to seek custody of the child in the first place?

The Society isn’t commenting on the specifics of the case so we’re left with more questions than answers, the most important of which is this: was this apprehension order really necessary?

There’s no question both Finck and VandenElsen have track records of violating court orders in child custody disputes.In 2000, Finck was convicted of abducting his four-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, and spent time in jail. That same year, VandenElsen fled to Mexico with the triplets from her first marriage because she was afraid she was about to lose all access to them. An Ontario court had already awarded custody of the children to her ex-husband and a decision on her own future access was pending. A jury later acquitted her on the abduction charges, accepting the defence argument that VandenElsen feared the children would be irreparably harmed if they lost all contact with their mother. That decision has since been overturned and a new trial ordered.

Reading between the lines of the clippings concerning those cases, neither Finck nor VandenElsen seem easy to like. “Ms VandenElsen” wrote one judge, “has chosen to perpetuate her fixation with her own victimization.” The judge in Finck’s case said he was “volatile and unpredictable… [and] has taken on the mantle of the obsessed and seems to have forsaken reason.”The one thing I didn’t find in any of those news stories, however, was any suggestion that either parent had deliberately harmed any of their children (except, of course, insofar as the custody battle itself represented a kind of harm to them.)

Parents involved in bitter child custody battles often feel like victims, often become obsessed and, occasionally, even do stupid things they believe to be in their children’s best interests..VandenElsen and Finck have certainly both done what appear to be irrational, perhaps even illegal things in what may have been misguided attempts to right what they see as wrongs being done to their children. The courts have, or are, dealing with those cases.

But does that mean VandenElsen and Finck represented such an imminent danger to Mona Claire that Children’s Aid had no choice but to swoop in and take their child from them?“When any court formally terminates a parent-child relationship, that is an event that is inevitably sad,” Mr. Justice Grant Campbell wrote last year in denying VandenElsen custody of her three older children. “A court must take such a drastic step in only the most extreme of cases.”

Was this really one of those cases?

Or, in this case, is Finck and VandenElsen’s “perceived victimization” more real than perceived?

Stephen Kimber

:: "News Room Watch" ::

This site is called "News Room Watch" because it will present media clippings addressing situations having to do with problems regarding child and family services in Canada, and accountability of institutions.

It is done with public interest in mind, as we are aware of many families asking questions and requesting transparence in the methods used to insure proper and efficient protection to children and families in Canada through the present official regulations.

Email your findings at: andrelef1@hotmail.com

Andre Lefebvre