By Dale Bass
Who do you think cares more about B.C.’s children and youth — Christy Clark or Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond?
It’s a question we should be pondering as the lines aren’t just drawn, but chiselled in stone between Premier Clark’s government and Turpel-Lafond, the woman hired to speak out for our youngest citizens.
The province’s Representative for Children and Youth has been accused of contempt by the speaker of the legislature after she released a child-welfare report last week that ripped apart an independent review of the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). Speaker Linda Reid called out Turpel-Lafond for the release, calling it “an egregious action, disrespectful and inconsistent with your position’s statutory reporting relationship with the legislature.”
The contempt charge is because Turpel-Lafond didn’t table her report in the legislature, but chose to release it on her own. Why? Because when she asked to table it, she was told there wasn’t enough time to fit it in, she told Vancouver media.
During her tenure, Turpel-Lafond has criticized the government for keeping a 17-year-old in solitary confinement in a youth detention centre for four months, for housing youths in care in hotels after closing group homes and for granting a pedophile father unsupervised access to his child, who he then molested.
She has spoken out harshly when children have died in government care. One of her recent heartbreaking reports was on 19-year-old Paige — her last name was redacted — who died on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Turpel-Lafond said it was one of the most horrific cases she has investigated, one where “the child-protection system, health-care system, social-service agencies, the education system and police consistently failed in their responsibility to this child and passively recorded her life’s downward spiral.”
The review report prepared by retired civil servant Bob Plecas recommended Turpel-Lafond not be reappointed in November, when her second five-year term expires. Plecas wrote the relationship between the ministry and Turpel-Lafond “has become strained” by “a great appetite [by the representative] for piling on and blaming both individual workers and the system at large for perceived and real failings.”
Plecas recommended $50 million more be put into the ministry coffers, an infusion that was included in the recent budget. He also recommended oversight be returned to the ministry — and that’s likely what sparked Turpel-Lafond’s anger more than anything. When her position was created, it was designed to be independent, reporting to the legislature and to the public. It came as a result of children in care dying needlessly, often violently at the hands of those charged with caring for them.
Turpel-Lafond was not hired to be a cheerleader for government, but to hold it to account, to tell the stories we might otherwise never hear. I trust her to speak out for our kids. Her voice should not be silenced.