In his review of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, former deputy minister Bob Plecas covers many topics, only one of which concerns independent oversight of the ministry. Yet that aspect of his review has drawn the most attention and criticism.
It鈥檚 unfortunate. Any debate about feuds and power struggles, real or merely perceived, will detract from the most important issue at hand 鈥� the welfare of children in the government鈥檚 care. Those involved should focus first on points they can agree on, setting aside points of disagreement to be worked out later.
Plecas said in his report that the sheer volume of recommendations from children and youth representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond has been a problem for the ministry and that relations between her office and the ministry have been strained.
He suggests the role of the children and youth representative could eventually be limited to one of advocacy, as the MCFD will have progressed to the point where its internal review processes should be robust enough that it can report on itself.
Turpel-Lafond disagrees. So do Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and Doug Kelly, chairman of the B.C. First Nations鈥� Health Council.
Plecas foresaw that possibility. 鈥淣ot everyone will agree with everything I say or advise,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淭hat is how it should be.鈥�
We support the role of independent watchdogs and their scrutiny of government operations. Internal reporting processes in government will always be coloured by politics; they are prone to being filtered through various offices for the best possible spin. We prefer a more clear-eyed perspective that the public would get from offices such as the auditor general and the representative for children and youth.
So set that aside for now, and focus on more important issues that Plecas says need to be addressed. They include lack of effective training, the erosion of funding, challenges in recruiting and retaining properly trained front-line child-protection workers and a management model that does not include informing senior leadership about difficult cases until it is too late.
Being a front-line social worker in the employ of the MCFD has to be one of the toughest jobs there is. As Plecas describes it: 鈥淵our job is to help children and parents stay together by providing them with supports, but you know that if you leave the kids there, they are possibly in danger. One parent is swearing at you and one is begging you to not take the kids, and you must decide to remove the kids or leave them with dysfunctional parents who, for better or worse, are the only family they know.鈥�
Plecas says the province needs to provide more resources, something Turpel-Lafond advocates with each annual report. Social workers鈥� caseloads are too heavy; they are made less effective by being spread too thin.
More money, more social workers, clearer and more consistent policies and better management are all necessary, but those measures won鈥檛 be enough.
The problems don鈥檛 begin when social workers intervene 鈥� they begin with the failure of families, and that often goes back generations, especially for aboriginal families who struggle with the effects of the residential-school era and corrosive government policies that aimed to erase languages and cultures.
The problems are rooted in unemployment, poverty, addictions, mental illness and lack of education.
Attacking the problems at the root level requires efforts from every facet of government and society, not just the MCFD. It鈥檚 a huge challenge; meeting that challenge should start on common ground, not on points of disagreement.
