To celebrate this anniversary, the society unveiled its first trademark or, to use the term then coming into common use, logo. Brian Greggains, a board member who was chair of the public relations committee, contacted Jim Donoahue, one of Canada’s leading graphic artists, to ask if he would design a logo to commemorate the anniversary. Donoahue agreed and set to work right away.
His submission, a small child ensconced in the final zero of the figure 100, was so well received that that the agency regretted having to put it aside when the anniversary year ended. Because of this, Donoahue agreed to revise the logo to make it appropriate for all occasions. The product was the logo the society uses to this day — a child nestled and protected inside the letter C — which Donaohue generously donated to the agency as a public service. It captures the essence of the society’s mission — the protection of children — and creates a strong visual identity for the organization.
Former executive director Ed Watson
Ed Watson resigns
Ed Watson’s tenure as leader of the society was a relatively short one; in 1978, he was invited to become executive director of the Child Welfare League of America. This was a tribute not only to him personally but also to the agency’s leadership of child welfare in North America. On his return to Canada, Watson was appointed the clinical director of the Addiction Research Foundation. Later, he went into health planning with the Toronto District Health Council.
In a 1999 interview, during which he looked back on his five years at Metro CAS, Watson mentioned the unresolved tension between child protection and prevention work. He described what remained a persistent concern at the agency:
There was seldom enough time for front-line staff to invest significant hours in working with a situation. They had to run from one crisis to another, often without being able to provide sufficient support to make a difference. The balance between protection and family service, to me, has never been adequately resolved and it gets somewhat artificially divided, either to organize the work or to partialize it into a manageable piece.
“There was seldom enough time for front-line staff to invest significant hours in working with a situation. They had to run from one crisis to another, often without being able to provide sufficient support to make a difference. The balance between protection and family service, to me, has never been adequately resolved and it gets somewhat artificially divided, either to organize the work or to partialize it into a manageable piece.”
— director Ed Watson
It would fall to Watson’s successor to try to resolve this dilemma.
CHAPTER 7
Improving the System,
1978–1988
Toronto in the 1980s
In the early 1980s, Toronto witnessed its most severe recession since the Great Depression fifty years earlier. Inflation was rampant, unemployment was high and job creation strategies failed to stem the layoffs. Demand for affordable housing outstripped supply, exacerbating homelessness, which grew to an estimated 10,000 people in Metro Toronto, many of them young people in need of protection.
Restraints and cutbacks in health and social services in the 1980s put added stress both on those who staffed those services and those who depended on them.
During these years, scant attention was paid to enhancing social services as a way to support struggling families. Indeed, restraints and cutbacks in health and social services put added stress both on those who staffed those services and those who depended on them. Better day care and more rigorous rent controls were talked about, but there was little action.
Governments did institute some low-cost strategies, among them the study and reform of laws affecting children and developmentally handicapped adults and the provision of aid to single mothers to eliminate their need for social assistance. Another positive development was a change in the policies of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board to allow abused children to receive criminal damages as compensation for injuries sustained at the hands of abusive parents.
The recession ebbed in the second part of the decade, although the gap between rich and poor widened. Concerns about poverty were deflected for a while by the publication in 1988 of Transitions, a report by a provincially appointed Social Assistance Review Committee chaired by Judge George Thompson. Calling attention to the inadequacy of social assistance benefits, Transitions contended that such aid should be seen as an investment in people rather than simply the alleviation of poverty. Concerned citizens and organizations such as Metro CAS campaigned aggressively in the media on the report’s behalf, but little concrete action was taken to implement its recommendations.
A positive development was a change in the policies of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board to allow abused children to receive criminal damages as compensation for injuries sustained at the hands of abusive parents.
By 1989, the number of Canadian children living in poverty led to a resolution in the House of Commons to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000. Although it received the support of all parties, politicians and influential opinion makers tended to be more concerned about the high levels of government debt and deficit financing than they were about the incidence of child poverty. Their views were to gain increasing credence over the subsequent decade.
The circumstances described above contributed to increasing illicit drug use, particularly of the cocaine derivative known as crack. This created such related problems as child neglect, particularly of “crack babies” (who were born addicted or with drug withdrawal symptoms and who were often neglected or abandoned as a result of parental drug addiction), family and adolescent violence, and an increase in the number of young people living on the streets. Exceptionally sad was the number of babies born infected with the HIV virus that leads to AIDS, usually as a result of unsafe sexual practices or hazardous drug use by their mothers.
Illicit drug use created such problems as child neglect, particularly of “crack babies” (who were born addicted or with drug withdrawal symptoms and who were often neglected or abandoned as a result of parental drug addiction). Exceptionally sad was the number of babies bom infected with the HIV virus that leads to AIDS.
Single parenthood and the raising of children by common law partners had now become accepted as never before, a change brought about by less restrictive social mores, easy access to divorce and legal separations, and a decline in the social pressure to marry. Many children grew up in reconstituted families or lived in flexible family arrangements — for example, by spending part of each week with different birth parents.
The 1980s were also a time of increased recognition of human rights. A new federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms became part of Canada’s constitution in 1982, while the Ontario Human Rights Code was amended in 1982 and again in 1986 to broaden the categories of those whom it protected. There was a new awareness and acceptance of the equality rights of aboriginal Canadians and of the needs of First Nations children. They received greater government attention, including the funding of specialized aboriginal child welfare programs.
Immigrant populations within Metro Toronto, particularly from Asia, the Caribbean and Central and South America, continued to grow throughout the decade, bringing with them diverse family traditions such as a greater reliance on extended family members for social, emotional and financial support. Many of the newcomers to Metro were refugees rather than migrants seeking to better their economic circumstances, a development whose roots lay in the late 1970s, when, as one of the aftereffects of the end of the American war with Vietnam, a wave of asylum seekers arrived in Toronto. Among them were unaccompanied children who needed protection. Later, a change of regime in Iran and a war with neighbouring Iraq brought another group of unaccompanied refugee youth to the city.
Many of the newcomers to Metro were refugees rather than migrants seeking to better their economic circumstances. Among them were unaccompanied children who needed protection.
These developments directly influenced the program
development, service delivery and hiring practices of social agencies. More slowly, similar changes affected industry and other private employers. The population of Metro itself remained relatively stable at just over two million, as the focus of growth in the Toronto area shifted to the neighbouring communities in, among others, Durham, York, Halton and Peel regions. These rapidly developing suburban communities were now beginning to face similar challenges to those that had confronted Metro since its formation three decades earlier.
The quality of children’s services came under heavy scrutiny during this era. In the mid-1970s, the deaths of two children receiving child protection services shook the public’s confidence in the effectiveness of Ontario’s child welfare system. These tragedies would lead to many changes over the subsequent decade, changes that would profoundly affect the work of Metro CAS and of other children’s aid societies across the province.
The death of Vicky Ellis
The first of these deaths was that of nineteen-month-old Kim Anne Popen, who died at her home in Sarnia in 1976 while receiving services from the local CAS. She sustained a fatal blow to her head. This was the final assault among more than seventy other injuries, including severe sexual abuse, that a postmortem examination revealed. Kim’s death led to a prolonged and acrimonious judicial inquiry headed by Judge Ward Allen, during which the Sarnia CAS’s supervision of the family and MCSS’s oversight of the society’s operations were criticized.
The second death was that of one-month-old Vicky Ellis, who died of neglect in Toronto’s west end in March 1977. According to the pathologist, the probable cause of her death was swelling of the brain brought on by improper feeding. In addition, she was suffering from gastroenteritis and high body fluid loss.
Vicky’s mother, Debbie Ellis, was a long-term CAS client, first of the Catholic CAS and subsequently of Metro CAS. Vicky was her fifth child. Her first, Charlene, had been apprehended after Debbie was charged with “failing to provide [the child] with the necessities of life.” The baby was returned home after six months in foster care. When her second child, Darlene, died of neglect just four months later, Charlene was apprehended once again and eventually made a Crown ward.
Three years after Darlene’s death, Debbie’s third child, Parrish, drowned in his bathtub — having been left unattended — when he was seventeen months old. One month before Parrish died, Debbie had given birth to her fourth child, Brooks. Metro CAS apprehended him when he was only seven weeks old because the worker found him grossly undernourished and lying in a diaper caked in excrement.
According to an anonymous social worker quoted by journalist Peter Silverman,
Over the next eighteen months, Debbie attempted via the Family Court to get Brooks back. But the legal battle over who was to have custody demonstrated the weaknesses of the Child Welfare Act. The parents have rights and can retain legal counsel and the CAS has a legal mandate and legal counsel. The two sides brawl in court using all the rules pertaining to the adversary system. The whole thing drags on. For a critical year and a half of Brooks’ life, no one could properly make arrangements for his future until the courts had decided who got the child.
Brooks was eventually made a Crown ward. In the meantime, Debbie became pregnant with Vicky. As Alan Wolfish, Metro CAS counsel, told Silverman:
We decided to apprehend at birth. We debated it at length, not just the caseworker but senior staff. We rejected a plan to supervise Mrs. Ellis twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It would have been impossible in terms of both execution and personnel.
During the subsequent court hearing to determine whether Vicky should remain in the agency’s care or be returned to her parents, Metro CAS argued strenuously against the Family Court Clinic’s recommendation that the baby be returned home. Tragically, however, the rules of evidence prevented the introduction of vital facts regarding Debbie’s history as a mother, so the judge returned Vicky to her. Three weeks later, the baby was dead. (A year after Vicky’s death, Metro CAS apprehended Debbie’s sixth child at birth.)
The media made much of the Vicky Ellis tragedy during the inquest that followed her death, and seldom did Metro CAS appear in a good light. Even though Vicky was ordered home over the agency’s protests, again and again the papers and broadcast news stated the opposite: that it had been the CAS workers who wanted the child sent home.
The media made much of this tragedy during the inquest that followed, and seldom did Metro CAS appear in a good light. Even though Vicky was ordered home over the agency’s protests, again and again the papers and broadcast news stated the opposite: that it had been the CAS workers who wanted the child sent home.
Other voices, however, tried to make themselves heard in letters to the newspapers. One child protection worker wrote: “Journalists are free to constantly attack the rare tragedies that occur in child protection work. I say rare because, while there are a number of tragedies every year, no child protection agency is ever free to publish the great number of lives saved every year.”
“No child protection agency is ever free to publish the great number of lives saved every year.”
— Excerpt from a letter to a newspaper editor
written by a child protection worker
Another letter read: “Like your editorialist, I am upset when a child dies of neglect or deprivation . . . but unlike your editor, I do not attribute these tragedies to the incompetence of the CAS but to the legislators who have severely limited CAS budgets . . . and to the existing legislation that does not give the experts sufficient muscle with which to protect children.”
A team of workers in the agency’s Scarborough branch — Shirley McCulloch, Charlotte Genova, Dan Freedman and Bruce Rivers — did not hesitate to make the same point:
On a daily basis, we touch the lives of family members who are subject to many sources of stress. Government cutbacks and lack of support for human services have significant impact on many of these individuals. Lack of adequate day care and special education, insufficient financial support and poor housing are a few of the results that serve to frustrate already high-risk family situations. It is not surprising that a child welfare worker’s success in helping such families is becoming extremely difficult to realize. Society and its government is demanding more for less and becoming intolerant of any failure on the part of the child welfare system.
The difficulties of protecting children
A few years later, Ron Smith, the manager of Toronto West Branch’s District 2 offices, and his staff faced similar challenges after the death of another infant due to malnutrition. His recollections illustrate how difficult it is to be a child protection worker:
The case was open to CAS because we were trying to help the child’s mother. This was our client. Did we fail to meet our responsibilities? If you read The Globe and Mail accounts uncritically, you might well have concluded that we did.
The paper’s detailed daily accounts of the mother’s criminal trial led even my best friends to ask, “What did you guys do there?” The two police officers investigating the case seemed to disbelieve not only what actually happened but also just about everything we reported. One medical expert disputed our evidence that the child appeared healthy two weeks prior to his death by stating that it would be impossible to draw this conclusion. Another expert disagreed with the first expert.
The social worker visited the home three days prior to the death to deliver winter clothing for an older child in the home. She did not suspect the infant was at risk. Was this understandable, was this consistent with child welfare norms and standards, was this believable, even? These and many more questions were explored repeatedly in the media and elsewhere.
For the better part of a year, those directly involved lived under a cloud of suspicion as the matter wound its way through internal agency reviews, the criminal trial of the mother, the coroner’s inquest and media scrutiny.
The experience was both a follow-up to the experience of those involved in the Ell
is inquest and a forerunner of the mid-nineties, which was marked by lengthier coroner’s inquests and even more intense media scrutiny.
“For the better part of a year, those directly involved in working with a child who subsequently died of malnutrition lived under a cloud of suspicion as the matter wound its way through internal agency reviews, the criminal trial of the mother, the coroner’s inquest and media scrutiny. The experience was both a follow up to the experience of those involved in the Ellis inquest and a forerunner of the mid-nineties, which was marked by lengthier coroner’s inquests and even more intense media scrutiny.”
— Ron Smith
Nancy Dale, who joined the agency as a child protection worker at this time, offers an additional perspective of protection work in this era:
We had very high caseloads, 27 to 30 families. There was an unofficial mentoring system on the team and we would pair up to do investigations for support and to get a different perspective. I remember that you’d excuse yourself for a minute and go out into the hall and discuss with your colleague what to do. The supervisor was linked into that but not in the way they are now. You’d consult with your supervisor before you went out but there was a level of trust that once you were out there you wouldn’t necessarily have to call in to the office at each step along the way. You and your colleague would be able to make the decision.
We worked very hard. All of us were relatively young, none of us had children, and our colleagues were our support system. I have strong memories of enjoying my clients; we had a real desire to help them.
Protection work undertaken at night could be particularly complex and dangerous because it was — and still is — done in isolation at a time of day when the only resources available are the police and the hospitals. Sybil Smith, for many years the supervisor of the agency’s Emergency After Hours Service, remembers:
A Legacy of Caring Page 22