IS EMERGENCY REMOVAL OF CHILDREN STANDARD PRACTICE?

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Over a six-year period, this Blog focused upon two cases in which so-called 'emergency removal' of children occurred. That is what propelled me to speak to the grievance, which I became aware was far more frequent than I wanted to believe or that is known by the public. These two consisted of first, a family of four children in which the surprise removal, or removal without notification occurred several times, and second, the case of a girl taken from her school. In the first case, the removal and custody battle lasted four years. In the latter case the girl spent three years in foster care, originating from an incident when she, an autistic child, wandered from her back yard and was missing for three hours.

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In the first case, the initial concern was that the infant had been physically abused, shaken. Was seizure without notification necessary in either of these cases? Has it become standard practice? These children were eventually returned to parents. Yet here is a gripping observation. In both the instances, the children were found not to have been maltreated, neglected, abused. That is merely symptomatic of a system that uses emergency removal as the tool with which to deal with appropriate concerns that must be investigated.

THE EXCESS OF EMERGENCY CHILD REMOVAL

It's a bureaucratic spectacle. It is recognizable. Even lawyers acknowledge that within a network of social workers, police officers and judges who make the hard decisions for emergency child-removals, there is a tendency for these professionals to become self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating in all subsequent child protective proceedings. Where are the checks and balances, the accountability, the investigatory due diligence, particularly when it is also statistically evidenced that each day that a child lives in a foster care environment is another day closer to the termination of all parental rights. In a just system, good and responsible parents despite economic, emotional or relational challenges would be identified, would not be cut off from their children and would not lose in their lives, what is most precious to them. There is so much that a just child protection system can do to assist parents to raise their children safely and happily rather than to take the children away.

LIBERALS DECIDING ABOUT CLARK

Ministers left an emergency cabinet meeting at Canada Place on Sunday afternoon, showing support for Premier Christy Clark even though there are increasing calls for her resignation over the ethnic voter scandal. Hundreds of Liberal party members in Surrey met at Sikh temples around the city Sunday to discuss the scandal, which has precipitated four high-profile departures from Surrey riding associations. Viewed now as an extension of the Liberals’ strategy to woo ethnic voters in advance of the May election, a group of 89 predominantly Indo-Canadian members of the B.C. Liberals have taken issue with Ms. Clark’s decision to spend taxpayer dollars to bid for the Times of India Film Awards. In a Sunday news release they called for Clark’s resignation, saying she had made the ethnic vote a joke in B.C.