SUB-HEADING: "After identifying 56 cases where families were “broken apart,” Commissioner Judith Beaman’s report makes 32 recommendations to “help ensure that no family suffers a similar injustice in the future.”

PHOTO CAPTION:  "Among the recommendations in Beaman's report: Requiring Children?s Aid Societies to obtain valid written consent ?in every situation where a parent is asked to provide a bodily sample,? and courts to ensure this consent has been given. "

GIST: "Ontario’s Motherisk Commission is calling for significant changes to the province’s child protection system after identifying 56 cases where families were “broken apart” due to ’s flawed hair-strand drug and alcohol testing. In her report released today, Commissioner Judith Beaman described the reliance in child protection cases on the flawed testing, which was produced at a once-trusted lab at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, as “manifestly unfair and harmful.” “The testing was imposed on people who were among the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, with scant regard for due process of their rights to privacy and bodily integrity,” Beaman said in her report released today, entitled Harmful Impacts. “The discovery that unreliable test results were used as expert evidence in child protection proceedings for so many years undermines the public’s confidence in the fairness of our justice system, particularly with respect to how it treats vulnerable people.” As the Star has reported, Motherisk’s discredited hair testing influenced at least eight criminal cases and thousands of child protection cases across the country, beginning in the 1990s. Sick Kids made millions from the hair tests, which were purchased by more than 100 child welfare providers in five provinces, who relied on the results primarily as proof of parental substance abuse. Beaman found that Motherisk’s testing disproportionately impacted Indigenous families, who were involved in nearly 15 per cent of the 1,291 cases the commission reviewed, despite making up less than 3 per cent of Ontario’s population. The commission was established on the recommendation of former Justice Susan Lang, whose independent review of Motherisk concluded in December 2015 that the testing was “inadequate and unreliable” for use in child protection and criminal proceedings. Beaman, also a retired judge, was appointed under the Public Inquiries Act to probe 25 years of child protection cases in Ontario involving Motherisk’s flawed hair tests. Armed with a $10-million budget and a two-year mandate, Beaman was tasked with identifying child protection cases in Ontario in which Motherisk’s tests played a significant role in decisions to remove children from their families, provide counselling and legal assistance and, where possible, facilitate reunification. The commission identified 56 cases where the Motherisk test results had a “substantial impact.”   “Behind every one of the 56 ‘cases,’ families were broken apart and relationships among children, siblings, parents, and extended families and communities were damaged or lost,” she said. Seven of those cases — 12.5 per cent — involved Indigenous families. Beaman’s report outlines 32 recommendations aimed at “addressing systemic issues” that allowed Motherisk’s flawed evidence to taint child protection cases for so long — recommendations she said are intended to “help ensure that no family suffers a similar injustice in the future.” They include:
  • Requiring Children’s Aid Societies to obtain valid written consent “in every situation where a parent is asked to provide a bodily sample,” and courts to ensure this consent has been given.
  • Requiring that scientific test results used in child protection proceedings be accompanied by a report from an expert explaining the meaning of the result and the underlying science.
  • Expanding the availability of legal aid funding in child protection cases involving expert evidence, and providing funding for social workers to assist parents’ lawyers.
  • Developing more substance use treatment programs that are “family-inclusive,” and ongoing education for child protection workers about “substance use issues and their impact on parenting.”
  • Continuing legal education for lawyers on child welfare and at least one course on child welfare in law schools.
  • Funding from the federal government for First Nations Band representatives to participate in child protection proceedings.   In a statement on Monday, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi vowed to take action on several of Beaman’s recommendations, including continuing to offer counselling services for families affected by Motherisk, establishing a task force of outside experts to guide next steps as asking the judiciary, the Law Society of Ontario and Legal Aid to act.
The exercise is further complicated by the fact that Motherisk’s testing was deemed unreliable but not necessarily inaccurate, and since the lab did not retain samples for future testing, there is no way to fully exonerate affected parents. Furthermore, once finalized, adoptions are virtually impossible to overturn, because the courts place tremendous weight on the best interests of the child. “This means that even where the discredited Motherisk testing substantially affected the outcome of cases, the families will likely have difficulty brining about a change in the children’s situations,” Beaman said. “These cases are likely to be very difficult and stressful to litigate and challenging for the courts to consider.” Of the 56 cases, Beaman said seven families have “achieved a legal remedy.” In four of those cases, “children have been returned to their parents’ care.” Toronto lawyer Sarah Clarke is representing four parents and one grandparent who have been identified by the commission as having a possible legal remedy. “I can’t imagine what it would be like for the adoptive parents. What do you do? These are your children. The problem is, these are also their parents,” she said, referring to the biological parents she represents, “so it’s really, really tricky.” “People don’t understand … the messiness of Motherisk. It doesn’t just impact the biological parents’ life. It doesn’t just impact the child. It impacts every single person who cares about that child,” Clarke said. Governments in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and British Columbia have also launched reviews of affected child protection cases, but so far Ontario is the only province to establish an independent process and provide a framework for counselling and legal support. However, the Motherisk Commission has drawn criticism from some affected parents who say they were excluded from the review process — which they argue should have included public hearings — and has failed to facilitate the reunions that many were hoping for. Heather, an Ontario mother, lost her two young daughters after positive cocaine hair-testing from Motherisk, despite producing dozens of clean urine tests before her 2009 trial. She received a letter from the commission in April 2016 indicating that Motherisk testing played a significant role in the decision to remove her kids, but the adoptive parents have not yet indicated that they are willing to participate in mediation, which the commission is offering to fund as an alternative to a court challenge. “I don’t know where my kids are. I don’t know if they’re safe. I don’t know if they’re happy,” she told the Star/CBC last fall. Heather, not her real name, is among three mothers who launched an unsuccessful application for judicial review of the commission in 2016.) The Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, Irwin Elman, has said the commission should review every single affected child protection case. Sick Kids has never released comprehensive, cross-country numbers, but Lang’s review found that 16,000 individuals had their hair tested at the request of Ontario child welfare agencies from 2005 to 2015 alone. Roughly 54 per cent of those tests were positive for drugs or alcohol. In her report, Beaman said the commission “made every effort to identify and review all of the cases involving Motherisk testing where children were permanently removed from their families and were still under the age of 18.” The commission also drew fire for an outreach campaign last March that tried to use schools to find children affected by the Motherisk scandal. A flyer posted on elementary and high school bulletin boards and Facebook pages asked students: “Were you taken from your parent by the Children’s Aid Society?” Outrage from Elman, as well as adoptive parents and students, led the Ministry of Education, which had sanctioned the campaign, to promptly pull the plug on the effort. At the time, the commission said the flyers were not intended to be posted in elementary schools, but defended the campaign, which was created in consultation with “a variety of groups representing children and youth.” The Motherisk scandal began in late 2014, when criticism of the reliability of the lab’s hair-testing results in a 2009 criminal case, involving a Toronto mother who was sent to jail for feeding her toddler cocaine, prompted the Court of Appeal to overturn her drug-related convictions. After a series of stories in the Star revealed that Motherisk had not used a gold-standard test to verify its results from 2005 to 2010, contrary to international forensic standards, Queen’s Park appointed Lang to review the reliability of five years of testing. For months, Sick Kids vigorously defended Motherisk. Hospital executives said they had “full confidence in the reliability of Motherisk’s hair testing” and continued to allow the lab to test samples for child welfare agencies. But during Lang’s review, in March 2015, Sick Kids suspended hair-testing at Motherisk, after learning it had been misled about external proficiency testing it had previously cited as proof that the lab’s results could be trusted. The lab was closed for good the next month. Lang’s mandate was expanded in April 2015, doubling the period under scrutiny to cover 2005 to 2015. Her blistering report on Motherisk chronicled a litany of failings at the once-revered lab. She said the use of Motherisk’s “hair-testing evidence in child protection and criminal cases has serious implications for the fairness of those proceedings and warrants an additional review.” Lang also lambasted Sick Kids for failing to learn from the lessons of a public inquiry in 2007 and 2008 into the mistakes of disgraced Sick Kids pediatric forensic pathologist Charles Smith, whose flawed autopsy analyses tainted more than a dozen cases. The Smith scandal also involved marginalized parents, flawed forensic evidence and families torn apart. In an interview with the Star/CBC last fall, Lang called the fallout from Motherisk “a tragedy.” Sick Kids issued a public apology for the Motherisk scandal in October 2015. The hospital, along with Motherisk founder and former director Dr. Gideon Koren and lab manager Joey Gareri, have been named as defendants in a series of lawsuits involving at least 328 plaintiffs. A proposed class-action, which sought compensation for 10,000 people across Canada, was rejected by a Toronto judge last fall, but the plaintiff is appealing that decision. Koren retired from Sick Kids during the scandal in June 2015. He is currently working for a health-care company in Israel and still speaks at medical conferences around the world. Although it no longer includes a hair-testing lab, the Motherisk Program, which Koren created at Sick Kids in 1985 to provide drug-safety advice to pregnant and lactating women, is still operational."

The entire story can be found at:

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/02/26/motherisk-tests-unfair-and-harmful-to-families-in-child-protection-cases.html

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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog."