SARA JANE WIENS’ LAWSUIT

Isabella would be almost four years old now.  She is dead. In 2011 her mother Sara Jane Wiens was an Ontario resident who had fled to B.C. to escape an abusive ex-boyfriend. Her lawyer Jack Hittrich, says that the B.C. Ministry falsely alleged that Wiens was fleeing a child protection order in Ontario. He customarily has substantial reason for the things he says.

In Hittrich’s words, “She is told that she cannot parent because she poses a risk to this young child…The child is scooped from her. There’s no attempt made to work with her to reunite her with her child. They then completely abdicate their responsibility to monitor the foster home and attend to these injuries.”

Sara Jane Wiens was 21 years old when her baby, two-month-old Isabella was removed from her by MCFD in August 2011 and placed in foster care. At the time, Wiens was deemed unfit to care for Isabella. 21 months later in March 2013, her baby died in her crib while in that care home, a service that the government deemed was in the child's best interests.

ASSISTED SUICIDE AND AN ARTIST'S BRUSH STROKES

Words applied to a topic are like brush strokes applied to a canvas.  A commendable interpretation of a subject requires understanding of the theme and understanding of what words do.  Set ten artists at their easels to paint an identical subject and the result will be ten distinct renditions. Ten pairs of artists' eyes uniquely observe details and depth of field and darks and lights and call for personalized selections of brushes, colours and strokes. Ten opinions about Doctor Assisted Suicide assess the February 6, 2015 Supreme Court of Canada judgement individually. The words that are chosen to speak about this are critical to the social outcome. 

Parliament must within the next twelve months develop a legislative response. None of the three major political parties has expressed a position on this highly sensitive matter. Thousands of citizens, journalists, preachers will express a position.

An artist in good health and with vitality, asked to paint an interpretation of life and death, may spend a month developing two pleasant panels, one depicting a newborn infant in the arm of an ecstatic mother clad in pink and another panel featuring a flag at half-mast against a bright blue sky. A different painter, faced with the same art challenge but who is living with incapacitating pain and who can no longer focus for sixty seconds on the art that once filled his mind and life, might take a house painter's brush and slap one half of a canvas with black to represent life, and the other half with radiant yellow to represent death.  

 

It will be crucial for legislators, citizens, journalists, and preachers to understand why the second artist painted as he did. It is imperative that words are chosen that are precise and that appropriately respect, eternal values, Canadian charter rights, personal autonomy, and sanctity of life.  The painting rivals the complexity of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The Actual Supreme Court Judgement

NEWBORN TAKEN FROM MOTHER & DIES WITHIN 4 WEEKS

Manitoba Child and Family Services seized Matias de Antonia at birth, and on March 27th, he died while in foster. The baby’s mother Maria Herriera’s family roots are in Colombia and their first language is Spanish. She has been in Canada for six years and she is a permanent resident of Canada. She had no record of neglect during her pregnancy. She has no record of mental illness. CFS were concerned about her ability to care for the child. The boy’s uncle, Carlos Burgos said that the family disagreed with the CFS’s action and says, “I’m not against CFS at all. CFS is there it help people, it’s just some people they don’t know how to do their jobs properly. They were very rough with my family. They didn’t give us the opportunity to show we could raise Matias. They took the baby away from our sister, from us.”

This data and interview details are part of a Global network article authored by By Eric Szeto, Reporter/Anchor.

http://globalnews.ca/news/1273270/winnipeg-family-seeks-answers-in-babys-death/

Every province has its stories that raise concern over deaths of children while in government initiated and sponsored foster care. Concern must result in better management. This cannot be allowed to continue. Legislators, government Ministers, Judges, politicians from all parties have to take notice of this.

CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Here is another thought from my friend Ray Ferris. Ray Ferris is a retired child-protection worker and the author of  The Art of Child Protection.

In Britain child protection legislation is national, but the execution of the work is delegated to local authorities, such as cities and towns, or county councils. Local authorities set up child welfare services, but are subject to accountability to the national government. The U.K. gets its fair share of child protection horror stories, but there does seem to be a difference about how they are handled. Also it is much more possible to have an efficient service in one municipality and a terrible one in the next.

Following the death in two different municipalities of children, in which the social workers repeatedly ignored compelling evidence, a judicial inquiry took place. The Haringey authority and another one were declared to be “unfit for purpose.” That has a nice ring to it and would apply here don’t you think?

ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC / Part 303 / For Love and For Justice / Zabeth and Paul Bayne/

Any time that a death of a child occurs while in care of the Ministry of Children, there is a need for close scrutiny of the custodial care and the circumstances in which it happened. The death of a child in care is alarming. It is assumed that a child is in care because that life was vulnerable or endangered by risk of some kind in the existing home care. It is therefore a shock when in the supposed foster place of safety, a child dies. It is assumed that a death should not occur while in foster care unless there were mitigating medical issues. When a child dies while in the system, we can be assured that front line child protection workers are not heartless but that they rather feel the emotional impact. That empathy becomes questionable to us if the system does not openly and publicly probe into the death and learn from it so that there will be improvements to policy and practice for the sake of other future children receiving services.

Loved ones of the deceased child do not want the child's death to be invisible. Chris Martell in Saskatchewan is an example of a father insistent upon the government learning from the tragic death of his two year old son while in a foster care home. He is presently completing a five day walk to Regina today where he will present a petition to the government to take necessary steps to prevent such tragedy. In his son's case, a foster mother has already been charged with a criminal act. The Ministry demonstrates real compassion only when it honestly investigates and assesses cause and takes steps to insure that if there was fault, it is not only punished but corrected, made preventable. In such situations, the government has responsibility to account to the public how things went wrong and what is being done to correct it.

A child does not need to die to warrant a review of process in handling the care of a child. I believe that this type of accountability ought similarly to apply to care situations, notwithstanding the confidentiality concerns written into the child protection protocol. So, when a child is returned to its parents by a court ruling, that must be an occasion for disclosure of Ministry decisions which shaped the entire experience of parents and children during the time they were involved with the Ministry. Don't regard that as sensational but educational. Good social work aims to excel. Clearly, when the court ruling declares that the Ministry has not proven its case that the child should be in or remain in care, yet the child has been removed from the family home for an extended time, then important lessons should be learned and policy and procedure shaped in response. When timelines for custody and care orders that are carefully prescribed in the Act are ignored or stretched, then the attending judge and MCF supervisors and the Ministry in Victoria should disregard excuses and act to correct the practice.  As 2010 closes out on the Bayne case and when Judge Crabtree returns all three children into the care of their own parents, a public accounting will be very informative and hopefully will assist Victoria to fine tune its expectations for outcomes and accountability within its decentralized structure.