PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "It’s pretty tough to overstate the gravity of what went on in this province’s children’s aid societies, in its courtrooms, and at the lucrative Motherisk lab at Sick Kids Hospital, since closed."
----------------------------
COMMENTARY: The National Post's Chris Selley says Ontario’s stolen children are still getting a raw deal as Ontario deals with the Motherisk scandal, by columnist Chris Selley, published by The National Post on March 30, 2017. (Chris Selley joined the Post in 2008 after leaving Maclean's, where he wrote on national affairs — as he did on Tart Cider, the blog on which he made a name for himself. He served as a member of the editorial board beginning in 2009, and is currently the Post's Toronto's City Hall columnist.)
GIST: "On Wednesday, Ontario’s Ministry of Education
asked for these Motherisk Commission posters to be taken down from
schools. That’s the question Ontario students were asked this week on posters
in their schools. It was an outreach effort by the Motherisk Commission,
which is examining hundreds of cases in which now-discredited hair
tests for drug and alcohol abuse contributed to children being removed
from their parents’ custody — in some cases forever. “Do you want to know if this testing was relied on in your case?”
the poster asked. “If yes, we may be able to help and it’s completely
confidential.” You can understand why parents of adopted children wouldn’t want
their sons and daughters confronting such a document. These are
discussions that need to happen on a family’s own terms. It could be
upsetting if children weren’t adopted under those circumstances: Irwin
Elman, Ontario’s Children and Youth Advocate, described a tearful child
suddenly wondering “if she was a ‘crack baby’.” And it could be upsetting if children were adopted under those
circumstances: the last thing they need is to be reminded of it every
day. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Education asked for the posters to
be yanked down. And that’s probably for the best. They certainly had no
business in elementary schools, and according to the Ministry they
weren’t supposed to be there. But I can see why the posters would have seemed like a good idea. The
full scope of this disaster needs to be known and its effects on
parents and children understood. It’s pretty tough to overstate the gravity of what went on in
this province’s children’s aid societies, in its courtrooms, and at the
lucrative Motherisk lab at Sick Kids Hospital, since closed. Consider the case of K, the appropriately Kafkaesque abbreviation
of a five-year-old girl who was taken from her mother in September
2012, entirely on the basis of cocaine use detected at the Motherisk
lab, which the mother denied. K has been in “legal limbo” ever since. She’s 10 now. The case
took nearly two years to get to trial. The 16 trial days unfolded over
eight months, during which the mother’s counsel never challenged the
hair evidence. The judge in the case reserved her decision for an
astonishing nine months, during which time K was moved from a foster
home to a “foster placement with a view to adoption” without her parents
or their counsel being notified. “This passage of time is not only entirely unacceptable, it is
reprehensible and cannot be justified or excused on any credible basis,”
Justice Grant A. Campbell of the Ontario Superior Court wrote in a
scathing ruling in February. (He called the parents’ lawyers
“incompetent.”) K remains a Crown ward. The parents have no access to her. And it
all stems from a test that fell “woefully short of internationally
recognized forensic standards,” according to Justice Susan Lang’s report
to the Attorney-General last year. Now imagine dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of similar cases.
(The Commission expects to examine 2,000.) Imagine cases where adoptions
have gone through, perhaps several years ago. Imagine you haven’t seen
your children in years; imagine they don’t even remember you; imagine
you know they’re doing well with their adopted parents; imagine trying
to decide what to do. The government stole your kid under false
pretences; you’re grief-stricken, furious; but maybe your kid is in a
wealthier or more stable environment than you can offer. It’s an
impossible position that no one should ever be in. Motherisk has made a lot of headlines, but it doesn’t seem like the
full horror of this situation has really pervaded the public
consciousness. Perhaps that’s because the people likeliest to run afoul
of child protective services tend to be marginalized to begin with, and
disproportionately aboriginal. Perhaps people reason people’s hair
wouldn’t be tested in the first place if they were reasonably fit
parents. But there’s not much worse that governments can do to people than
take their children away."
The entire commentary 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/
