Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I just want to follow up on my Member’s statement when I spoke about grandparents having difficulty taking care of their grandchildren after a social services apprehension. I want to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services.
Our legislation recognizes our Aboriginal culture and customs with custom adoptions. Why can’t we do the same and recognize the rights of our grandparents and extended families who want to become involved when there is an apprehension?
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A significant amount of work has been done around child and family services. The 16th Legislative Assembly did a comprehensive review where this exact question came up on a number of occasions. Also, the Auditor General recently brought forward a fairly scathing report of child and family services here in the Northwest Territories, and committee has been very, very, very active in articulating their concerns and their desire for significant change. As a result, we are moving forward with Building Stronger Families, an action plan to transform the child and family services system here in the Northwest Territories, and this is a fundamental change in how we do business here in the Northwest Territories.
Currently, we already have the ability to work with families in a case of apprehension, and our goal is not to take children away. If a child needs to be apprehended as a result of abuse-type situations, we would like to work with the families to keep them in the community. If we can’t keep them in the community, we want to work with the regions to keep them in the region; and if we can’t keep them in the region, obviously we will have to look at other locations possibly.
But in a foster family situation we do have the ability to work with elders to go through a foster application so that we can put children with their grandparents or other family members. It doesn’t need to just be their grandparents. There are some challenges with that because we still need people to pass the application process in order to legally ensure the security and safety of those children.
We are working on this. We are fundamentally changing the way we provide child and family services here in the Northwest Territories, and I am regularly keeping committee up to date on the important work that is being done in this area.
Certainly, I can appreciate some of the complications around being a foster home, but I think what the grandparents are telling me is that they are not a foster home, they are the actual grandparents and extended family. Having police record checks is kind of demeaning to them. That’s difficult to grapple with. I know that the Social Programs committee has done some good work the last term, but apparently it seems like the culture about apprehensions has not changed in Social Services to recognize the Aboriginal culture. I think the committee uses the least intrusive measures whenever possible.
So, I’d just like to ask the Minister, internally, what kind of direction is being given to social service workers when they’re considering apprehensions? Thank you.
Research has shown that in the Northwest Territories the vast majority of apprehensions that have existed to date have resulted as a result of neglect, as opposed to abuse, which is one of the reasons we’re going to a completely differential response of dealing with children in those abuse situations.
The new approach is supporting families, finding ways to support families so that we can actually keep the children with the families. If they do need counseling, if they need all these other types of supports, we’re going to be there to work with them to find solutions.
When it’s abuse, we still may need to be in a situation where we have to apprehend, which is where foster family comes in. I hear the Member’s concerns about families wanting to go through the process, but we do have an obligation to ensure that these children are protected once we’ve taken them away as a result of abuse.
Many of these changes are taking place as we speak and some of them may take a little longer than others. The differential response is going to take three to five years to fully roll out and test and make sure that it’s meeting the needs, but at the immediate time we are doing a number of things to ensure that the direction is being passed down to our staff.
As the Member knows, the assistant directors have been delegated in all seven authorities as associate directors under the act. We’ve updated our manuals. Those are going live right away. Later today I will actually be doing a notice of motion for first reading of bills on the Child and Family Services Act where we’re going to be making significant improvements to the act.
One of the changes that we’re making to the act is requiring that notification of applicable Aboriginal organizations of an apprehension order in respect to an Aboriginal child and providing for Aboriginal organizations to be party of an apprehension hearing, a child protection hearing and youth protection hearing.
We want to involve the people, we want to involve the communities and we want to involve the appropriate regional Aboriginal governments when we are faced with an actual apprehension.
Thank you very much. When apprehensions occur, usually it’s not the first time. They’re usually repeated events. I call upon the Minister to assess the procedures that ensure that grandparents and extended family members are involved in the process because usually there’s a plan of care indicated after the first apprehension.
Now, as well, perhaps the Minister can expand on the concepts of voluntary support services agreement as well as the extended family foster placement concepts as well as why it seems that this is not in place right now. Thank you.
There are 43 minutes on the clock and I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to use the entire 43 minutes. So what I’ll do is I’ll actually commit to get the Member a little bit of detail, because the question did actually contain a significant amount of detail. Needless to say, as we move forward with this differential response, we are about supporting families and putting mechanisms in to help families who are in a situation where their children may be in a neglect situation. Abuse situations will be different, but I’m happy to get all of that information, the binders, the information as well as a full briefing on that detail. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much. No, I didn’t want to precede the Minister’s Child and Family Services Act that’s going to also be taken on the road by our Social Programs committee. But at the same time, will the reassessment of this act also consider grandparents and extended families as we had discussed during question period here? Thank you.
The act may not focus specifically on grandparents and elders or other family members, but the actual application of building stronger families moving forward is focused on the families. It is focused on providing supports to the families in situations of neglect to help those families find the solutions to the root causes of that neglect. Therefore, we’ll be able to keep the children in our communities, in our regions and in their homes for as long as possible, hopefully, until they’re ready to go off to college or university.
This is the direction we’re taking, and like I said, I’m happy to share that information and have further discussions with committee as well as the Member. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
