Frustration over the laggard adoption process for children in care has reached the point where both the government and the independent representative for children and youth are planning to give the representative’s office a direct role in making the system work better.
Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond spoke at a legislature finance committee last week about a budget hike to hire several more staff to tackle the adoption backlog head-on. She released a report a year ago exposing lengthy wait times and skimpy numbers of children being adopted from care. It prompted an awareness campaign and a higher priority in government for the program, which got a one-time budget hike to make some progress.
But placements over the past year fell short of the new goals that were set. An achievable target of getting 300 children adopted was set, but the ministry came up short — 265. Some bottlenecks in the system meant adoptions of children in care dropped every year from 2007 to 2013, when there were just 205.
Turpel-Lafond told MLAs on the committee she wants to support the work, but it will require hiring several more staff for two or three years to focus on the problem — almost $1 million a year.
The government earmarked $2 million in one-time funding to tackle the waiting times. But Turpel-Lafond raised questions about what that accomplished. The ministry contracted with private agencies to get 138 home studies done and only 16 were completed.
In another example, she said one agency got $639,000, but didn’t get a single new file.
“They did work. I’m sure they did thinking about what they’re going to do later, but they didn’t have a single case. If you get $639,000, I expect you to have a case or maybe 10 or maybe 15 or maybe 100.”
She said money is being spent on “having conversations” about the issue, but there needs to be more commitment to outcomes.
Another alternative under discussion was to second several ministry staff people into her office so the representative is more intensely involved in advocating for the hundreds of children waiting.
“But I’m not entirely comfortable with having a transfer of a staff member into an independent office.”
So her preferred option to is to hire her own staff to focus on facilitating adoptions. She said the government had a strong response to her report, but still the job did not get fully done. Now the ministry has asked her office to be directly involved, but she needs more money to take on the role.
“My idea, from my organization, is right now I can expand my advocacy staff and help with the adoptions process shoulder-to-shoulder with the ministry … From an advocacy viewpoint, I’m impatient, and I can push. I am not inside a ministry, where there are thousands of reasons why you can’t do anything. I am on the side of: ‘You can do something.’ ”
JUST SO YOU KNOW: She also touched on the recent report about Paige, the 19-year-old acute alcoholic who died on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after a miserable life. The representative said there are 150 kids just like Paige, but there is no secure care in B.C. to treat them.
“What we’re thinking is: Let’s send them to Alberta. If we get them across the border, maybe we can get the B.C. child into a secure care setting where they can be detoxed and start to be put back together on the path to health. We’ve got to get them over the Rocky Mountains, but I don’t think that’s a very good response.”
She said there is a “fantasy” in B.C. that “we don’t need things, and we shut them down.”
She cited the youth custody centre in Victoria, where the dwindling number of inmates were moved to Burnaby. The facility is now open only to house offenders on a short-term basis, since police refuse to hold them. Even on that reduced basis, it processed 71 youth from September to April.
It could be an addictions-treatment centre with intensive, qualified staff if there were bigger-picture thinking, she said.
