MCFD TENDS TO LEAP TO LITIGATION

Ray Ferris, my writing colleague for GPS (Advocacy Blog) has written another article to the Times Colonist. He himself had a helpful and rewarding career in the Ministry of Children and Family Development dealing justly for children and parents and caregivers. Later as he saw bureaucratic missteps and bungling he became an outspoken critic as well as an advisor.

Look at his latest piece.

MCFD's DEFAULT LEAP TO LITIGATION

            The Clarke government always seems to be willing to spend more on battling its citizens than on helping them. They leap to litigation with no apparent heed for the cost. We know about the big ones like the years taken to lose a dispute with the teachers, the millions covering up the fired health researchers and the six million spent bailing out Basi and Verk. We will never be allowed to know the true cost of all those millions spent battling against families and innocent children in family court.

   

            Suffice it to say that if a family has its children removed under the CF&CSA, they will need at least $200,000 in legal fees to get them back, regardless of the merits f the case. Several cases have cost far more. Parents need deep pockets, a valuable house or a very generous lawyer. The late Doug Christie worked free for the B. case for two years. Hittrich law advanced well over a million. The director was willing to fight for a year in a losing cause and the case still goes on. A Victoria lawyer gave $700,000 worth of service in a case, where the judge had already returned the children under supervision. The director wasted a full week of Hittrichcourt time just quibbling about details of a continued order. What did that cost the taxpayer?

   

            Then there was the little Metis child SS. She was snatched from her Metis foster home over the pleadings of Ms. Turpel-Lafond and sent to strangers. The loving foster parents and extended family spent nearly a million dollars trying to keep her. How much did the taxpayer spend? Now their Metis adoption of her has been legally validated, the director spends more millions battling them and the child in the courts of the North-West-Territories. Sad.

From Ray Ferris. # 105-3900 Shelbourne St., Victoria V8P 4H8,   250 477 5723

MCFD'S DELIBERATE EVASION OF APPROPRIATE PROCEDURE

MCFD'S DELIBERATE EVASION OF APPROPRIATE PROCEDURE

SS is the 3-year old Metis girl who lived with upstanding Metis foster parents in BC since she was 3 days old. These parents wanted to adopt her. MCFD had other plans and waited 3 years to enact them. In order to accomplish the removal of SS from her B.C. foster parents' home and send her to another foster home in Ontario, the Ministry of Children and Family Development purposely, one might say deliberately, took numerous questionable actions. You will read about them here. An unnamed friend has written the following points that I deem to be worth considering.

MCFD purposely disregarded every criterion for assessing a child’s best interests as specified in B.C. legislation and in the B.C. College of Social Workers Standards of Practice;

MCFD purposely disregarded the rights of the birth parents and their written preferences to which attention should be given as specified in B.C. legislation and in the B.C. College of Social Workers Standards of Practice;

MCFD purposely disregarded the written position of the B.C. Metis Federation that opposed the move;

MCFD purposely disregarded specialized opinions of medical and psychological professionals who advised against the move;

MCFD purposely disregarded the excellent record of care by the BC foster family, and the child’s superior development during her first three years with her foster family;

The MCFD fabricated charges against the foster parents, and created sham procedures by which to justify intolerable delays in finalizing a permanent placement for the child, by moving her from her psychological family in B.C. to another foster home with strangers in Ontario.

The MCFD procedure began as an adoption to the Ontario family until faced with the law forbidding this, and ultimately called placement with new foster parents;

MCFD in spite of the move being a fostering relationship have insisted that the child refer to the new foster parents as “mommy and daddy,” while insisting that her de facto psychological parents in B.C. be referred to only by their first names.

MCFD's confused bureaucratic manoeuvrings validated by B.C. Courts, gives the appearance that the Courts are complicit in this flawed and insulting treatment of a vulnerable child.