What may be required in Victoria perhaps with several ministries but most certainly with Ministry of Children and Family Development is an organizational review not conducted internally but impartially by consultants equipped to work with MCFD to achieve long-term sustainable success.MCFD is under pressure to deliver operational effectiveness because of recurring incidents and prior public inquiries that attract media coverage. Deteriorating public confidence and changing public expectations are imperatives that demand some new approaches to child welfare work. In all probability such a review will inform structure, culture, processes, dynamics, human capital and behaviour and assess their alignment and coherence. Although it was thought that regionalization of services would improve performance, that has not been achieved as I observe. It was intended to provide a collaborative community approach to child welfare. Presently, I don't perceive MCFD in the region as a community, or a grassroots oriented service organization. That does not mean regionalization cannot be effective. A collaborative approach to child welfare is not happening presently except as the regional MCFD, foster parents, legal representatives and contracted superintending agencies collaborate together.
Institutional change takes time and requires purpose and resolve as well as the commitment of necessary human and organizational resources. In this family specific Ministry, parents and children and youth must be consulted and their responses valued and incorporated in order to customize a process that drives good change forward. What I believe is absent at the moment is a consensus for change. Affected families, parents and children whose lives have been uprooted sometimes unnecessarily, as well as a growing segment of the population is sensing and expressing a need for change. What will be required is the buy-in by change-makers, key influencers, leaders with leverage, policy and decision makers. All these need to capture a vision for a more satisfactory future for MCFD and B.C.'s family welfare. They are the ones who can translate vision into reality.
One of the critical improvements that I believe must happen when these minds come together is fitting the right people with the vision and commitment into positions and retaining these people. MCFD needs the right people with the right skills in place and when I hear of lives bungled by the ineptitude of MCFD management and case workers I conclude we have not got that. A superior skill and performance management system is imperative to find the right people and to align them with the strategic altruistic objectives of the Ministry. Does that mean some people will have to be released? Yes. Performance reviews that are regular and thorough and skill building must be incorporated into this Ministry. Why do talented people leave the Ministry? For many reasons I am sure but often because some supervisory and management people cannot be improved or changed. Perhaps they should not have had the job in the first place. It happens.
I am convinced that an organizational review done in a timely manner and a sustained relationship with a human capital consulting firm could result in a high performance MCFD team in each region, where individual contributions are maximized and effectiveness and commitment increased to a high level of compassionate, relational, cooperative, solution-based, child protecting, family preserving, cost effective and case load reduced work.
Nothing really matters until the government is prepared to surrender general child removal authority to its people.
ReplyDeleteNobody in his right mind would give his government such oppressive and barbaric power that could trample a very fundamental human right.
That is fundamentally what is wrong. MCFD is allowed to violate all the normal rights given to any accused, including disclosure rights, rights to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Even the way that they can spy on people legally. It is wrong to the core.
ReplyDeleteAs long as people think big brother should have the right to take their children, and as long as people give big brother that right, nothing will change.
ReplyDeletePeople have to make an existential shift in their view of government, freedom, security and the notion of protection before anything will change.
Unfortunately, too many people still believe that the government is there to protect them from everything and anything. Too many of us want to live in a nanny state, and think that is what will give us security. Too many people are still duped by an evil "niceness." This is the kind of security and "niceness," however, which always leads to tyranny.
As Plato put it:
“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector.”
Plato, Greek Philosopher, 428BC—348BC
WHY haven't the child abuser (i.e.., the researchers or "contractors") who subjected young boys to violent rape narratives, while forcing them to look at naked pictures of babies and children, been charged yet?
ReplyDeleteDon't assume these young boys were all vicious rapists - the MCFD lies, all the time. And some of these boys may have been "at risk" of committing a "sex crime" - and what is a "sex crime" - is kissing a little girl your age a sex crime, yes it is according to some.
Just a quick note before I continue with the CF&CSA later today.
ReplyDeleteCREDIT DUE TO THE MINISTRY OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES.
My morning paper reported that the ministry has the second highest compliance rate in answering requests for freedom of information. They delivered information on time in 97% of cases.
The worst ministry was the ministry of housing and social services. This gives the MCF something to be proud of and hopefully the incentive to do as well in other areas.
This is essentially the Bureaucratic equivalent of another Gove report, and we know the outcome of that equally well-meaning set of recommendations.
ReplyDeleteWhen you talk of outside review, you are really talking about an accountability process. You want those people who are found wanting to be executed for their crimes, it is just being said more nicely using "MCFD" language.
I have to ask how such a top-down remedial approach would help prevent a further repeat of the Baynes situation. Police, who can put people in jail, and can temporarily remove children, would not have removed the Baynes children if the decision was left up to them. Civilian bureaucrats made this decision and force unnecessary police involvement. This is a mischief charge if an individual did this.
Such massive one-shot review processes are expensive and would need to span at least a year or two of time. I'm not clear on the immediate benefits of this in light of past review outcomes. MCFD touts itself as an organization that states that it continually reviews its operations. In their mind, it can now label itself as "responsive" in shutting down the 20-year Penile testing program when someone complained.
MCFD is like a Provincial police service, with the foster homes being the equivalent of jails for children. They are not a developmental service organization as are schools, and I'm sure Ray Ferris can comment further on the lack of MCFD's ability to prove "development." MCFD tacked on the Development to their title, possibly to disguise their true nature.
MCFD does not have a mandate or the will to provide developmental services to children while in care (hidden recording of senior bureaucrat verifies this), schools do that job.
What exactly do we get for the money and human resources MCFD uses? Province-wide, there are 30,000 calls yearly, and they get a 1.4 billion dollar budget and there are about 1,300 social workers. The Vancouver police alone gets about 250,000 calls each year and their budget is $290 million using about 1,700 employees.
Police are still the only front line resource that can respond immediately to a child in immediate danger, so as the previous commenter pointed out. Stated another way, MCFD represents a significant redundancy to police, populated by less qualified people that are error prone, without integrity and far more expensive to operate on a per "client" basis.
MCFD is a tail wagging the dog organization. There is an embedded subculture within the organization that essentially feeds information to bureaucrats in a manner that ensures resulting decisions support the status quo. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
External resolution is indeed needed, however, and not just a bureaucratic feel-good review process. Test cases like the Baynes situation need to trigger a public review to examine "what went wrong" and the people charged with the review need to be completely independent of the MCFD, and have the power to subpoena people for examination.
Essentially, you will get the exact same review process as this blog suggests, as administrative and executional failings would still be identified and a remedy suggested, but it would be "on demand" and triggerable by events.
In essence, this would be introducing a level of accountability. This would be more akin to a legal process where someone sues, a discovery and examination process leads up to the trial, and the judge gives reasons at the end, assigning a penalty as appropriate. Change has to result or the problem repeats itself indefinitely.
There is a judicial review people can request, but not an operational review "on demand," which is what is needed. People that should be able to request this type of review are those who get their children back, and the span of time before this happened was measured in years. Meaning, everything could have been dealt without courts and much sooner, so the questions would be why didn't this happen.
You may get an occasional admission from an MCFD representative that in rare cases, such violations of human decency do occur, but these will come with a qualifying explanation that these situations are quickly remedied and are rare as hens teeth.
ReplyDeleteUntil the true scope of this Ministry's failings are identified in indisputable black and white numbers and show the real life tragedies that go with these numbers, the public cannot demand correction.
The official picture we are presented of MCFD is that overall, the good the organization does outweighs the bad.
A Responses to Anonymous August 6, 2010 10:57 AM
ReplyDeleteYes, a highly accountable ministry is what I would hope for, and yes I believe that those who cannot commit to this approach should be released, and Yes I know that another review would likely cost an exorbitant amount of money but something must be done and No I have no idea whether a review would accomplish what we want. So where does that leave us? Short of someone or some committee being charged to discover and uncover and recommend changes, why will anything change? I am no happier with the bureaucracy than you are. What I feel to be essential to a review that makes the changes all of you are advocating is the involvement of a different sort of committee member than at other times. We place wordsmiths and legalists and politicians and bureaucrats in charge of these reviews. We leave out the voices of parents and children, specially those belonging to people who have first hand experienced the mistakes within the system.
NOW HOWEVER, YOU HAVE COME UP WITH A SUGGESTION IN WHICH I HAVE INTEREST AND OTHERS MAY TOO. BUT I WOULD LIKE YOU TO ELABORATE. YOU SAID, “External resolution is indeed needed, however, and not just a bureaucratic feel-good review process. Test cases like the Baynes situation need to trigger a public review to examine "what went wrong" and the people charged with the review need to be completely independent of the MCFD, and have the power to subpoena people for examination....External resolution is indeed needed, however, and not just a bureaucratic feel-good review process. Test cases like the Baynes situation need to trigger a public review to examine "what went wrong" and the people charged with the review need to be completely independent of the MCFD, and have the power to subpoena people for examination.”
Ron;much as I was tempted to engage in todays topic, I decided to carry on with the outcome of Gove and the CF&CSA. The new act was being floated during the Gove Inquiry and had been passed before he completed his report. What happened.
ReplyDeleteWhat happened in my view was entirely predictable and disastrous. The Act was so long and complicated that the ministry management decided to take 72 of their most experienced and skilled child welfare workers out of active duty just to study the new act and to try to figure out how to make it work. (It must have been very challenging, because it took me over two hours to read the act and nearly as long again to write a critique.) Anyway the idea was that the trained workers would subsequently act as mentors to other staff. The only problem was that a number of them managed to get assigned to other duties. Another predictable thing happened. The lawyers and judges had to call a halt to things while they studied the act and tried to figure out how to make it work. The court process virtually ground to a standstill and people could not get their day in court. A logjam took place and the courts have not yet recovered. Under the old act things seemed to progress within reasonable time frames and in my day no cases exceeded statutory time limits. The judges would not have tolerated it.
There were generally far fewer lawyers involved and he process was much less adversarial and prone to negotiation. The CF&CSA could not have done a better job if it had been designed to provide revenue for lawyers. So here was the first tsunami. laying waste to rational child protection work. The second was soon to follow.
Not long after the CF&CSA came into being, the Gove report came out and as a result the child welfare services were peeled off the social service ministry and amalgamated with bits and pieces of other ministries. It was utter chaos.
Bear in mind that Gove himself had remarked that previous re-organisations created bedlam. He identified as lack of fundamental knowledge and skills as being evidenced in the Vaudreuil case--not just at the worker level but among the managers and supervisors. He did not blame the workers because they had received no training. It was also here that the Gove report showed the naive outlook of a commission stacked with too many academics and theorists Gove correctly identified core training as a crying need. He said it should include studying the interministry handbook. Nothing wrong with that, except the interministry handbook should only be a miniscule part of core training. He also recommended that training be givn in recognising foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) Nothing wrong with that except what is really needed is a thorough grounding in the development of alcohol and drug abuse and recovery and what a protection worker needs to know about this topic. FAS is just one small part of this. Gove's was a rather simplistic approach. In a later blog, I think I will cover what should be covered in core training. (Or I could just paste in chapters from my book!!)
Before I go on to my next part of the blog, I think I will tell you a couple of little stories, which show the problem. The local foster parents association had asked me to assist with a foster home closure which they thought unfair. The foster parents had taken 13 mostly difficult children over a period of nine years and had received good assessments. A policeman said that a boy in the home had committed a crime and the parents were shielding him. The home was promptly closed. No matter that somebody else got convicted of the crime, they would not back down. In ordering the closure of the home the director had breached policy, and agreed protocols. She also admitted having breached a section of the new act.Her excuse was that she had not yet received her training.(NOr had I for that matter!!)
I will continue the stories in my next blog
My next story took place some years later. The situation was that a woman asked me for help. She was in a common law marriage with a man who had custody of his two children. His ex-wife had a very active alcohol addiction and gained a police record for her frequent violent behaviour. The court had ordered access on a frequent basis, but the problem was that she was often drunk and the children got frightened. Eventually the older child just refused to go. The ex-wife complained to the court. The parents had a lawyer, but he said there was not much he could do and advised them to see someone on the childrens ministry.Over the course of a year they had several interviews with a counsellor. I went with them to see him.
ReplyDeleteHe was a man who had about thirty years as a district supervisor before retiring. He had come back as a temporary worker. He agreed that the mother was an alcoholic and a hazard to her children, but there was not much he could do. I took out my act and read the sections to him which said he had an obligation to try to help a parent to protect his own child. He said that was just my interpretation of the act. I said that I was just reading the actual words. He responded in two ways. First he said they went by policy and not by the law. Second that he was a lawyer and not qualified to interpret the law. I said no interpretation needed it speaks fo itself. He said they do not take sides in custody disputes. I told him I was only asking him to take the side of the child, which was his job. I then read him the section of the act which says the director can act as an intervener and petition the court, if it is considered that one of the parents is a danger. Ah said he, my supervisor would never support me. For good measure he added that they only used this section where the father was the danger and never when the mother was the danger. At this point I realised that the man was useless and terminated the interview.
We did get there. I learned that the mother had an extensive police record and told the parents to instruct their lawyer to get it and enter it in the custody court. They reported back that the lawyer was told by the police that this would breach privacy laws. I told them to instruct their lawyer to subpoene the record. This he did and as soon as the judge saw the record he suspended the mother's access until she could prove six months abstinence.
I assume you see my point in telling these stories? What does it matter what is in the law if the people with the authority just do not want to do their jobs. The counsellor did not know, nor care about his responsibilites and ran them around for a year. I cannot imagine what the lawyer was thinking. Why should I have to teach him his job by remote control. A year of unnecessary stress to these parents. NOTE THAT THIS WAS NOT AN ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEM AND NOT A LEGAL PROBLEM IT WAS A PROBLEM OF POOR PERSONNEL. wHAT IS THE QUICK FIX FOR THAT? It matters not a jot what the is in the law and it does not matter what the administrative structure is. Good staff will make any system work. Bad staff will wreck it.
The next administrative fix was precipitated by the death of a little girl called Cherie Charlie,which brought on the Hughes report.I will conclude this on Monday and go on to show you a pland for core training.
I think we need to go back to the old days when people showed caring. I read a 'low five' in a community newspaper and someone bothered to write in to complain because they thought a baby was not well enough dressed. A self identified CPS person wrote in with the # to call to complain about parents. She wrote that even a wrong comment that a parent makes to a child can be called in and there is no consequence for the caller. Many examples of good reasons to call were given and it was set out as an obligation to report on parents.
ReplyDeleteI was very upset when I read all this. I think that now that people have cell phones, they are taking advantage and losing their values.
The right thing to do obviously, is if you see a baby who appears cold, give the parents a blanket, or talk to them directly.
It is evil to hide in your warm car and call MCFD on them from your cell phone.
I have just started reading 2000 pages of the most ridiculous lies about me which is called my file. Someone phoned in that they thought I was talking to myself and it is an 'intake' on my file. I asked a lawyer about the cost and process of cleaning up my 'file'. I was told it would cost me $20,000 to $60,000. Anyone have any experience with this type of thing?
ReplyDeleteIn software development, one needs to insert checkpoints within a software program in order to monitor normal functions without affecting normal operation in order pick off information to analysis. Sometimes, parts of the program must first be fixed in order to properly collect useful information from different areas.
ReplyDeleteSecret operations within MCFD such as the penile testing process would easily be uncovered by a team of forensic systems analysts, accountants, and experienced social workers, and even parents.
One way is to track how each penny is spent. Uncover those "general" and "miscellaneous" accounting categories. It might take millions of dollars over a few years just to properly map the organization and figure out what check points to install.
However, if you see that a handful of family interventions can incur millions of dollars of needless expense, this justifies the magnitude of such an approach. It has to take several years, because many typical cases parents endure span several years. The examination process needs to span major transition events such as ministerial and other regime changes.
There needs to be the same freedom to examine other ministry's as well, such as the Attorney general, Health, Education, Housing -- you name it. There can be no barriers to the information gathering process, it cannot be limited to just the one ministry because there exist many links to others. Social workers have broad powers, so the investigators have to have far greater powers.
Real-time information gathering and reporting systems are the mainstay of most large businesses. MCFD may have a lot of this in place already.
Information collection systems likely have to be cleaned up first, so that the data that is collected is "clean". The current dogs breakfast manner how social workers record information is atrocious. Bits of paper, handwritten notes that are never transcribed to computer, emails on paper, the odd bits of recordings of interviews, all separate and unsearchable, is useless, therefore must be turned into something of value.
Meetings with parents need to be recorded (without social workers knowing) and later cross-checked for accuracy. Interviews of social workers need to be conducted immediately after questionable risk assessments are recorded. This information needs to be recorded into record keeping systems, collated and analyzed.
In the same way, an investigative team needs to quietly insert people at various points within the MCFD organization. The people being monitored cannot in any way interrupt or intimidate the workers in order not to change their normal day-to-day procedures.
If a parent reports they are being monitored, their social worker and foster parent needs to be shadowed to see if someone issued an order. A sting operation might be necessary to get the parent to deliberately violate a restraining order and see how MCFD operatives discovered how the order was violated. If the local police can orchestrate such sting operations to unmask criminal organizations, the same sort of power is needed to unmask the suspected nefarious activities of child protection.
Others have suggested other approaches that are simple by comparison. Begin a new political party and simply outlaw child removals by civilians is one example. Double the number of social workers is suggested by another. Reinstitute residential schools, and call them "daycare" if you will, just do a better job screening applicants. Forbid the removal of aboriginals and stop subsidizing their removals.
The "how" of this is immaterial. If there is a will, there is a way. Necessity is the mother of invention. A cancerous disease exists, a cure is required. Take your pick.
Quite simply, there exists a problem that needs to be fixed. Visionaries such as the Georgian Senator Nancy Schaefer recognized the vast scope of the problem and were undeterred, and began the huge task to publicize the problem and fix it, one parent at a time.
To Ray Ferris
ReplyDeleteI believe the Native toddler is Sherry Charlie, not Cherie.
Summary of Points made today in all your comments:
ReplyDelete1. The extent of child removal authority must be modified because as it stands, it violates human rights.
2. MCFD is authorized to violate rights by spying, believing call-in information, refusing to disclose the personal information that it says justifies its actions.
3. We the people must shift our thinking about government from optimistic, unqualified trust to cynical suspicion that demands answers and changes.
4. Those responsible for the penile research should be charged with criminal offence.
5. NEWS: MCFD has the second highest compliance rate in answering requests for freedom of information delivering information on time in 97% of cases.
6. A one-time review is too expensive, takes too long and the outcome while revealing is usually disappointing in what it ultimately accomplishes.
7. MCFD is involved in family mischief not family development.
8. Examine this disparity: MCFD in BC receives 30,000 calls annually, has 1,300 workers and a budget of 1.4 billion, whereas RCMP receives 250,000 calls annually, has 1700 employees and a budget of only $290,000.
9. Each time a test case like the Baynes results in a judge's ruling to return the children to parents, there should be an automatic 'operational' review done by people entirely independent of MCFD and with power to subpoena people to testify and with power make change happen.
10. CFCSA might as well have been designed exclusively for lawyers' revenues because they stay busy since the document is so long and complicated. The old act moved cases according to statutory time limits.
11. The Gove Report fashioned by a commission of academics and theorists identified lack of knowledge and skills among workers, managers and supervisors but rendered a simplistic approach to the recommended core training needed to fix the mess.
12. It is too easy with cell phones and anonymity to call in a concern and created a world of grief for innocent people.
13. MCFD presented this person with a 2000 page intake file documenting its case and in order to “clean up” / refute and remove improper material is estimated to cost $20,000 to $60,000 in legal fees.
14. Information collection systems likely have to be cleaned up, so that the data that is collected is "clean".
15. Meetings with parents need to be recorded (without social workers knowing) and later cross-checked for accuracy. Interviews of social workers need to be conducted immediately after questionable risk assessments are recorded. This information needs to be recorded into record keeping systems, collated and analyzed.
16. Begin a new political party and simply outlaw child removals by civilians is one example.
17. Double the number of social workers is suggested by another.
18. Quite simply, there exists a problem that needs to be fixed.
19. the Native toddler in Ray Ferris' story was Sherry Charlie.
Simply presenting the link to the reports requires considerable time by the reader to go through the total of nearly 50 pages. I would be helpful to generate pull-quotes out of each report that illustrate several doctors have identical observations even though they have not see each other's reports.
ReplyDeleteA common theme I observed in these reports was remarkable disbelief at the time elapsed and repeated hospital trips, and finally the SBS diagnosis by the one doctor and steadfast refusal to accept the parent's explanation.
In order to facilitate analysis, I OCR'd the reports (optical character recognition by Adobe Acrobat) so they could be word-searched. Court transcripts are also similar word-indexed so that an occurrence of key words list all the pages on which they occur.
In analyzing large quantities of information, it is necessary to think like a judge and decide how to distill down information to its most saliant components. Judges have to see the forest and not be confused by individual trees.
It is also necessary to take a devil's advocate position. Where are the Ministry reports and their complete opinions on which the information from these reports derived? The mere absence of this infers the Baynes are intent weighting data in their favour and are providing a single view -- their view of the desired outcome.
The opposition can look at the same information and state the Baynes "purchased" the information from another country in the same way university degrees are obtained. The response is to state that if the Baynes could afford it, they would, but they just happened to sell their house and piano, their livlihood in the mistaken belief they had enough money to address the Ministry early on. The Ministry has no such constrains, and flew in their "out of country" expert. Fortunately, the fellow made a fool of himself on the stand with lack of preparation and in revealing last minute information was supplied to him that illustrates attempts by MCFD to further skew opinion against the Baynes.
The other common argument is these doctors listed are distant, all in the U.S. and were not present to view and examine the child personally. It is necessary to anticipate, and use this excuse against the Ministry when they present the radiologist this coming monday. This puts stress on the accuracy and depth of recorded information.
If we have a picture of a string of a dozen country bumpkin Canadian doctors who collectively do not have the wherewithal to order ANY investigative scans within moments of the first visit rather than weeks later, what information they record is likely to be incomplete (as is indicated by comments by some doctors). It's a dogs breakfast.
In courts, unless these people are successfully designated as experts, it is generally not permissible to have the reports stand on their own as weighted information (in the same sense Colbourne attempted to have herself designated as an unquestionable 'expert' and therefore an 'officer of the court' (which is also seen as a 'without motive' or 'without vested interest' view of any data they present).
The strategy used by the Baynes in order to avoid having each and every doctor fly in to testify is to have one doctor testify and reference salient reports and enter them as evidence as if they were his own. I believe other experts have, or will teleconference, another cost effective means of bringing their visage in front of the judge.
Now, keep in mind these are civil, not criminal proceedings. Much of the extraordinary length and breadth of effort is normally reserved for high-value civil lawsuits where there is significant financial reward (or protection from a large expense) at the end of the court case. The "price" and/or "reward" is the lives of three children.
Truly, this is a reprehensible situation for anyone to have to go through.
My name is Blake and I and my common law partner have been adverly affected by the unethical and illegal treatment of us regarding the seizure of our child.
ReplyDelete#1. It was stated that Magda (My spouse) was displaying and throwing knives in a Alberta Child Protective Service report made by Dr. Matsella. This was untrue as stated in the report.
#2 My family was told to completely dis-associate themselves from Magda. Initially this was done. The reasons for this were vague, unspecific and without grounds.
#3 When the child was born, Magda was restrained against her will. This is a Charter rights violation. Next, an interpreter was not provided. Again, this is a Charter rights violation.
#4 No diagnosis was properly made at the time. The diagnosis that was provided was by a Doctor that had never performed an phschiatric evaluation on a person who had just had a C-section birth and then had their child removed. This is only the beginning. I will continue the tale of this outrageous assault on our rights as Canadian citizens.