Summary
By Shari Narine
Windspeaker Contributor
EDMONTON
Don't conduct another review, said Cheryl Whiskeyjack. That’s her answer to the feud that has sparked between the provincial government and opposition parties in establishing terms of reference for a new panel on the child intervention system.
“Another review is not going to help us. It’s just review after review and then things get quiet again and the business of child intervention just continues to go,” said Whiskeyjack, executive director for Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society.
The non-profit organization provides comprehensive family services to Edmonton’s urban Indigenous population.
The push for an all-party ministerial panel – as presented by Human Services Minister Irfan Sabir – or an all-party committee of the Legislature – as proposed by the four opposition parties – is the result of information that came to light following the most recent investigative report from the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate.
Four-year-old Serenity died of a traumatic head injury that followed after being in kinship care. But what the OCYA report didn’t include – and what was later revealed by a local media outlet – was that she had been suffering from serious hypothermia, catastrophic malnutrition, and sexual abuse. The NDP government claimed the matter was being investigated by the RCMP, but it was later determined the RCMP had not received the documentation necessary to investigate. That information was provided in early December. Serenity died in 2014. The OCYA report was released in mid-October 2016.
Now, both the opposition parties and the government have presented their own terms of reference for the all-party panel, the opposition parties are threatening to boycott the process, and Premier Rachel Notley is saying their seats will be held for them if they decide to participate.
But Whiskeyjack says this isn’t the work that needs to be done.
“I think we’ve been down this road before. We’ve had recommendations. I’d like to see us put those into action. I think we have a number of really wise eyes and minds that have paid attention to some of the things that have happened,” she said.
Whiskeyjack points to the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as existing recommendations through numerous investigative reports undertaken by Child and Youth Advocate Del Graff over a number of years, and two special reports released earlier this year by Graff’s office, one of which focused on the needs of Indigenous children in government child care
Whiskeyjack also made reference to a round table review undertaken by Human Services Minister Manmeet Bhullar in January 2014. That round table focused on the issue of serious injury and death of children in care and examined what constituted a meaningful investigation; how to improve transparency and accountability in such investigations; and what information should be shared publicly.
That ministerial action was prompted by a joint investigative report by the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald that revealed 145 foster children had died in government care from Jan. 1, 1999 to June 8, 2013, although government annual reports in that time period had revealed 56 deaths.
Once more, as Whiskeyjack noted, it was government action prompted by tragedy.
“I don’t know where (those recommendations) went,” she said of the roundtable’s work. “They had good discussion, but then they didn’t have that follow through.”
Don Langford, executive director with Metis Child and Family Services Society, agrees with Whiskeyjack’s assessment.
“(The government) has been coming to the community for the last 20 years with focus groups and what not for changes and redesign of children’s services and they spend millions and millions of dollars on this and they get the recommendations and they take them to Cabinet and they’re accepted and they’re not implemented,” he said.
Langford contends that implementing the recommendations gets lost somewhere amongst the staff that works directly with the minister and deputy minister.
“I imagine if I was in the OCYA I would most likely be as frustrated as everybody else is because how many years have we been making recommendations that are just sluffed off at the ministerial level?” he said.
The frontline workers Langford interacts with every day want to see services delivered in a different way, he says, with the focus on families and keeping families together. Presently, Indigenous children make up close to 70 per cent of children in care.
Whiskeyjack says she has made offers to the government to work with them in implementing the recommendations, but has been told “stuff is happening, but its happening at a higher level and when it’s time I’d be looped in. But I haven’t been looped in.”
Such a response makes her both hopeful and frustrated.
Whiskeyjack has been with Bent Arrow for 22 years, having worked in the social services field for three years previously. She says she has seen both small and big changes in the child intervention system over that time.
“Things have changed, but I think the frustration community folks feel is that things haven’t changed enough,” she said. “But the changes that we want to see happen are not going to happen quickly. You’re really talking about turning a big ship, and it really happens in a slow way.”
To do that, she says, someone has to give the authority to allow the workers on the ground to do things differently, instead of focusing on a whole system change.