Motherisk: Hospital for Sick Children: Ontario: Aftermath: (3); National Post columnist Chris Selley recognizes the enormity of the Motherisk calamity: In this column he he prezents it as Ontario's unacknowledged - and worst - scandal, from a government that has a rich history of scandal...And he doesn't mince words..."This is a horror show, well documented in particular by the Toronto Star’s Rachel Mendleson, and yet somehow it still seems to fly below the radar. In the history of child apprehension perpetrated by Canadian governments for terrible reasons, 56 isn’t a big number. It’s a big number in the 21st century, though. It’s the number of cases in which Beaman’s team concluded that hair-based evidence of drug and alcohol abuse from the Motherisk lab had a “substantial impact” on the outcome of a case — i.e., where parents lost their kids and quite very well should not have. The lab was very lucrative for Sick Kids, but its tests were garbage. Its results often differed from those of other labs. And for parents, its widespread credibility became a Kafkaesque nightmare. They weren’t told hair tests could be used against them in court. Many asked to be tested, thinking tests would exonerate them — only to have them come back positive and find themselves without the resources to contest them."

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: "A powerful column that brings us closer to the truth of Motherisk - and the hollow core of  Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. The truest  headline I have seen so far in the aftermath of release of the Motherisk report came from Scoop. "Canada's lost kids. Scores ripped away from their parents. An excellent column. Too tightly written to reduce..

Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

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MOTHERISK:  Hospital for Sick Children:  Ontario: Aftermath: (3);  National Post columnist Chrris Selley Chris Selley: Motherisk is the Ontario Liberals' unacknowledged — and worst — scandal.

COMMENTARY: "Motherisk is the Ontario Liberals' unacknowledged — and worst — scandal," by Chris Selley, Published by The National Post on March 1, 2018.

SUB-HEADING: "In the history of child apprehension perpetrated by Canadian governments for terrible reasons, 56 isn’t a big number. It’s a big number in the 21st century, though."

PHOTO CAPTION: Motherisk, a disgraced and now-shuttered hair-testing lab at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto helped Ontario's children's aid societies take hundreds of children away from their parents.  GIST: "Ontario’s Liberal government has a rich history of scandal: power plants, Caledonia, eHealth, ORNGE, the list goes on. But there are remedies for all of those. Ontarians can vote the Liberals out. The government bought out Caledonia’s homeowners. Ontario’s economy made back the gas plant money in a trice. To my mind, the whole lot taken together pales in comparison to what Judith Beaman detailed this week in her report on Motherisk, the disgraced and now-shuttered hair-testing lab at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto that helped Ontario’s children’s aid societies (CAS) take hundreds of kids away from their parents. This is a horror show, well documented in particular by the Toronto Star’s Rachel Mendleson, and yet somehow it still seems to fly below the radar. In the history of child apprehension perpetrated by Canadian governments for terrible reasons, 56 isn’t a big number. It’s a big number in the 21st century, though. It’s the number of cases in which Beaman’s team concluded that hair-based evidence of drug and alcohol abuse from the Motherisk lab had a “substantial impact” on the outcome of a case — i.e., where parents lost their kids and quite very well should not have. The lab was very lucrative for Sick Kids, but its tests were garbage. Its results often differed from those of other labs. And for parents, its widespread credibility became a Kafkaesque nightmare. They weren’t told hair tests could be used against them in court. Many asked to be tested, thinking tests would exonerate them — only to have them come back positive and find themselves without the resources to contest them. CASs tested children’s hair without their parents’ consent. They ignored obvious problems: a newborn whose hair showed evidence of drug use by the mother, whose own hair showed none; children testing positive when their parents tested negative; “people tested negative for drugs they admitted to using and tested positive for drugs they adamantly denied using.” And if parents refused the testing, the report finds, they “were almost always presumed to be hiding drug use.” The report alleges drug use was widely used by CASs as a “proxy” for unfit parenting — as if tens of thousands of wealthy, loving Ontarian parents don’t live in absolutely zero fear of child services agencies despite their addictions to alcohol and goodness knows what else.

Legal aid funding for parents in these situations was, naturally, a joke. “The system-wide respect for the (Motherisk) testing, coupled with the relaxed standards for evidence in child protection cases, made positive results virtually impossible to refute,” the report finds. And even if they could be refuted, our mockery of a justice system often took much or all of a childhood to sort it out.
“Temporary hearings often do not happen for many months,” the report finds. “After the temporary hearing, many more months and possibly years may elapse before the matter reaches the final hearing. By then, the children may have settled into a new home and bonded with new caregivers.” You can imagine the gut-wrenching decisions that necessitated. What if you’re vindicated as a fit parent but your child doesn’t even remember you, or is happy with loving adoptive parents who can better provide for her? Or what if you’re not vindicated? Do you keep fighting, or just hope to form a relationship with your child once she turns 18? There has been much talk of systemic racism since the report’s release, and rightly so: Indigenous families were wildly disproportionately affected by this catastrophe, and while the commission doesn’t have data on Black families, we know they are wildly disproportionately affected by CAS interventions in Toronto. On a purely practical point, Susan Lang’s 2015 review of Motherisk’s hair analysis procedures found the lab did not properly account for the fact that drugs will accumulate in higher concentrations in black hair than in light hair. Oops! But while unconscious bias certainly plays a role, the real determining factor here is poverty, the report concludes — and more to the point, powerlessness. The government screwed over these parents because it could. That’s what governments do. It knew they couldn’t fight back and it knew not many of their powerful fellow citizens would object, because they face no prospect of remotely similar peril. Beaman’s report has all manner of suggestions that Attorney-General Yasir Naqvi promises to take on board. None should have been necessary in a civilized society such as Ontario purports to be. Naqvi signalled this week he might be open to “compensating” affected parents, as well he should. But you can’t compensate in any meaningful way for stealing someone’s kid under false pretences and then spending the kid’s entire childhood litigating it. Basically, as it stands, Ontario is unequipped to take people’s children away and offer them any guarantee of swift due process. Until such time as it is so equipped, except in the most extreme of cases, it should get out of the child-snatching business altogether."

The entire commentary can be read at:

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-motherisk-is-the-ontario-liberals-unacknowledged-and-worst-scandal

 

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.