Between 23 and 50 foster children have been placed in B.C. hotels in the past year, officials reported one week after a foster youth fell to his death from the window of a hotel where he’d been housed for months. The numbers are imprecise and vary according to whom you ask.
The Children’s Ministry puts the number at 23 hotel stays, for an average of five days each, between November 2014 and this month.
However, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the provincial representative for children and youth, believes the number is higher. Turpel-Lafond’s files suggest between 30 and 50 youth in the care of the Ministry for Children and Families have been lodged in hotels instead of group or foster homes in the last year.
“Why is this happening?” asked Turpel-Lafond.
This issue has exploded since foster youth Alex Gervais, 18, died a week ago after falling from the fourth-floor window of the Super 8 hotel in Abbotsford, where he had lived for several months.
On Tuesday, Children’s Minister Stephanie Cadieux said the provincial director of child welfare was not aware of any other youth in care, other than Gervais, living in a hotel.
On Thursday, she learned that was not correct, after demanding all ministry agencies and aboriginal agencies be phoned and asked directly. The hastily arranged survey found one additional foster youth living in a hotel, which violated a year-old policy that the provincial director be informed of every such case.
“The delay in notification to the director and the fact that the director had to call to find out is not OK,” Cadieux said. “I am not comfortable or happy at all that we’ve learned that policy has not been followed in at least two cases and I expect that is going to change.”
Cadieux said the one foster child currently in a hotel is an appropriate and temporary case, but would not elaborate for privacy reasons.
She has asked for a second round of phone calls to child welfare agencies, to ensure all hotel stays have truly been reported. For example, did the agencies report older youth who receive money from the ministry to live independently — as opposed to ones destined for group or foster homes — who might be living in hotels?
“Because of the circumstances that have arisen with the Abbotsford case and one other situation that the director did not know about, we are delving deeper. We are making another round of calls because we want to make sure there are no others,” Cadieux said.
Turpel-Lafond said Thursday she doubts the number of foster children recently housed in hotels is just two. She is also angry that so many other foster youth have had stays in hotels this year, and is concerned the ministry is not on top of this issue. “I’m worried they don’t have the length of stay, they don’t have the numbers, and the [foster children] are not seeing their social workers,” she said.
NDP Leader John Horgan told reporters Thursday he believed Cadieux should resign over the Gervais case and that it was inappropriate for children to be housed in hotels.
Gervais’s death follows the high-profile 2014 murder in Winnipeg of Tina Fontaine, 15, a foster child who was living in a hotel. That case prompted Manitoba’s child welfare system to ban the use of hotels.
B.C. policy set a year ago states that foster children should be placed in hotels only as an emergency measure, the decision must be approved by the social worker’s boss, and that the provincial director of child welfare must be informed. And the youth should be moved as soon as a group home or foster home is available.
