LOSS OF TRUST & NEED TO RESTORE IT / 506

You might say that trust is like a piece of paper. Once it is crumpled, it can't be perfect again. You can flatten the paper and try to make it as straight as possible but it will never be perfect again.

The child protection segment of the Ministry of Children and Family Development in British Columbia has lost the trust of many readers and respondents on this blog site and around this province.

I acknowledge that my experience is limited to the scores of stories that I have heard since I began writing this blog. In so many personal instances, MCFD has failed to protect children, and failed to preserve families, and failed to be honourable, failed to show compassion, failed to be large-hearted.


By most accounts, cynicism and pessimism and despair are the predictable outcomes of engagement with child protective services. Why is that?

All over the world, the refrain is the same. Child Protection is out of control. In a commendable endeavour to safeguard children, extensive power has been vested by governments into agencies where trust should be imperative if a difference is to be made for families to function well. Yet the stories told by so many family members is of trust broken by social workers and their team leaders and directors. These stories are not all fabricated by dysfunctional and impaired human beings. There is truth to many of the parental pleas for help. Parents have been misjudged, mistreated, intimidated, ignored. That is what they are saying in blogs and web sites generating from numerous global civilized and democratically governed locations.

In British Columbia what is now absolutely essential is that the newly installed Premier Christy Clark appointees with fresh eyes for their jobs, audit and analyze the Ministry of Children and Family Development to discern and to increase levels of trust. Trust is one of the most valuable assets any ministry or organization must have. And Minister Mary McNeil and Deputy Minister Stephen Brown, must waste no time prioritizing this and they must not take long doing it. Ministry governance for the past many years has not stayed in touch and owned what the regional offices are producing, creating an accountability vacuum and the consequent deficit of trust not only of the local and regional offices of child protection but of the MCFD altogether.