October 12, 2006
Family Services and Housing Minister Gord Mackintosh today announced that legislation will be introduced in the upcoming session that would expand the roles of the children’s advocate and ombudsman in reviewing the deaths of children in care.
Mackintosh said a bill will be proposed to the legislature this fall which would:
assign responsibility to the children’s advocate to examine the circumstances of each child death in Manitoba and make recommendations to prevent similar deaths; and
require the ombudsman to report publicly on the government’s compliance with the recommendations of the children’s advocate.
As well, child death reviews will require investments of more than $380,000 per year in new funding.
“By more than doubling our investments into reviews of child deaths, we will be establishing the strongest independent review process in Canada,” said Mackintosh, adding the increases will be proposed to the Legislative Assembly Management Committee to ensure the advocate’s office can fulfil its new responsibility and provide reports on a timely basis.
These proposals would implement several recommendations made in an external review of the child welfare system that was released yesterday. The review concluded that, although the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner currently conducts a review of the service provided by an agency to a child in care who has died, the scope of the review is restricted to just the agency’s actions. The changes will significantly expand the review to look at any relevant circumstances. The report also concluded the system is flawed because there is no compliance mechanism external to the child welfare system.
“Increased transparency and new operating funds for each child death will help to assure Manitobans that action is being taken when lessons can be learned from these tragedies,” said Mackintosh.
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REVIEW RECOMMENDATIONS
Recommendations regarding oversight of the child welfare system from Strengthen the Commitment – an External Review of the Child Welfare System by Michael Hardy, executive director, Tikinagan Child and Family Services, Billie Schibler, children’s advocate, and Irene Hamilton, ombudsman:
We recommend that the Fatality Inquiries Act be amended to remove the responsibility set out in Section 10 from the Chief Medical Examiner and amend the CFS Act to include the responsibility under those duties and responsibilities of the Office of the Children’s Advocate (OCA).
We recommend that the necessary amendments be made to the CFS Act, to require the OCA to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the death, and make recommendations to prevent similar deaths in the future. These amendments should ensure that the OCA is provided with access to all records held by government that relate to collateral services provided by government, regardless of which department.
We recommend that the staff, staff years, salaries and operating funds be transferred from the CME to the OCA and that those staff become a separate division within the office of the OCA to ensure that they are not investigating complaints. Further, we recommend that two additional full time permanent staff years, and necessary salary and operating funds be allocated to the child death review division of the OCA.
We recommend that the reports of the investigations into the deaths of children conducted by the Office of the Children’s Advocate, forwarded to the Director and Authorities, also be forwarded to the Ombudsman to determine what action has been taken in accordance with the recommendations made.
We recommend that the Ombudsman Act be amended to require the Ombudsman to submit a separate annual report to the Legislature on the results of investigations of the system’s compliance with recommendations made by the Office of the Children’s Advocate concerning child deaths.
RETURN