The Justice Paul Walker judgment and several others have made it evident that an adversarial and even hostile culture permeates B.C.’s Ministry of Children and Family Development.
There are probable causes for this. One is that provincial social workers used to be responsible for both financial assistance and child welfare.
The deep-seated antagonism to assistance applicants rubbed off on child-welfare cases, often the same cases. The three children’s aid societies were kinder, because they handled no assistance. All services were amalgamated by the first NDP government.
The courts used to function well. In the late 1970s, I studied about 200 cases that went through the Victoria court. No cases exceeded statutory time guidelines and judges were vigilant in demanding proper notices and other parental protections. Only four cases went to contested hearings. Most cases were settled by negotiation. There were many registered social workers and there was a sense of professionalism among the staff members.
There was a marked deterioration after the 1995 Gove report on child protection in B.C. A major reorganization was followed closely by the enactment of a long and complicated act. Chaos followed, and the courts virtually ground to a halt.
More and more lawyers appeared in family court, and their well-established adversarial culture did nothing to help matters.
The British Seebohm commission of the 1960s noted that there were many non-systemic problems in the social services and they would not be remedied by systemic changes. This basic lesson was lost in B.C., and every time there has been a big child-welfare mess, only systemic fixes have been tried and they have not worked.
Following the Gove report, major systemic fixes were tried, which made things worse. The same for the Ted Hughes report of 2006.
The most important non-systemic problem is that the staff members do not have the knowledge and skills required to do protection work. Administrators understand only systemic remedies. They tried to reduce protection staff into bureaucratic functionaries doing everything by formula.
If you think that filling in forms and checklists produces good social work, then you probably think that painting by numbers is great art.
Competent, experienced staff were shown no respect, and professionalism was slowly stifled. This led to increasing dysfunction and a toxic atmosphere with a resultant high staff turnover.
As professional skills eroded, social workers no longer did assessments and other work needing skills. Instead, they became brokers, contracting out the work to psychologists, private counsellors and social workers. Also, they depend increasingly on lawyers and often call in counsel to attend routine meetings with parents.
If parents contest a protection complaint, the social workers will fight it tooth and nail, no matter how weak the evidence, while young children can stay in limbo for years. It is not unusual for parents to sell or re-mortgage the family home to pay legal costs.
The search for remedies is complex. Both Gove and Hughes noted that social-work schools do not teach the skills of child protection. Hardly surprising, because until the 1960s, only Freudian psychology was taught. This started the trend for following all the latest psychological gurus.
As the main qualification for registration is a social-work degree, it is hard to see how registration would benefit. Indeed, many of the staff involved in the tragic Matthew Vaudreuil case, which sparked the Gove inquiry, were registered, and they did just as badly as anyone else. The registrar recently told me that no registered members are employed in child protection.
What are the remedies? The main problem is that untrained staff are given difficult responsibilities. There is no point in just hiring more workers who do not know what they are doing. The knowledge and skills for protection workers are definable, teachable and trainable under good mentorship. What is needed is a good core training program lasting several months that teaches these skills.
The first hurdle will be to find someone with the ability to teach and mentor, and many of the supervisory staff might need to be retrained. The system has become ruinously expensive. Perhaps Children and Family Development Minister Stephanie Cadieux should start her inquiry by assessing the skills of her senior staff.
Ray Ferris of Victoria worked for 31 years in public service in B.C., much of that time as a social worker and supervisor in child protection.
