Search This Blog

Search This Blog

Search This Blog

Translate

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Public Rally Court House

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

they dont want any media until they can get this Bill passed, with no oversight, on CAS CCAS and the Ministers office.

Anonymous said...

It's a disgrace if indeed the verdict is delayed until April. What is Justice Watt doing - is he on vacation?

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Anonymous said...

I also suspect that delaying the verdict relates to quietly proceeding with the bill.

From personal experience, I can tell you the politician who chairs CAS' complaints committee in my community willfully ignored irrefutable evidence of heinous misconduct by several CAS employees, delaying the release of his committee's "decision" five weeks. This contrived date fell the day after he was safely re-elected. Provincial politicians are every bit as slimy.

Amanda said...

Write to McGuinty, the Ombudsman Andre Marin and anyone else you can think of to slow down this bill!! There have been many complaints against it from people like us who want some sort of accountability from the C/CAS's to the Native community who are scared of another child scoop! These agencies are catering to rich, infertile couples who want babies, then place the older children wherever they can, regardless of home studies or references! As a result, these older (I mean three and up) are being abused, molested, neglected and killed.

I think the point is that NO ONE ASKED TO BE BORN and no one, ESPECIALLY a child, deserves anything but a wonderful, safe childhood.

Please stall the bill with your letters! I will be writing until my printer is out of ink here, please, please do the same. All the addresses and contact information you need is on this site. Also, the Social Policy Committee is a great place to start! They are the ones who aren't giving the ombudsman authority and who are letting this bill slide through.

This bill CAN NOT pass or we are ALL in trouble, not to mention the children under the 'care' of the Canadian Mofia, i.e the Canadian Children's Aid Societies...

Amanda Reed

Anonymous said...

Its been over 3 years since his death and Jeffrey is still waiting for Justice...Not sure what facts about this case Judge Watt doesn't understand...What a fucking joke. Today I am embarrassed to be a Canadian.

Anonymous said...

DELAYED?
This is ridiculous!
Didn't Jeffrey die in 2002?!
I am so angry right now, when are they going to give this little boy justice?!?!

Anonymous said...

National Post - July 12, 2001
Save us from social workers on crusade
Donna Laframboise

Social work is a noble profession, but it's also a heartbreaking, thankless one. Idealistic young people are attracted to this field because they want to help others. But many soon realize there's a limit to what they can realistically achieve. Some of their clients have such severe addictions or mental illness, getting them through the day is a major challenge. Others make bad decisions left and right, learning little from their mistakes.

Dispirited social workers are particularly vulnerable, therefore, to crusades that offer them a renewed sense of purpose. Crusades such as those against spanking and sex abuse.

Last week, at the behest of child welfare workers, police wrenched seven frightened children, aged six to 14, from their Southern Ontario home -- apparently because their parents refused to promise not to spank them. When the dust settles, this may turn out to be a textbook example of how the social work profession, consumed by anti-spanking fervour, traumatized these children needlessly. Anyone who thinks turning young children's lives upside down is preferable to mild corporal punishment has lost the ability to imagine what it must be like to be plunged into a world of strangers at the age of eight.

In Massachusetts, the Governor is being urged to commute the 30-40 year sentence of Gerald Amirault, jailed for the past 15 years in one of America's most notorious daycare sex abuse cases. Starting from a single allegation lodged by a mother whose judgment was suspect, the case mushroomed into dozens of accusations after social workers told the parents of other kids in the daycare that a long list of normal childhood behaviours indicated sex abuse.

Transcripts of interviews conducted with these children, then between ages two and five, reveal authorities who refused to take no for an answer. To say these kids were badgered until they finally "remembered" being abused is putting it mildly.

The return of this case to the news -- last week the state parole board cast grave doubt on Mr. Amirault's conviction and recommended his release -- serves to remind us that, during the 1980s, overzealous adults convinced hundreds of children they'd been sexually molested by their daycare workers when nothing of the sort had happened. Large numbers of these youngsters were then subjected to counselling to help them overcome the imagined abuse -- a recipe for mental health difficulties if ever there was one.

Nor is there much reason to believe the social work profession has been appropriately horrified by these mistakes. In April, a judge lambasted Illinois' equivalent of Children's Aid in a 102-page ruling that concluded the way child abuse is investigated in that state (and elsewhere in the United States) is fundamentally flawed. In three-quarters of the instances in which social workers found caregivers guilty of child maltreatment, the standards of proof were so low the finding was later overturned. Which, as the judge pointed out, means all those children lost "the benefit of a stable environment" for no good reason.

Here in Canada, judges have condemned social workers for taking sides when divorcing mothers have falsely accused fathers of child sexual abuse. In one such case, an Ontario judge concluded in 1994 that the Children's Aid Society of Durham Region continued to argue in court that a father was guilty even after it had belatedly realized he was innocent. (In effect, he was being punished for declining the society's offer of a financial settlement.) That this was a dismal way to serve the interests of the man's two daughters -- who were supposed to be the society's sole focus – seems to have escaped the social workers involved.

In another false sex abuse case, a Manitoba judge condemned a social worker in 1999 for, among other things, glossing over serious concerns regarding a mentally disturbed mother's ability to care for her daughter. In the words of the judge, the social worker "was determined to stop [the father] from seeing [his daughter] and it appeared that she would go to any length." The child suffered terribly as a result -- to the point where, noted the judge, this six-year-old "spoke of jumping out a window."

Most social workers have only the best of intentions. But that's clearly not enough to prevent them from devastating children's lives under the guise of saving them.

Copyright © National Post Online

Anonymous said...

Please write and also so the social standing comm. your MPs and MPPs this bill will result in more Childrens deaths. listen to Amanda. We as citzens need to protect the children and are tax dollars from being used to cause anyone harm. Does anyone have Standing commettees e-mail???

Anonymous said...

Press Releases



Province must do more to protect kids Ombud - The Toronto Star, February 15, 2006
Province must do more to protect kids Ombud; New rules falling 'far short,' Marin says Independent oversight of aid societies urged

The Toronto Star
Wed 15 Feb 2006
Byline: Richard Brennan

Queen's Park is falling "far short" of its responsibility to protect youngsters in the care of children's aid societies, Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin warned yesterday.

"We are the only province in Canada where there is no independent oversight of our child protection system, which is in private hands," Marin said in an interview.

Marin issued a news release earlier slamming the Liberal government's handling of amendments to Bill 210, the Child and Family Services Statute Law Amendment Act.

It said the amendments fall "far short of what is needed to ensure independent, third party, investigative oversight of Children's Aid Societies."

The ombudsman sent a similarly worded warning to Children and Youth Services Minister Mary Anne Chambers, emphasizing that in other provinces the ombud's office has jurisdiction.

"There is no ability for a citizen to complain to an outside, independent investigative agency about the administrative decisions the CAS make on a day-to-day basis that affect children," Marin said.

"There is absolutely no oversight mechanism, yet we cut these private agencies $1.2 billion a year with no checks and balances on the administrative decisions they make," he said.

Chambers said she personally put in an amendment giving the Child and Family Services Review Board greater powers, which she noted would then fall under the jurisdiction of Marin's office.

People who take exception to a ruling by the review board, she said, can appeal to the ombudsman's office.

"What I am not in a position to do is to give the ombudsman more power than he has right now," she told reporters.

Marin said what the minister has proposed "is smoke and mirror. It's got nothing to do with oversight."

He said the Child and Family Services Review Board is an adjudicative agency. "This is not an investigation agency. This is a quasi-judicial tribunal," he said.

"After this is in place we will be providing the least oversight of any province. It doesn't change at all the situation."

In his release, Marin asked, "How many more cases like Jeffrey Baldwin will there be before the government wakes up and sees that we need stronger accountability, the kind that comes from having an independent watchdog with strong investigative powers?"

Jeffrey, 6, who was in the care of his grandparents and the Catholic Children's Aid Society, was the victim of possibly the worst case of child malnutrition ever seen in Canada.

© 2006 Torstar Corporation

Anonymous said...

Social Policy Committee of the Ontario Legislative Assembly

Room 1405, Whitney Block

Queen's Park

Toronto, Ontario

M7A 1A2

Clerk of the Committee is Anne Stokes

anne_stokes@ontla.ola.org
Room 1405, Whitney Block

Tel: (416) 325-3515

Fax: (416) 325-3505

TTY: (416) 325-3538

Anonymous said...

Today's Toronto Star reports that the new date for the verdict is April 7, 2006.