PUBLISHER'S NOTE: As much as I feel that The Hospital for Sick Children has failed its public trust for failing to rein in Charles Smith before he could cause such widespread harm and misery - and for failing to learn from the Smith debacle and thereby allowing Motherisk to occur, with similar devastation to innocent individuals and families - the Children's Aid Societies cannot be allowed to wiggle off the hook and evade their own responsibility by blaming Sick Kids. My understanding is that typically children's aid societies chose to act solely on the finding of the famed hospital's Motherisk lab - without listening to the desperate voices crying for an independent investigation - talk to us, listen to us, speak to our neighbours, speak to our preacher, speak to our doctor - because they were innocent and they dreaded the possibility that their children would be torn from them and placed for adoption. All to no avail. My message to the Association of Children's Aid Societies is: 'Yes, Sick Kids still owes an apology right from the top - from each and every member of the Board. They failed the public trust. But you made the decisions in the individual cases - that we are learning will probably never be set right because the adoptions have gone through. You should be looking into your own souls, and the way that you exercised your public trust. 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.'
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Behind a true apology is continuing to make amends and … continuing to help with the work that needs to be done... “I would like to see SickKids stand behind their apology. I don’t know that we’re seeing them step up.”
Mary Ballantyne: Executive director of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies.
STORY: "Hospital for Sick Children. SickKids urged to do more on Motherisk scandal" by reporter Rachel Mendelson, published by The Toronto Star on December 13, 2016;
SUB-HEADING: "Children’s Aid Societies say hospital must help more with aftermath of testing probe."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Mary
Ballantyne, Head of the Ontario Association for Children's Aid
Societies, says SickKids hospital hould do more to assist in the efforts
underway to deliver justice to those affected by the Motherisk scandal.
GIST: "Children’s
Aid Societies are calling on the Hospital for Sick Children to “step
up” and own the role it played in the Motherisk scandal that saw faulty
drug and alcohol hair tests used in thousands of child protection cases. Mary Ballantyne, executive director of
the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS) said
SickKids, which housed the discredited Motherisk Drug Testing
Laboratory, should do more to assist in the significant efforts underway to deliver justice to those affected. “Behind
a true apology is continuing to make amends and … continuing to help
with the work that needs to be done,” Ballantyne said in an interview on
Monday. “I would like to see SickKids stand behind their apology. I
don’t know that we’re seeing them step up.” SickKids, which had previously defended the reliability of Motherisk’s hair tests, issued a public apology in October 2015 for “unacceptable” practices at the lab after completing an internal probe. Soon
after, retired Justice Susan Lang’s independent review of Motherisk —
conducted amid an ongoing Star investigation — found the hospital failed
to provide meaningful oversight of Motherisk, and the lab’s drug and
alcohol hair test results were “inadequate” and “unreliable” for use in
child protection and criminal cases. Established on Lang’s recommendation,
the Motherisk Commission of Inquiry is now reviewing high-priority
child protection cases, to see if positive Motherisk tests — often
accepted without question as proof of parental substance abuse — played
too significant a role in decisions to remove a child from her family. These
review efforts depend heavily on Children’s Aid Societies, which spend
between eight and 20 hours on each file, according to OACAS. The
Ministry of Children and Youth Services has given $1.5 million in
additional funding to OACAS. Although SickKids has provided information
to help locate relevant files, the hospital has yet to contribute
financially, Ballantyne said. “The costs
that are involved in doing this work are significant, so what role are
they and can they be playing in these costs?” she said. SickKids
declined to make CEO Michael Apkon available for an interview on
Monday. In a response to an email from the Star, hospital spokeswoman
Matet Nebres said only that “the hospital continues to co-operate with
(the) ongoing review, and to provide support if and when requested, in
order to address the concerns of families who believe that they may have
been negatively affected by the Motherisk Drug Testing Lab.” SickKids
has been named in several proposed lawsuits. Apkon has previously
acknowledged the hospital “may need to participate in compensating
impacted families.” Before the lab was
shuttered in 2015, Motherisk actively marketed its hair drug and alcohol
tests to child protection agencies, which commissioned the lab to test
the hair of 16,000 individuals between 2005 and 2015, Lang found. With
each test costing $700, it was a lucrative proposition, as the Star has previously reported.........Motherisk
Commission lawyer Lorne Glass said SickKids has been “very
co-operative” in terms of organizing their data to make it easier for
his team to connect with Children’s Aid Societies and reach affected
families, but he declined to weigh in on the question of additional
funding. Ballantyne stressed that
Children’s Aid Societies work closely with SickKids “all the time,”
emphasizing the need to “maintain that relationship and trust.” That
trust was tested in October 2014, when a Court of Appeal decision in a
criminal case that had relied on the Motherisk hair test cast doubt on the reliability of the lab’s evidence, which was previously seen as almost infallible. Child
protection agencies were unclear about how to proceed in active files
that had relied on Motherisk testing, so Ballantyne sought answers from
SickKids. “We were told all the way up the
line that there was not a problem,” she said. “We believed it because
they (the hospital) brought their experts in to prove (it) to us.” That
changed in November 2014, when the ministry appointed Lang to conduct a
review of five years’ of Motherisk testing. But it wasn’t until the
following spring that the societies received clear direction from the
government to stop relying on Motherisk tests. A
Star investigation found the method Motherisk was using to test hair
for drugs prior to 2010 was not considered by experts to be the
“gold-standard test.” The Lang report, which expanded its scope from
five years of hair testing to 10, confirmed this finding, and concluded
Motherisk’s tests “fell woefully short of internationally recognized
forensic standards.” Ballantyne’s reaction to the Lang report was, as she puts it, “Like, whoa. Clearly we didn’t have the whole story.” While
she acknowledged “we are all learning” from the problems at Motherisk,
she said too much blame has been placed on the societies. “One
of the primary experts in the province of Ontario that put itself out
there as having this expertise, in fact didn’t really have this
expertise. That was a big part of the travesty,” she said. “SickKids
does a lot of great work for children, but it this situation, they
erred."
The entire story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
