JOIN THE CONVERSATION ABOUT AYN AND THE MCFD

Please tell your friends to read this blog on a regular basis, to become interested in AYN'S freedom cause presented frequently here and let them know that they can read more at her Facebook page, as well as other web sites dedicated to her campaign to come home, such as THE WEBSITE http://www.justice4ayn.com/
THE BLOG http://freedomforayn.blogspot.com/
Ask them to JOIN THE CONVERSATION.

Help the Conversation by Promoting, Listening and Speaking Out.

GPS has over 404,000 hits to date. During the days when I wrote about Paul and Zabeth Bayne and there four year ordeal to recover their four children from Ministry custody, the GPS had 1,000 per day. These days, there are significantly fewer. Now granted, part of the reason for the former popularity was that my daily information was fresh and relevant because I was in consistent communication with the Baynes. I knew them personally. That same familiarity has not been true with Derek and Amie, biological parents of Ayn Van Dyk. That's no one's fault. We were not personal friends before I learned of this abysmal injustice. I have not sought to involve myself in their lives and they have not found it helpful to supply frequent informational updates to anyone. I have taken what I could get and aired it here.

Nevertheless, I believe that Ayn's removal from her home by social workers was an ill-considered step back in June 2011, and that it has been allowed to continue far too long for no justifiable reason. You don't keep a child in care, just because you can. At least the legislation was designed to demand genuine reasons to keep a child from parental care and in foster care. Those reasons do not exist. Reasons can be manufactured of course.

Joining the conversation may accomplish something further down the road. Some of you envision a movement of ordinary people with a voice loud enough to demand that legislators and government representatives will listen and respond with changes to the way the best interests of children is understood and administered in this province. This blog became for a time a story-telling forum and a comment platform for countless other people. Other blogs and websites are doing something similar and I applaud them all.

In griping initially, I realized that the developing concerns that I had about child welfare and child protection in particular, at least the way I saw it operative with respect to the Baynes, was more than a single family issue. Hundreds of families have been struggling to recover children from a Ministry that is so powerfully endorsed and equipped and bureaucratic that the Ministry work is invariably adversarial. There could and should be far more grace and compassion. If we could see that, it would evoke responses in kind from clients, rather than the vitriolic reaction of helpless parents and the anguished cries of desperate children.

We are within weeks perhaps of learning that Ayn has been returned home. I don't know. That's what many of us believe we heard from Derek early in the new year.  I will be sure to let you know when the ruling is delivered. In the meanwhile, other sympathetic parents and suffering parents, and supporters, and advocates for change, and Ministry employees, and journalists and interested readers are stopping by at this blog and at so many others. Perhaps a movement can develop, an exponential swelling of genuine concerns to improve services to families and children and parents that is articulated well enough that our government, whoever forms it in the next election, cannot and will not want to ignore.

invite others to JOIN THE CONVERSATION - Perhaps we can be the Transformation