I KNOW YOU CAN DO THIS/ Part 350 / For Love and For Justice / Zabeth and Paul Bayne

I know foster parents personally. Over a period of many years I have watched these foster parents that I know do a praiseworthy job of raising someone else's children. I know adoptive parents whose families have been comprised of children born to someone else yet who were integrated with such love that it was seamless. I applaud excellent foster parents and superior adoptive parents. They transform unfortunate life events into redemptive rescues and recoveries.

This blogsite is not designed to castigate or demean foster or adoptive parents and families.

I know competent social workers who dedicate themselves to effective responsible work. Knowing them has caused me to conclude that the dominant motivation for people who embark upon a career in social work is the unmistakable desire to help people with social needs. They desire and they receive training to provide a variety of resources to people with social difficulties within the target population in which they work. They have access to and they may collaborate with other social care organizations and government institutions as mediators and consultants.

We are all proud of our province

This blogsite is not designed to rebuke or humiliate social workers whether at the front line or in a supervisory role.

Listen, I could do this all day. I know as friends, doctors and lawyers and people in law enforcement and I am certain that almost everyone who enters these professions do so with laudable intentions. This blog is not designed to reprimand or offend any who spend their lives in these fields.

However, it may sometimes appear that this blog is merely a vehicle for disseminating vitriol to scar people employed in positions to which I have alluded above, because child protection activities at the heart of these daily written communications have bred such wrath and anguish, not in me personally, but in those for whom and about whom I write. Further, my thoughts provide opportunity for the wounded to respond and they do, often with words directed like a scatter gun at everyone in the fields related to their damaged lives. Everyone who is suspected of being responsible for disrupting and interfering and even ruining a family becomes a target for a verbal blast.

You see, I also know personally, people whose children should never have been held from their parents for as long a period as has been the case. I know parents who have not received from social workers a respect and compassion we would associate with their professions. I know parents who have been handled with disinterest, discourtesy and cruelty by healthcare and legal and law enforcement persons.

So you will have to excuse what appears to be an occasional outburst or an overstep of civility because YOU HAVE NOT BEEN LISTENING. Ms. Polak, Ms. Du Toit, Ms. Turpel-Lafond, Mr. Campbell, Mr. de Jong, Mr. McNeill, Mr. Fitzimmons, Mr. Jensen, Mr. Gulbot, Mr. Humeny, there are parents and children who are not being heard. Attention must be paid to a countless number of parents who are powerless to recover their families because an entire ministry and legal system is charged with a mandate that can be deemed counter productive to the objectives of these disenfranchised parents. In so many of these cases, the best interests of the children is being misunderstood and misinterpreted. I am begging you to begin to listen to their heart cries. This province needs to become proactive, a trail blazer in reform of child protection policy and practice. I know that you can do this.