[news] Cuts to Child Protection

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Cuts to Child Protection
From: "Bob Wilson" <BWilson at heu.org>
Date: Fri, January 31, 2003 4:45 pm

Cuts to Child Protection

According to Minister of Children and Family Development, Gordon Hogg,
65% of the children taken into the care of the government come from
single parent families on welfare. The goal of Hogg's Ministry is to
reduce the number of children in care. Meanwhile, Minister of Human
Resources, Murray Coell, has cut welfare rates for single parent
families.

On April 1, 2002, government made it harder to get child care, and
support payments to single parents with a child over 3 also went down by
$51 per month. On July 1, 2002, there was a further cut of over $50 in
shelter allowances for families of 3 or more (including single parent
families with 2 or more kids). Coell and Hogg sit in the same Cabinet.
Are their policies inconsistent, or does Hogg's acceptance of a 20%
failure rate for kids explain how they can cut support for the most
vulnerable while cutting child protection.

Hogg was quoted in the April 1st Victoria Times Colonist as saying "Even
with the best risk management tools an 80 per cent success rate is
probably the most that can be achieved." When interviewed by Vaughn
Palmer on Shaw Cable's Voice of BC on January 22, 2003, Hogg repeated
his assertion that a 20% failure rate is acceptable. He stated that
reorganizing his Ministry while cutting it by 25% was "not ideal". In
opposition, the BC Liberals pilloried the NDP for not putting more money
into child protection and acted as if every tragedy was the personal
responsibility of the Minister. Hogg said that his Ministry has saved
$40 million by reducing the number of children in care by 1,000.

The Ministry has yet to respond to my Freedom of Information request for
statistics on the number of child protection cases. It is likely that the
number of children in need of protection has continued to increase even
though the number of children in care has decreased. Since the government
eliminated the position of the independent Children's Advocate before it
started its cuts, we will have to wait two years to see data from Vital
Statistics on the number of deaths. Government, meanwhile, eliminated that
measure from any of its "service plans" (except for aboriginal infants).

Hogg said that his Ministry has data showing that every time a high
profile tragedy hit the news, social workers in his Ministry responded
with higher rates of apprehending children. He neglected to mention that
it was the BC Liberal caucus who raised the profile of every tragedy
over the past ten years. Now that they are in power, it is particularly
hypocritical that his response to tragedies is a lecture on the
acceptance of failure. There is a need to verify that no tragedy is the
result of cuts imposed by the Campbell government, but you can be
certain that they will make it virtually impossible to ever make that
determination.
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C 2003 David D. Schreck.

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