Children and Family Development Minister Stephanie Cadieux doesn’t want the latest rocket from the independent watchdog of her ministry “misinterpreted.”
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, representative for children and youth, spent a couple of years working on a report released Wednesday proving pretty conclusively that the government has blown at least $66 million on talks about the governance of aboriginal child-welfare services that accomplished nothing.
But Cadieux said she doesn’t want it to sound as if nothing came of it.
She’s probably right. All the consultants that Turpel-Lafond fingered as important drivers of this little cottage industry did very well for themselves.
And all the participants got to go to big important meetings. Everybody got to trade social-work buzzwords and get to know each other better.
But Turpel-Lafond couldn’t have been clearer on what she thinks of the 12-year exercise in wheel-spinning.
• The money has been spent “without any functional public policy framework, no meaningful financial or performance accountability and without any actual children receiving additional services.”
• The policy context and administrative principles “can only be described as chaotic and haphazard.”
• The total outlay of at least $66 million “is a colossal failure of public policy to do the right thing for citizens.”
• “There could not be a more confused, unstable and bizarre area of public policy than that which guides aboriginal child and family services in B.C.”
It’s pretty hard to misinterpret those findings. Particularly when they’re backed up with pages of documentation and hard findings. Turpel-Lafond collated all the efforts to engage with aboriginal communities and agencies to talk about the governance of child welfare in those communities.
They stretch back 12 years and through two main manifestations of the dreamy notion that the provincial government could hand over the responsibility and bow out of the troubled field.
Nearly $35 million was dropped on discussing regional aboriginal authorities. It paid people to meet, hired facilitators and produced questionable reports that almost never addressed the real issues, said Turpel-Lafond.
Then the government patted itself on the back for the talks, while never evaluating what was really happening on the ground. Which was: Nothing.
That lasted until 2008, when the effort morphed into something different. The ministry decided First Nations would write their own approaches and it would just fund the initiatives. The “nation-to-nation” approach produced several projects with “staggering” expenditures that were disconnected from the real world. That effort consumed another $31 million.
Turpel-Lafond said the whole field is prone to undue political influence and lobbying by consultants and others with the ability to convince government to become a funder of programs with questionable policy basis or outcomes.
“To be blunt, a significant amount of money has gone to people who provide no program or service to directly benefit children.”
That includes hundreds of thousands of dollars to some societies that don’t list a single open file, meaning they don’t even have a caseload.
Cadieux’s ministry produced a response Wednesday right after Turpel-Lafond blew the whistle, trying to minimize the shocking findings. She said a former deputy minister two years ago began shifting the focus of contracts from governance to service delivery. In other words, from talking about conceptual models of agencies that could be run to delivering real badly needed programs. The ministry said all the contractors involved have already been informed that any future contracts will focus on direct services.
It was the traditional smug move of portraying it as an old problem, one that government has already recognized and acted on.
The representative’s detailed tables of expenditures show the government still spent $8.5 million in the last fiscal year on “indigenous approaches,” the label for the aimless talks on governance.
Cadieux said it’s because the contracts in place before the deputy minister shifted the focus had years to run. That would be the last year money is spent on that program.
If true, it will be the end of a remarkable example that disproves the old notion that talk is cheap.
Turpel-Lafond concluded that the whole thing is a “rather shameful debacle.”
But we wouldn’t want to misinterpret that, would we?
