When I began to supervise night duty work in the early 1980s, it had grown from a very small service staffed, for the most part, by contracted law students to a more professional operation where the staff was fairly large and professionally trained, albeit still working on a fee-for-service contract. They are the unsung heroes of the agency, working from five at night until nine the next morning and 24 hours a day on weekends.
The adrenaline pumps at 2 a.m. when such matters as medical emergencies occur and complicated action involving numerous people must take place immediately with little information readily available. The lighter side was epitomized by one night duty worker who remarked, “Never have so many decisions been made by so many naked people sitting on the edge of the bed [at home, taking a night duty phone referral].”
Night duty workers love to regale their audiences with “war stories.” Who can forget the rather small worker who had to move a very large, angry adolescent [and] who meekly asked the boy, “Are you going to come quietly or are you going to hurt me?” Or the irate farmer who called from out of town to complain about his horse having become sick after being bitten by a CAS ward, and what were we going to do about it!
“The adrenaline pumps at 2 a.m. when such matters as medical emergencies occur and complicated action involving numerous people must take place immediately with little information readily available. The lighter side was epitomized by one night duty worker who remarked, “Never have so many decisions been made by so many naked people sitting on the edge of the bed [at home, taking a night duty phone referral].”
— Sybil Smith, writing about the
Emergency After Hours Service
Making it easier to protect children
The deaths of Vicky Ellis and Kim Anne Popen led directly to alterations to the system designed to protect children. At the provincial level, these included legislative change, the overdue development of standards for children and families receiving services from children’s aid societies, and more consistent monitoring of the work of the societies by MCSS. An operational review process was developed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of individual societies; agencies began to report such serious occurrences as the deaths of children receiving service to MCSS; CAS services to Crown wards were subjected to mandatory reviews; and guidelines for the provision of residential services were created.
Legislative change, the overdue development of standards for children and families receiving services from children’s aid societies and more consistent monitoring of the work of the societies by the provincial government all resulted from the deaths of Vicky Ellis and Kim Anne Popen.
At Metro CAS, services for abused children and their families had been a top priority for several years. Specialist abuse committees were well established, and each branch had its own trained abuse coordinator. Family services departments, while working on behalf of abused and neglected children, put an increasing emphasis on programs to prevent child abuse, several of them funded by the agency’s new charitable foundation.
The Ellis and Popen cases also were a factor in the establishment of an MCSS Task Force on Child Abuse chaired by Ralph Garber, the dean of the University of Toronto School of Social Work. As a result of the Garber Report, training of frontline workers became more systematic, government-mandated standards and guidelines regulating CAS intervention in abuse cases were introduced and a statutory child abuse register was established.
Child Welfare Act, 1978
The changes to child protection legislation embodied in the Child Welfare Act, 1978, were a direct outcome of the Ellis and Popen cases.
Among them were provisions that ensured that children involved in child protection matters, such as Vicky Ellis and her brother Brooks, would have their opinions about what should happen to them heard through separate legal representation from that of their parents. The act also required the consent of children aged twelve and over whenever a children’s aid society assumed the voluntary care of that child outside of a court hearing.
(Until 1978, all children in CAS care had been considered wards, although the idea of voluntary temporary care had first emerged between the two world wars. Through the provisions in the 1978 act, parents who needed temporary care and parents of children with special needs could negotiate agreements for care with CASs.)
Other sections of the act codified how judges in protection hearings were to define the best interests of a child; allowed conditions to be attached to orders requiring children’s aid societies to supervise children in their own homes; and provided for professionals who failed to report child abuse to be fined. (The concept of the “best interests” of a child had been developed early on in the history of child welfare in Ontario, but was not codified until the introduction of the 1978 act.)
The act also created the more formal, statutory Child Abuse Register recommended in the Garber Report. Its purpose was to ensure that previous allegations of abuse in one jurisdiction were brought to the attention of all children’s aid societies across the province. With this register, however, the suspected abuser’s rights also began to be codified, just as the act codified the rights of children. Thus, the suspected abuser had to be notified when he or she was registered, and was allowed to view the entry and had the right to appeal. (Prior to this time, children’s aid societies reported cases to a central abuse registry that had been established in 1966. By the late 1970s, however, the registry had become mainly administrative and was used primarily for research purposes.)
Until 1978, Metro CAS had few, if any, lawyers on staff, having relied instead on social workers with court experience — and perhaps paralegal training — to represent it in protection hearings. With the passage of the new act, the agency began to hire legal counsel to manage the added court services workload that the legislation created.
Until this time, Metro CAS had few, if any, lawyers on staff, having relied instead on social workers with court experience — and perhaps paralegal training — to represent it in protection hearings. With the passage of the new act, the agency began to hire legal counsel to manage the added court services workload that the legislation created.
Doug Barr
In 1978, the year the new Child Welfare Act was implemented, Doug Barr succeeded Ed Watson as executive director of Metro CAS. Barr was a popular man whose vision, vitality and success in working with people — as well as his knowledge of the agency — made him an appealing leader, even though, at the time of his appointment, he did not have senior management experience.
Barr had been a community worker with the society in Regent Park as well as a member of the agency’s board of directors, a social planner and a school trustee. He had also spent time at the National Council of Welfare. Based on these qualifications, the staff had high expectations of him. As he recounted in a 1980 article for the agency journal Our Children, he had written a letter on behalf of the staff association to the president of the agency’s board of directors seven years earlier outlining the qualifications for the position of executive director:
Someone in the middle of his/her professional career with some but not necessarily all of his/her experience in the child welfare field. Someone who would consult with staff, who would speak out publicly concerning the political and institutional roadblocks to client well-being, who could deal positively with the media and who was committed to operationalizing prevention.
Former executive director Doug Barr
He achieved all these objectives and more in his almost seven years at the helm of the agency. The challenges during those years were certainly many: public expectations of children’s aid societies were higher, the law was more specific about what was required of workers, the provincial government was more involved in setting service standards and guidelines, and a severe recession made financial restraint in the provision of social services the norm. Barr, however, viewed these as opportunities rather than dangers. He characterized the society’s activities during his years as executive dir
ector as “reform under fiscal restraint.”
Public expectations of children’s aid societies were higher, the law was more specific about what was required of workers, the provincial government was more involved in setting service standards and guidelines and a severe recession made financial restraint in the provision of social services the norm.
Child and Family Services Act, 1984
The Child Welfare Act of 1978 was considered a short-term measure pending the introduction of omnibus children’s services legislation. This took place in 1984, when, after extensive consultation, the Child and Family Services Act was passed.
This new act repealed not only the Child Welfare Act but also a number of other pieces of legislation that affected children, including the Children’s Institutions Act, the Children’s Residential Services Act and the Children’s Mental Health Act. The intent of the Child and Family Services Act was to consolidate the separate streams of programs designed to benefit children — child welfare, young offenders and services to those who were developmentally handicapped and those who needed treatment. Acknowledging the importance of prevention and support services, it added the new program stream called “community support.”
The intent of the Child and Family Services Act was to consolidate the separate streams of programs designed to benefit children — child welfare, young offenders and services to those who were developmentally handicapped and those who needed treatment.
The legislation also extended the rights of children in care — in many ways making mandatory the good-practice standards already in place at Metro CAS — including the prohibition of corporal punishment; the right to adequate nutrition, clothing, medical and dental care, education and recreation; the right to private communication with family and child advocates; the right to express views about placements and to be involved in a plan of care; and the right to complaints procedures.
Residential Placement Advisory Committees were set up to review the appropriateness of placements of children in larger residential settings and to respond to requests for review by children and parents. The Office of Child and Family Advocacy was established as an avenue for complaints from children and families when the procedures of individual agencies did not bring them satisfactory results.
In practice, however, the most significant feature of the act was its attempt to balance the agencies’ desire to respond to children’s needs with legal mechanisms that protected parental rights. Children’s aid societies were required to help children while at the same time supporting the autonomy and integrity of the family.
In practice, the most significant feature of the act was its attempt to balance the agencies’ desire to respond to children’s needs with legal mechanisms that protected parental rights. Children’s aid societies were required to help children while at the same time supporting the autonomy and integrity of the family.
Several factors led to this aspect of the new act. One was the increasing attention to civil and human rights, a development that was reflected in many subtle shifts in social work practice, among them strategies rooted in an ideology that government and its agencies should have limited authority to intervene in family affairs and should give greater respect to the rights of children.
Another influence, particularly within the child welfare community, was the publication of a book by famed child psychoanalyst Anna Freud and her colleagues, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, which advocated that “To safeguard the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit, free of government intrusion, except in cases of neglect and abandonment, is to safeguard each child’s need for continuity.”
The authors proposed that the least restrictive or detrimental alternative that was appropriate and available in each individual circumstance should be the legal basis for safeguarding a child’s growth and development. This principle had far-reaching effects in Ontario, where it was enshrined in the Child And Family Services Act.
“It is our opinion that there is an overemphasis on parents’ rights and family autonomy but little recognition of children’s needs.”
— Excerpt from Metro CAS’s critique of the
proposed Child and Family Services Act
In its brief to MCSS during the drafting stage of the new act, Metro CAS had registered its concerns that the legislation would not place the child’s rights in the forefront. The brief stated that “It is our opinion that there is an overemphasis on parents’ rights and family autonomy but little recognition of children’s needs.”
The government of Premier Bill Davis ignored this input from the society. In practical terms, the failure to address the agency’s recommendations meant that the new act put severe constraints upon the children’s aid societies’ ability to intervene to respond to child welfare concerns. Workers found that the law often hindered effective and efficient protection of children and prevented them from achieving stable placements for those who required out-of-home care. It took years and the perspective of hindsight for these flaws in the legislation to become truly evident.
Workers found that the act often hindered effective and efficient protection of children and prevented them from achieving stable placements for those who required out-of-home care.
The government was applauded, however, for the provisions in the act that recognized the need to provide aboriginal children and families with services that reflected their culture, heritage and traditions. During the 1970s and 1980s, there had been several reviews across Canada of provincial child welfare services to aboriginal children. They found that these young people were overrepresented in the system and that workers were generally unaware of the history and needs of aboriginal children, families and communities. Services were insufficient and poor. Change was clearly needed.
The government was applauded, however, for the provisions in the act that recognized the need to provide aboriginal children and families with services that reflected their culture, heritage and traditions.
One outcome was the involvement of First Nations bands in the provision of services to aboriginal children, and a decrease in CAS placements of these young people with non-aboriginal families. Aboriginal communities also began to provide services directly to their own members — in Toronto, Native Child and Family Services (NCFS) was established in 1988, with former Metro CAS worker Kenn Richard as executive director. Although not a designated children’s aid society, NCFS developed a culturally based approach to servicing native families.
Metro CAS and NCFS would work together more and more closely to provide culturally appropriate services to aboriginal children. Richard comments:
Traditionally, CAS had not asked questions about ethnicity and background. Unless a family was obviously aboriginal, there was no recognition that it might be important to ask. There was no consciousness about aboriginal issues or that we should be doing things differently.
What changed was that the aboriginal community started asking questions, and because of that there was an increase in people self-identifying as aboriginal. Then the 1984 Child and Family Services Act strengthened the provision of services to aboriginal children and families, and Metro CAS started to become more accountable for the aboriginal families on its caseloads.
Paralleling the passage of the Child and Family Services Act was the implementation in 1984 of a federal Young Offenders Act. It replaced the Juvenile Delinquents Act of 1908, which, as was noted in Chapter 2, treated young offenders not as criminals but as children in need of protection. The new act dramatically changed this approach to focus on the consequences for the young offender of his or her misbehaviour. This change relieved the CAS of its century-long responsibility for young people in trouble with the law. Although it saved the Metro society money, the resulting surplus had to be redirected to fund the additional administrative and legal responsibilities required in court proceedings under the Child and Family Services Act.
Joyce James and Alec Duncan pose as the couple who can make a difference
by fostering. This fullpage ad appeared in the Telegram in 1979.
A CAS Foundation to prevent child abuse
In the aftermath of the Ellis and Popen tragedies, Metro CAS embarked on a number of child abuse prevention projects which were funded and supported by a new charitable foundation established by the agency.
When they were founded in the late Victorian era, the CAS of Toronto and its sister agency, the Infants’ Home and Infirmary, were totally dependent upon the charity and goodwill of the community. Gradually, through the intervening years, their day-to-day operations came to be funded to an increasing extent by the provincial and municipal governments. By the late 1970s, however, with public money growing tighter, it became clear that funding for prevention programs would have to be found outside Metro CAS’s annual operating budget.
In 1979, therefore, the society’s board of directors decided that the gifts and bequests from private donors that had been accumulated over the years should be administered by its own Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto Foundation. The foundation would administer these funds and raise others from non-government sources to develop programs designed to prevent child abuse.
To ensure the overall health of the society, and to enable it to develop innovative projects, Metro CAS transferred to the foundation those properties in which the province had no financial interest. (The society feared that MCSS was planning to expropriate these buildings.) The move was acclaimed as a coup by the board and staff, but it probably contributed to a deterioration of the society’s relationship with the province. Queen’s Park’s official reaction later became evident when a legislative amendment prohibited any further transfers or assignments of assets acquired by agencies with the financial assistance of the province.
A Legacy of Caring Page 23