Throwing money around isn’t the answer to every problem, but in the case of the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development, it would be a good start to a badly needed overhaul.
In a report released last week in co-operation with B.C.’s child and youth representative, the ministry said it had placed 117 children and youth in hotels from November 2014 to October 2015.
After 18-year-old Alex Gervais fell to his death at an Abbotsford hotel in September, Children’s Minister Stephanie Cadieux said 23 children had been placed in hotels over the past year. She had no explanation for the huge discrepancy in numbers.
“Frankly, I’m unhappy that it’s so different, because the 23 was based on numbers reported to us by our service delivery areas, by the people doing the work on a daily basis,” she said.
Gervais had been living alone in the hotel for 49 nights, the longest stay of any child in the ministry’s care during that year. The average hotel stay was 2.7 nights; 55 per cent of the placements were for one night.
Even as she released the report, Cadieux disagreed with one of its findings, that the use of hotels reflects “significant shortfalls” in other available placements, including foster homes, emergency beds and group homes.
“It is misleading to say there is a lack of resources and that it’s being stop-gapped with hotel space,” she said.
Rather, it’s a communications problem, she said, an issue with staff knowing what beds are available at a given time.
She said most placements take place in the evenings or on weekends when a child is urgently taken into care or when another placement breaks down.
“In a perfect world, hotels would never be used and, as this report shows, they are used as an option of last resort,” Cadieux said.
It never hurts to improve procedures, but communication gaps often result when staffing is short and people become so overburdened, they can’t think straight. It’s hard to make thoughtful, reasoned decisions when you’re rushing from one crisis to another.
Last year, the government asked former deputy minister Bob Plecas to review the ministry after an ugly child-abuse case. Echoing a report by former judge Ted Hughes nine years earlier, Plecas said the ministry has been starved of resources, buffeted by change and hurt by high turnover of leaders and frontline staff.
He called for an injection of $50 million in 2016-17 as part of a four-year strategic plan that would improve training, expand quality-assurance programs and strengthen the office of the director of child welfare.
The government didn’t exactly embrace the recommendations in Plecas’s report, but promised to take some time to consider it.
Last week’s report says B.C. should follow Manitoba’s example and eventually ban the use of hotels, even on a temporary or emergency basis.
That requires more resources — funding, to be specific. Children’s representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond said Manitoba worked over a two-year period to abolish the use of hotels for children in care by adding 55 emergency shelter beds and 114 emergency foster beds.
Cadieux said the ministry wants to eliminate hotel placements entirely, but requires more people to “step up” and get trained as foster parents. She said the ministry is working on a foster-parent recruitment and pay plan that she will present to cabinet this year.
More money will not make all the problems go away, but if the funding doesn’t increase, the problems surely will.
