Dufferin VOCA News May

Oriena Rejola Currie, R.I.P.

August 6, 2007

Oriena Currie, a board member of Canada Court Watch, has passed away.

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In memory of Oriena Rejola Currie
Canada Court Watch executive, Oriena Currie, passes away at 72 years of age
Sadly, on Sunday, July 22, 2007, Canada Court Watch advocate, Oriena Rejola Currie, 72 years of age, passed away in hospital after losing her final battle with cancer.
To her many friends and associates with whom she had become involved in over the years during her political advocacy and as an executive director of Canada Court Watch, she will be greatly missed.
She is survived by her son, Charles, her daughter, Bonnie, and five grandchildren, Chatham, Cauthen, Quen , Caegan and Kitsym.
Oriena was one of the most respected and senior member of Canada Court Watch, having served on its Board of Directors for a number of years.
Up until her final battle with cancer she proudly stood up for freedom, justice and democracy which were the issues she strongly believed in and fought fearlessly for those beliefs.
Oriena was born November 23, 1934 in Toronto, Ontario. She grew up as a young child in the Cabbagetown community of Toronto and in her teenage years lived in the Mississauga area.
In her later years, Oriena resided in Campbellville, a small community situated on the beautiful Niagara Escarpment close to Milton, Ontario.
She operated a family owned flea market from a small commercial building located on her family's properly on Guelph Line at the southern outskirts of her community.
Most Saturdays and Sundays she could be found at her flea market with her grandchildren close at hand.
Outside of her time spent with her family members and running the family business, Oriena was a powerhouse, devoting much of her knowledge and experience to provide helpful advice to others experiencing problems with the courts and lawyers.
People from all over called Oriena by phone for help with their court related problems with many finding much needed information and support that they were unable to obtain or afford from professionals in legal community.
Oriena stated that advocating for fairness, justice and most all accountability had been a passion and a driving force during most of her life.

Oriena at the Barrie, Ontario rally in 2006 wearing the T shirt which caused court workers to label her and other justice minded Canadian citizens as "gang" members.
She often attended meetings, protests and events in the community designed to bring attention to the plight of those involved with the court system.
Last year in Barrie, Oriena was refused entry to the public washrooms at the Barrie, Ontario courthouse by security forces.
Officers told her that because she was wearing a Canada Court Watch T shirt, she was considered as posing a threat to the security of the court.
Court Security officers told Oriena that court administrators and judges inside the building had labelled the senior citizen a "gang" member.
Afterwards, outside of the Barrie, Ontario courthouse, Oriena laughed and stated the incident at the court about her being refused entry to use of the washroom was a joke.
"I must be doing something right if these big, burly and armed police officers felt threatened by me, a 71-year old senior citizen," she said.
Oriena stated that the actions of police and court workers that day at the Barrie court was an insult to justice and free speech in Canada.
She said that this only showed that the judges and those who work for the court system were more afraid of her Court Watch T shirt and what it stood for than they were of her.
"The judges and court workers are terrified of the public finding out the truth of what is going on inside of their lavish court buildings.
They know what they are doing is wrong and they only want to hide the truth" she said during an interview with reporters outside of the court.
Over the years, Oriena had acquired a small library of legal books which she graciously shared with people who were in need of helpful legal information.
She provided free legal advocacy under the name "YoYo" Law, the phrase YoYo standing for "Your On Your Own".
Oriena coined this unique name because she believed that people had to self educate themselves about the law and about their rights and freedoms.
She often said that the costs associated with people obtaining competent legal services had become unaffordable to all Canadians except those considered wealthy.
Oriena did not fear standing up against injustice and would often stand up for others in the community, especially those who had been pillaged of their assets and then abandoned by legal professionals.
Just days before her passing, Oriena had rescheduled a court hearing in which she was scheduled to appear in court to represent herself in a lawsuit she had prepared and filed by herself prior to her becoming ill.
Her civil lawsuit against authorities involved the Halton Regional Police and the Crown Attorney's office.
Even with her illness facing her, she forged ahead in expectation of being well enough to fight for justice another day.
Although Oriena wanted very much to keep her scheduled court date, in the end her failing health would not permit her to do so.
Even at 72 years of age, Oriena was ready and willing to set an example to all Canadians by single-handedly challenging local authorities who she believed had done wrong, including the police.
In addition to handing out information to people involved in the court system, Oriena loved going to various courts in the southern Ontario region as a Canada Court Watch observer where she would observe court proceedings and report back about irregularities in the courts.
Archbishop Dorian A. Baxter, the National Chairman of Court Watch, said that Oriena was a person full of spirit, determination and dedication in the pursuit of fairness and justice for her fellow Canadians.
"Good, honest and hard working citizens of her calibre are hard to find," said Baxter.
Oriena has been laid to rest at the St. David's Presbyterian Church in Campbellville.
Oriena will be dearly missed by many.
Source: email from Canada Court Watch

CAS Trains Killer

August 5, 2007

Jesse Imeson became Canada's most wanted man after committing three homicides. The biographical article below discloses that he spent much of his childhood in the care of children's aid. The article is misleading on one point: it says his mother placed him with CAS. We have interviewed many parents who (on paper) relinquished their children to CAS voluntarily. The consent was most often obtained by deception, such as a social worker suggesting to the parent that a signature was a formality necessary for the agency to provide help to the child.

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Murder suspect 'always smiling'
By JENNIFER O'BRIEN, SUN MEDIA
August 4, 2007
He was non-stop.
An adventurous, wide-eyed boy, Jesse Imeson made his babysitter work for her money -- giggling as he chased her through his parents' Amherstburg home south of Windsor.
The eldest of three children, Imeson, seven at the time could be "a little turd," Cheryl White remembers.
"He would chase me through the house with a water gun. He was a jokester," says White, who used to care for Imeson and his younger brother and sister.
"But he was a happy kid. He had these huge eyes and he was always smiling, trying to have fun."
That boyish smile is long behind the six-foot-tall man whose eyes are harder now, and whose body is covered in tattoos, including a Chinese symbol meaning "soldier," on his neck.
At 22, Imeson is suddenly infamous as an unpredictable fugitive, accused of murdering three people in cold blood, and evading a national manhunt for two weeks before his arrest Tuesday.
But his troubles didn't begin overnight. In recent years, Imeson had been a regular at Windsor's jail, and became known to some people as a guy who'd say anything to get what he wanted.
Though his personal life appeared full -- a beautiful girlfriend, the mother of his two-year-old daughter, and a circle of supportive friends and relatives -- many say he considered himself alone since his mom put him into foster care at about age 10.
"He had a rough life," so many have said of Imeson.
There was the suicide of his father, Jeff, who worked in construction in Amherstburg. Imeson has told friends it was he -- then nine-years-old -- who found his father dead.
There was foster care. Shortly after his dad died, Imeson's mom handed over her eldest son -- but not his siblings -- to Children's Aid.
Since turning 18, a Corrections Canada official said, Imeson had often been in the Windsor jail on charges of petty crimes, including possession of stolen goods and robbery.
Then, there's the drug addiction.
And now there are the three killings police link to Imeson -- the strangulation of 25-year-old Carlos Rivera, who was found in Imeson's rented Windsor room on July 19, and the shooting deaths of Bill and Helene Regier, who were found dead, tied up in their Mount Carmel home July 23.
For 12 days, Imeson evaded a manhunt that went Canada-wide after the Regiers killings, until a concerned neighbour spotted him watching television in an unoccupied home in Portage-Du-Fort, Que., and he was chased into the woods.
Then, keeping with his unpredictable reputation, the heavily tattooed, newly bearded fugitive simply laid down beside the loaded gun he carried and let police arrest him.
"His family is so glad," says White. "We all thought it could have ended worse, with the family ( suicide) history."

Imeson took his father's death "badly," White says.
"His dad was his hero. He started to get out of hand. That's how he was reacting to the devastation."
His mom put him in foster care -- a move called "abandonment" by Children's Aid societies. She didn't put his younger siblings into care, but eventually relatives cared for them, too, a cousin says.
"She did it for him," says White. "He was causing trouble in the home and she couldn't handle it at the time."
He went to Leamington, a 45-minute drive from Amherstburg, where his mom lived.
Foster parents wouldn't comment on Imeson, but former classmates who met Imeson in Grade 6 remember the new kid as likeable.
"Everybody knew he had a messed up life," says a woman who went to Leamington's Queen Elizabeth elementary school."He was a little rough, but he was a decent kid."
Imeson graduated from Grade 8 at that school, she says, and went on to Leamington District secondary.
Somehow, he ended up back in Amherstburg, where he began temporary stays with aunts and uncles.
"He stayed with relatives, and his grandparents tried so hard," one cousin says. "He was unworkable."
Today, Imeson is close with his sister and a brother, who is training to be a paramedic, and some cousins, friends say.
Though he had friends in high school -- he went to General Amherst in Amherstburg until dropping out in Grade 11 -- Imeson's reputation was as a hard-partying hot head.
Known for his tough talk, and tough walk, he always had a cigarette in his mouth and usually a beer in his hands.
Though friends say he wasn't a bully, and that he charmed women with his manners and easy grin, he was a bad boy -- even banned from one Amherstburg bar.
"He caused trouble all the time," says a server at Shooters. "The night he was banned, we were all sitting around after work and (talking about it)."
Though Imeson has several tattoos, including his surname etched across his stomach, a Windsor tattoo artist says he was horrible to work on.
"He was hyper and high strung," says Jeff Vella, who booted Imeson from his shop for his behaviour. Vella says Imeson often came in after partying at the casino and sometimes couldn't sit still for more than five minutes.
A well-built man who worked out often, Imeson took odd jobs, doing construction or helping people out, friends say. But he had several criminal convictions.
It's surprising, then, that he wanted to be a cop, enrolling in a police foundations course at a Windsor college. But that's where White -- enrolled in a different course -- ran into the man she once babysat.
Imeson was worried during his time at the college, she says -- his girlfriend was pregnant. She says he graduated, but then couldn't find work.
Imeson left for Whistler, B.C., to do just that, says another friend. He did get a job somewhere, but "he came back after his daughter was born," she says.
But Imeson's drug use -- a former rehab peer says he was into cocaine -- was heavy and his troubles continued.
This summer, Imeson did a 40-day program at Windsor's Salvation Army Addiction and Rehabilitation Centre, where former peers blame drugs for his troubles. While there, Imeson said he wanted to be a better dad and received visits from his baby's "hot" mother, says a former peer.
"He was a nice guy," the friend says.
Imeson graduated from the program "a model client," says Salvation Army Major Wilfred Harbin. But he relapsed.
Imeson moved into a rooming house in downtown Windsor, telling his landlords he had been in the military -- a story police have refuted.
The couple who rented to him say Imeson was polite and quiet, and kept pictures of his daughter in his room.
Friends say he was still in an on-and-off relationship with his daughter's mom.
Imeson was living in that home for three weeks when he decided to go to a downtown gay strip bar, the Tap.

Staff at the Tap say they had never seen Imeson before Tuesday, July 17, when he showed up and began talking to bartender Carlos Rivera.
Always on the hunt for fast cash, the high school dropout told friends he thought he could make good money dancing for men. But he didn't fill out the application, says operator Eddie An.
An said he had a bad feeling about Imeson, who was boasting about being a soldier.
But Rivera was interested and later left with Imeson.
Next morning, the landlords said, Imeson left early. In Rivera's car, he drove the more than 200 kilometres to Grand Bend. Rivera's strangled body remained in his room -- and wasn't found until Thursday, July 19.
Police have said that before Rivera's body was even found, Imeson had hooked up with South Huron teen Lindsey Glavin at a Grand Bend bar.
They hung out until Friday, July 20, when Glavin ended the relationship and dropped Imeson off in a Stephen Township field, north of Mount Carmel Line.
Assisted by Glavin, police combed that field Saturday, July 21, but called off the search the next day.
On Monday, July 23, four concessions east, the Regiers were found dead, spurring the nationwide hunt for Imeson. That hunt ended last Tuesday, eight days later, 600 kilometres away, in a wooded area of Quebec, north of Ottawa.
With no blaze of glory, Imeson went down peacefully, police said, laying down beside his loaded rifle.
He's been charged with first-degree murder in Rivera's death and, within a week, is expected to face the same charge for the deaths of the Regiers.
"He has gotten himself into a lot of trouble over the years but something like this? We are shocked," says White.
Another friend from Amherstburg says she was happy Imeson was captured, "because he doesn't have to run anymore," though she was worried about him, saying he looked thin on the news.
Source: London Free Press

Pervert Shrink

August 4, 2007

Stuart Greenberg was an expert witness in Seattle who earned a living taking children from their parents. He was also a voyeur who secretly photographed women using his bathroom, then used the pictures for his own sexual gratification. He joins the ranks of Ontario's Dr Charles Smith as a discredited expert, requiring reviews of many of the cases in which he provided opinions.

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Friday, July 27, 2007 - 12:00 AM
Therapist's suicide could trigger challenges in legal cases
By Jennifer Sullivan and Maureen O'Hagan, Seattle Times staff reporters
The arrest and suicide of a prominent Seattle psychologist who was often an expert witness in sexual-abuse and child-custody cases could raise questions about his recommendations, and some could be challenged, judges say.
Renton police on Wednesday found Stuart Greenberg's body after employees at the Clarion hotel entered his room and found a note on the floor that read, "medical personnel, do not resuscitate. Let me die," according to a Renton police report.
Officers later found Greenberg in a bathtub. He had cuts on both wrists, and police found a variety of medications in the bathroom. The case is being investigated as an overdose.
Greenberg, 59, was well-known as an expert witness in sexual-abuse cases. He had worked as a consultant to the Archdiocese of Seattle, which was defending itself in priest-abuse cases. He also had served as an expert witness on behalf of sex-abuse victims in other cases.
Greenberg also was frequently appointed as a parenting evaluator in child-custody cases.
Greenberg was arrested then suspended from practice earlier this month after allegations surfaced that he had secretly videotaped a woman in his office bathroom.
He was booked into the King County Jail on July 3 after an acquaintance found the videotape in the psychologist's VCR and alerted the person who appeared on the tape, police said. The tape was then handed over to police.
While in jail, Greenberg had been placed on suicide watch, according to the Renton police report. He was conditionally released two days after his arrest.
Dan Donohoe, spokesman for the King County Prosecutor's Office, said a decision on whether to file charges against Greenberg had not been made. But the state Board of Psychology suspended his license after the voyeurism allegation.
Nationally renowned
Greenberg, as a parenting evaluator in child-custody cases, carried tremendous power. A parenting evaluator's job is to interview all the parties involved and make custody recommendations; typically, the recommendations are followed.
Greenberg had developed a national reputation, as well. His curriculum vitae, listing all his professional accomplishments, runs 19 pages.
Among other things, he served as president of the American Board of Forensic Psychology in 2002-2003 and taught dozens of continuing-education courses across the country for fellow psychologists.
He also trained a crop of would-be psychologists as a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington, and before that at the University of Southern California and the University of Iowa.
King County Presiding Judge Michael Trickey said the courts — and families going through custody battles — will have to contend with a number of difficult issues in the wake of Greenberg's arrest and subsequent death. He anticipates a flurry of challenges by parties who were unhappy with past evaluations involving Greenberg.
Greenberg's arrest alone wouldn't be enough to reopen a case. But if his recommendations hinged on a parent's alleged sexual deviancy, for example, that parent could argue that Greenberg's opinion was tainted by his alleged actions.
"Never having dealt with this before, I'm not sure how this would play out," Trickey said, adding, "I assume we're going to deal with it sooner rather than later."
The court doesn't keep count of cases assigned to a particular parenting evaluator, so it's impossible to tell how many families could be affected. But it's a given that all of Greenberg's pending cases will have to be reassigned to other evaluators — a process that was already under way since his arrest and suspension of his license to practice psychology.
Judge James Doerty, the chief family-court judge, said a key question in reopening old cases is whether the child-custody plan has been working for the child.
"The problem about going backwards and redoing those decisions is you are actually changing the lives the children have led," Doerty said.
"Great gifts and flaws"
On Sunday, Greenberg's wife checked him into an Extended Stay Deluxe motel in Renton because he said he didn't feel safe at home, the police report said.
Marcia Greenberg told police her husband had been depressed for nearly four months, possibly from a change in heart medication, and was upset by his recent arrest, the report read.
The Greenbergs went to dinner that night and then Marcia Greenberg returned to their Seattle home.
But at some point Greenberg left the motel and checked into the Clarion on Monday, police said.
Marcia Greenberg said she last spoke with her husband around 8 p.m. on Monday, according to the report.
"We are overwhelmed by loss and with grief that we could not convince Stu life was worth living," Marcia Greenberg wrote in a statement released Thursday. "Stu had great gifts and flaws, but to us he was a much loved husband, father, brother, and son. We miss him terribly."
Greenberg left suicide notes to his wife, daughter and "everyone else I hurt," the police report said. His wife said he apologized for his actions in the notes, the report states.
The King County Medical Examiner's Office said an autopsy was done Thursday but a cause of death won't be released until toxicology tests are completed.
Seattle Times staff reporters Nancy Kelsey and Michael Berens contributed to this report.
Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com
Source: Seattle Times

Boy Dies in Care

August 2, 2007

Two-year-old Gage Guimond died in his foster home in Winnipeg. Other news reports suggest he suffered sustained physical abuse. Over a hundred people attended his funeral, making it harder in Manitoba for child protectors to bury their mistakes.

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August 1, 2007
Toddler mourned
Memories of 'happy boy' recalled
By ROB NAY, SUN MEDIA

Natasha Guimond, mother of two-year-old Gage Guimond, cries at his funeral yesterday. (Chris Procaylo, Sun Media)

A two-year-old boy was remembered as "a bright ray of sunshine" at his funeral yesterday.
Gage Dakota Guimond died on July 22, 2007, the day after his second birthday and two days after he was taken to hospital in critical condition.
Stuffed toy animals, flowers and a blanket surrounded his small coffin at the funeral service. Photos of the boy playing in a bathtub, eating cake and smiling while sitting on a beach faced the room filled with mourners. A large orange card featuring a child's writing and the words "We love you very much" sat close to the coffin.
Charged with manslaughter in Gage's death is Shirley Guimond, 52, his great-aunt. She had Gage and his three-year-old sister in her care at the time of the incident. A call was made to 911 saying a child had fallen down a flight of stairs.
As mourners entered the room for Gage's funeral, a musician sang and played an acoustic guitar, dedicating songs to Gage, his family and foster family.
Gage's mother, Natasha Guimond, sobbed, "I can't. I can't," as she was led into the room, braced by people who supported her as she struggled to walk.
Natasha temporarily gave up custody of Gage and his three-year-old sister more than a year ago because she wasn't ready to raise them by herself at age 18, she told Sun Media in a previous interview.
ASKS FOR HEALING
Pastor Larry Laquette, who conducted the funeral service, asked people to pray for every one of Gage's family members at the funeral. He asked for healing and restoration in people's lives.
Gage's former foster parents, Russ and Debbie Debassige, spoke about their time with Gage and how he came with them when they went bowling, fishing and camping. "He was a real water baby," said Debbie Debassige. "He loved the beach."
"Everyone who sees the photos at the front can see Gage was a happy boy," said Russ Debassige. "We fell in love with Gage."
While learning to walk, Gage also enjoyed visiting his foster siblings as they went to and from school. "He was always a bright ray of sunshine," said Debbie Debassige, adding the sound of drums soothed the young boy.
As mourners filed past the coffin at the end of the service, nearby musicians sang and beat on drums.
A trust fund for Natasha Guimond's surviving daughter has been set up at the Bank of Montreal at 1010 McPhillips St.
Source: Winnipeg Sun

Adoption Warehouse

August 2, 2007

Nine lucky children found a forever home with adoptive mother Judith Leekin. In her home they were handcuffed, tied together and burned while being deprived of food, education or toilet facilities. The mother earned a six-figure income from the adoption subsidies.

This could be a case of a mother scamming the system as suggested in the article, or another dumping ground case, in which the child protectors get rid of their problem cases, then blame the adoptive parent. At least in this case, the press is focusing on money as the root of the problem.

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updated 9:44 a.m. EDT, Tue July 31, 2007
Police: Kids were adopted for profit, abused
PORT ST. LUCIE, Florida (AP) -- They were often handcuffed, tethered together with plastic ties and allowed to soil themselves, investigators say. They had scars on their wrists. Some had burns.

Police say Judith Leekin enriched herself by adopting and neglecting nine children.

Police say Leekin bought this house and another one with the state stipends for her adopted children.

None appeared to have more than a fourth-grade education, not even the adults in their 20s. All were starving.
In all, nine teenagers and young adults were held like prisoners in Judith Leekin's home in what appeared to be a decades-long scheme to line her pockets with the government payments she received for adopting and raising them, police say.
From the outside, Leekin's home appeared to be as ordinary as the others in this well-kept working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of this Atlantic coast town, 120 miles north of Miami. But its pink and white stucco exterior hid the horrors inside, authorities say.
"Horrible, I think, would be the best word used to describe what was going on in that house," said police Capt. Scott Bartal.
Investigators have not yet confirmed the identities of the young people and have not established how long Leekin had them. But authorities believe she adopted all of them in New York City under at least five aliases over two decades.
They range in age from 15 to 27. One is blind and mumbles. One can barely walk or stand. One can't read. But authorities said they do not know if the handicaps are a result of the alleged abuse.
The case came to light on July 4, some 200 miles away across the state in St. Petersburg, when police received a call from a grocery store that a teenager was there wandering aimlessly. The 18-year-old woman, who said she has been with Leekin for 13 years, said Leekin drove her there and abandoned her after telling her they were going to an amusement park.
Police and child welfare workers went to Leekin's home, but found nothing awry. Just one child was with her in the house, and Leekin told investigators the 18-year-old ran away a year ago. But police soon returned, and this time they found all the children, who had apparently been hiding on Leekin's orders.
Leekin, 62, was arrested and jailed on 11 charges, including aggravated elder and child abuse. She declined to be interviewed. Her attorney had no comment.
According to authorities, she was unemployed and lived off the monthly stipends provided by child welfare authorities in New York. She owned at least two homes and several cars. The adopted children said they had never seen a doctor or a dentist and had not been allowed to attend school or even leave the house.
"These people have not received any formal education in the time they've been with her," Bartal said. "At times when they were restricted with handcuffs or zip ties, during the night, they soiled themselves because they weren't permitted to go to the bathroom."
They were fed only noodles, and "they would have eventually starved to death," Bartal said.
The 18-year-old told police Leekin threatened to cut her head off if she told anyone what was happening, authorities said.
"Was there any kind of emotional attachment? Yes, it was fear," Bartal said.
Child welfare workers in New York said they are still digging through paperwork to determine how Leekin came to gain custody. It was not until 1999 that New York City child-welfare authorities began fingerprinting adults who adopted children out of foster care.
If Leekin did adopt them in New York City, she could have been making as much as $180,000 a year for a time. Parents who adopt special needs children can get as much as $55 a day.
"If you adopt a child out of the foster care system, you receive a stipend to help with the child's care, to cover clothing and food, and whatever additional costs are involved with caring for the child until the child turns 21," said Sharman Stein, spokeswoman for the New York City Administration for Children's Services.
There is no legal requirement that a person adopting a child from New York City's foster care system live in New York State.
The Florida Department of Children & Families authorities investigated a complaint of child abuse against Leekin in 1999, but the case was later closed. Officials would not give details.
"Right now we're just concentrating on the care of the victims, making sure they get the medical attention and psychological care they need," department spokeswoman Ellen Higinbotham said. "These adults, they're like elderly people, they're frail and vulnerable."
In Leekin's neighborhood, residents said they were shocked.
"You'd think she was your grandmother. There was nothing suspicious at all," neighbor Jim Hammond said. "We never heard anything from over there, no hollering, no screaming. She was just a nice lady."
Source: CNN

Addendum: From later news, it is clear that social services used Judith Leekin to dump problem children. Just about all of the children in her care had mental handicaps. If this case follows the usual pattern, the adoptive mom will be the target of public outrage and put away for a long time. The social workers who dumped their children with her will escape scrutiny. One teenager, Mo, died in Mrs Leekin's care.

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Aug 16, 2007 3:18 pm US/Eastern
Florida Judge Wants N.Y. Adoption Records
Says They Are Relevant To Leekin Abuse Case
(AP) FORT PIERCE, Fla. A New York judge must decide whether to unseal confidential adoption records, after a Florida court ruled Thursday that they are relevant in the criminal case against a woman accused of abusing 11 adopted children.
Judith Leekin, 62, of Port St. Lucie, is accused of bilking New York City out of $1.26 million in a scheme that involved adopting the children under four aliases to line her pockets with subsidies for their care.
Authorities say the children, now ages 15 to 27, were severely abused, that none have more than a fourth grade education, and all suffer from physical and mental disabilities.
Leekin has pleaded not guilty to the abuse charges.
Circuit Judge James McCann's ruling opens the door for Florida prosecutors to now ask a New York judge to unseal the adoption records.
Prosecutor Marshall Evans said the New York adoption records are needed to confirm the identities of the victims.
The records could also help locate a missing 11th adopted child, prosecutors say. Nine of the children and disabled adults are in Florida state care. A 19-year-old who police say Leekin abandoned in 2004 remains on his own.
The children and adults told police the 11th victim, an 18-year-old boy nicknamed "MO" who suffered from Down's syndrome or autism, died sometime in 1999 or 2000.
"Other than his name and date of birth and a nickname, we know very little about him," Port St. Lucie Police Detective Stuart Klearman told the judge Thursday. "The children have been led to believe that he died but we don't have any record of that."
Klearman also said police need the records to track down the victims' biological parents for DNA comparisons to determine their true identities.
"We do not know for 100 percent fact ... that any of these children are the children adopted out of New York," Klearman said. "They could be almost anybody."
He said copies of their birth certificates obtained from Leekin appear "suspicious."
Klearman also said the victims are now becoming curious.
"They're asking questions -- 'Who are we?"' he said.
Leekin's attorney, Mario Garcia, argued that the adoption records were not relevant in the abuse case.
Outside court, Garcia said the victims received medical care and were taken care of by Leekin.
Garcia also said the Florida Department of Children & Families took custody on Wednesday of the children of Desmond Leekin, who is Leekin's biological son. Desmond Leekin has been questioned by investigators and has said he did not know his mother had all the adopted children in her home.
A telephone message left for the Florida agency was not immediately returned. A telephone listing for Desmond Leekin could not be found.
Source: WCBS-TV New York

Anna Mae He Back Home

July 24, 2007

The parents of Anna Mae He give their newborn daughter temporarily to a Tennessee couple while they worked out their financial problems. The fosters refused to return the girl when the parents wanted her back, and even legally adopted the girl through a Tennessee court. It took years of litigation for the Tennessee Supreme Court to state the obvious, that failure to visit the girl when kept away by force did not amount to abandonment. Even after the courts ruled against them, the baby-snatchers held on through another six months of foot-dragging. Now the girl is finally back with mom and dad.

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Associated Press
Girl, 8, Back With Chinese Parents
By WOODY BAIRD 07.23.07, 5:33 PM ET
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -
A Chinese couple regained legal custody of their 8-year-old daughter Monday after a seven-year fight to get her back from what was supposed to be temporary foster care.
Judge Curtis Person of Memphis Juvenile Court signed an order returning custody of Anna Mae He to parents Shaoqiang and Qin Luo He, Chinese citizens who came to the United States so Shaoqiang He could attend college.
The order revoked the temporary guardianship by Jerry and Louise Baker, former foster parents who had tried to adopt the girl over her parents' objections.
"As far as custody goes, that's it," said David Siegel, the Hes' lawyer. "That's no longer an issue. That's nothing that will ever be an issue again."
The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled in January that Anna Mae He must be reunited with her parents, and she began a series of meetings with them in March. Those meetings, which progressed to overnight stays and weekend visits, were overseen by a lawyer and psychologist appointed by the Juvenile Court.
In his custody order, Person said the Supreme Court mandate had been fulfilled.
"I want everyone to know she will have a bright future," Shaoqiang He said in a telephone interview Monday. He said he expects to return to China with his family after Anna Mae has settled in.
Psychologists helping her adjust to leaving one family for another will decide whether she has further contact with the Bakers, who took her in when she was just less than a month old, He said.
"That depends on Anna Mae and her emotional and psychological needs," He said. "We want to do the best for her."
In its ruling, the state Supreme Court overturned a decision by a Memphis judge that took away the Hes' parental rights. That decision in 2004 followed a trial at which the Bakers argued Anna Mae would have a better life in suburban America than in China.
"I want her to have both cultures, Asian heritage and American culture," He said. "But from today on, she will never have to hide her Chinese heritage. I want her to have pride in it."
The Bakers' lawyer, Larry Parrish, issued a written statement last week saying that they had ended their custody fight. The Bakers contend Anna Mae will be emotionally devastated by leaving the only family she has known, "but further delaying the execution of what she must now suffer cannot be expected to help," Parrish wrote.
The high court said the Hes were penalized because they did not understand the American legal system and thought they were giving up their daughter temporarily so she could get health insurance. The family hit hard financial times when Shaoqiang He lost his graduate school scholarship and student stipend at the University of Memphis.
He also lost his student visa, but the immigration courts have held off on deportation proceedings because of the custody fight.
"I have to leave the United States," He said. "I promised the immigration judge I would take the voluntary departure after the custody issues were resolved."
But He said he hopes his family, which includes a son and another daughter born during the custody fight, can stay in the United States a while longer.
"I hope for the sake of Anna Mae's welfare they can give us ... one year or two years until Anna Mae is well adjusted," he said. Going to China sooner "might be too big a change for her right now."
Source: Forbes

Mother Flees to Save Baby

July 11, 2007

Police are looking for a mother, Jessilyn Paulhus, who has left Toronto with her baby. If she is found, her baby, Ryan Tenhave, will be taken and she will likely never see him again. If she keeps the baby, she will have to live in the shadows where it will be hard to get food for him. Will anyone suggest an amnesty to save this boy?

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Police Search For Mother And Missing 5-Month-Old Boy
Tuesday July 10, 2007, CityNews.ca Staff
He's just an infant, too young to know the fuss his presence - and absence - has caused. But Toronto Police have issued a notice about him, and are hoping you know where he - and his missing mother - is. They're concerned about 20-year-old Jessilyn Paulhus and her son Ryan Tenhave. The reason - the boy is only five months old and but weighs just 12 lbs. The Children's Aid Society had been monitoring the child until June 29th - when the mother and the kid suddenly disappeared from the Sherbourne and Carlton St. area.
Police aren't accusing the young mom of anything, but say they're worried about the welfare of the baby. "There's a warrant to apprehend the child," Detective Hugh Wong tells CityNews.ca. "The child would be taken into custody" as a safety precaution so the C.A.S. could continue to reassure itself the infant's in good condition.
Paulhus's mother lives out west and police here think she may have gone to either Calgary or B.C. But they need to find little Ryan to be sure he's O.K. The 20-year-old shouldn't be hard to spot. She has several distinguishing features that would be hard to hide. She's described as:

White,
5'7",
115 lbs.,
Light-brown hair shaved on the left side and longer on the right side
Pierced tongue.

The 5-month-old is:

White,
2',
12 lbs.,
Light-brown hair,
Blue eyes
Fair complexion.

Cops were only informed of their absence a few days ago when the C.A.S. confirmed they were gone. If you know where they are now, call (416) 808-5100 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at (416) 222-TIPS.
Source: City-TV

Addendum: Police have found the pair. As usual in this kind of case, they were astonished to find that the mother had not harmed her own baby.

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July 13, 2007
Missing mom and son found
By DOUG MCINTYRE
Cops have located a Toronto mother and her infant son reported missing earlier this week.
Toronto police enlisted the help of their Calgary colleagues after Jessilyn Paulhus, 20, and her five-month-old son Ryan Tenhave went missing last Friday.
At the time, it was believed the pair were headed to, or already in, Calgary or B.C.
Although police initially had concerns about the welfare of the infant, both mother and son were found unharmed.
Source: Calgary Sun

Jury Disowns Parents

July 4, 2007

A Utah couple, James and Connie Roska, had their children taken without cause in 1999. After years of successful litigation in appellate courts they got a jury trial for damages. The jury awarded them $2 for their suffering.

This case illustrates a prerequisites for reform of child protection. It is not enough to write letters to newspaper editors or politicians. It is important as well to get the message out to people not yet involved with the child protection system.

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Skeptical jury awards just $2 for parents' pain over son's improper removal by state
But 1999 incident helped change family-rights laws
By Kirsten Stewart, The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:07/03/2007 08:53:46 AM MDT

DCFS case workers Melinda Sneddon, left, and Colleen Lasater leave Federal Court on Monday after getting a verdict in their favor regarding the Roska family lawsuit against DCFS. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

After watching Utah child-welfare caseworkers drive off with her 12-year-old son, Connie Roska collapsed on the front lawn of her Layton home.
She doesn't remember how she got back into the house.
But the hurt remains fresh for Roska and her husband, James, who testified tearfully in U.S. District Court last week about harms suffered due to Rusty's wrongful removal May 28, 1999. Sleepless nights, a missed graduation ceremony, depression and general distrust of governmental authorities were the suffering for which the Roskas said they deserve compensation.
It wasn't enough to sway a jury, which Monday rejected the couple's injury claim, awarding $2 in nominal damages.
Monday's verdict caps a six-day trial and nearly eight-year legal battle, which helped drive changes to Utah law aimed at safeguarding parents' rights.
But those changes are meaningless, if "you can violate the law without being punished," said the Roskas' lawyer Steven Russell. The Roskas left the courthouse Monday in tears and declined to comment.
The Roskas sued Shirley Morrison, a caseworker at Utah's Division of Child and Family Services, and her two supervisors, Colleen Lasater and Melinda Sneddon. A federal appeals court earlier had ruled the trio violated Utah law - and could be held personally liable - by taking Rusty into protective care without first offering services to his parents.
Caseworkers also violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by taking Rusty without a hearing or warrant, their attorneys acknowledged.
But Utah Assistant Attorney General Matthew Bates asked jurors to "cut these social workers a little slack."
Bates said caseworkers are caring professionals who "work in an extremely demanding and thankless job" and said they followed their training.
"Folks, you don't get damages just because your constitutional rights were violated," Bates said. "This isn't 'The Price Is Right.' [The Roskas] need to prove they were injured."
Caseworkers argued they had no choice but to remove Rusty, who they feared was a victim of abuse, and that removals without due process were common in the late '90s. The practice led Morrison, who worked for the division for one year, to later become an advocate for falsely accused families.
In a taped phone call to the Roskas' attorney, she condemned the state's "Gestapo-style" tactics and agreed to be a witness for the Roskas. That changed when the Roskas sued.
Utah law since has been changed to require a warrant or hearing before removal, unless there's an emergency.
Still, Russell called caseworkers' claims of ignorance "an outrage," citing division training manuals underscoring that removal should be a last resort.
The Roskas alleged caseworkers yelled profanities and shoved children out of their way during Rusty's removal. Sneddon told Roska if she didn't carry Rusty out to the van, she would "drag him up the stairs," Russell said.
A neuropsychologist who examined the family said Rusty Roska, now 21 and living in his parents' home, and his parents display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Connie has coped by trying to "save the world," working as a parental-rights advocate, while her husband "retreated from the world," Russell said. "He lost the trust of his son and the trust of himself as a father. He still blames himself for what happened."
Bates questioned the Roskas' damage claims, noting each had struggled with mental illnesses before Rusty's removal. "Jim still has a job. Connie runs a day care," he said. "They appear to be living normal lives."
Russell said the Roskas have nearly exhausted their chances to appeal, though they may revive injury claims for their children.
The state had twice offered to settle with the Roskas; once for $100,000 and again for a more generous sum.
Russell said suing the state wasn't an option for the Roskas due to Utah's immunity statute. He fears the verdict will have a chilling effect on future lawsuits. "I can't imagine anyone wanting to go through this after this trial."
kstewart@sltrib.com
The case in brief

What happened: A jury found three Utah child-welfare workers owe only $2 in damages for the wrongful removal of a 12-year-old boy from his Davis County home.
History: Social workers and school officials believed the boy was a victim of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a condition in which a parent acts as if a child is ill, or even causes the child's illness. A doctor corroborated his parents' assertion that he suffered from a kidney disorder. Nevertheless, workers took custody of the boy, who returned home after a week in foster care.
A federal judge had dismissed the parents' lawsuit, but an appeals court ruled the workers were liable for violating Utah law by taking they boy without first offering services to his parents.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Rhode Island has Real Child Advocate

July 2, 2007

In January 2005 Rhode Island governor Donald L Carcieri appointed Jametta O Alston to be the state's child advocate press release. Last Thursday she filed a suit alleging that children are being abused and killed in foster care. Contrast that to Ontario, where the child advocate interviews children and urges hiring more foster parents, all while ignoring the 83 children who died last year under CAS watch.

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Governor vows to 'get to the bottom' of foster care lawsuit
The Associated Press
By Eric Tucker, Associated Press Writer | July 2, 2007
PROVIDENCE, R.I. --Gov. Don Carcieri vowed Monday to "get to the bottom" of allegations contained in a federal lawsuit that the state's foster care system is so broken that children have been placed back with foster parents who abused them, shuttled between more than a dozen homes or even killed in foster care.
"Are the allegations in fact true? Do we have any failings in terms of procedure or policy? Do we have possibly some bad decisions being made?" Carcieri said after a meeting with state child advocate Jametta Alston, who filed the lawsuit Thursday. "I don't know any of that right now, but we're going to get to the bottom of it."
Alston brought the lawsuit, which is seeking class action status, on behalf of the 3,000 children currently in Rhode Island's foster care system. The lawsuit cites federal data that show Rhode Island had the nation's highest rate of abuse or neglect of foster care children in five of the six years between 2000 and 2005.
"If we have youngsters that are being abused that are in our care ... I want it to stop now, and I want to get to the bottom of it," Carcieri said.
Ten children were identified with pseudonyms in the complaint, which included disturbing allegations about their cases and the foster care system.
For instance, the suit says the Department of Children, Youth and Families returned two brothers to their parents even though one of the boys had reported being sexually abused by his father. The month after they were returned, the complaint says, one boy had a bruise around his eye and one had a large mark on his neck.
The lawsuit says one 5-year-old boy was sexually assaulted in his foster home, while another child spent time in more than 14 different homes and institutions -- including one where he was allegedly sexually abused by a roommate.
Patricia Martinez, the director of the department -- which was sued along with the governor -- said she could not comment on any of the alleged abuse cases since her staff was still in the early stages of investigating them. But she said she was troubled by the allegations.
"If we find that we failed a system, that a provider failed, then you bet that we will take corrective actions," Martinez said.
Some of the cases are already several years old, so some of the staff members involved in these cases may no longer be associated with the department, Martinez said.
The suit says caseworkers are so overburdened that children might not get a visit from them for months and contends that children languish for long periods of time in the foster care system because the department is slow in finding them permanent adoptive homes.
Carcieri said Monday that Alston had given him the full names of the children cited in the lawsuit. He said he would be briefed Tuesday by DCYF about their cases and that it was possible that caseworkers would be fired if they knew about problems but did not fix them.
Problems at the department came to the public's attention after 3-year-old T.J. Wright died in foster care in 2004. His aunt and her live-in boyfriend have pleaded not guilty to beating him to death. Their cases have not reached trial.
Carcieri and Alston said they did not discuss specifics of the lawsuit during their conversation but instead focused on ways to improve communication. The governor said he had not been aware of the alleged abuse until he read news accounts of the lawsuit.
Lisa Guillette, executive director of the Rhode Island Foster Parents Association, said it's critical that caseworkers have manageable workloads since they're relied upon to identify problems.
"The stories of the plaintiffs demonstrate systemic failure in a lot of ways -- lack of oversight, lack of adequate support for the children and the placements that are serving them," Guillette said.
Source: Boston Globe

Addendum: Here is a copy of the complaint (pdf).

Addendum: The suit came to an end on April 29, 2009. Children's Rights Inc had a hand in creating this lawsuit, though they were not in the headlines when it started.

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Child advocate’s suit over DCYF care dismissed
01:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 1, 2009, By Katie Mulvaney, Journal Staff Writer

Alston

PROVIDENCE — A federal judge has dismissed a sweeping lawsuit that alleged widespread abuse of the children in Department of Children, Youth and Families care, saying the state’s child advocate, who brought the suit on behalf of 10 children, had no standing in the case.
Senior U.S. District Judge Ronald R. Lagueux ruled Wednesday that Child Advocate Jametta O. Alston and others who backed the suit had no authority to proceed because the children they claimed to represent are already in the jurisdiction of the state Family Court, where their guardians had been appointed.
Alston and the child-advocacy organization, Children’s Rights, pursued the suit in June 2007 on behalf of the 3,000 children now in state custody, with the aim to overhaul Rhode Island’s entire foster-care system. The suit alleged children in DCYF care were being molested, beaten and, in one high-profile case, killed. Her suit claimed staff faced excessive caseloads and that too many children were being placed in institutions and group homes, or being reunited with abusive parents.
The suit named Governor Carcieri, Jane Hayward, former secretary of the Office of Health and Human Services, and DCYF Director Patricia Martinez as defendants, and charged that the child-welfare system is underfunded, understaffed and mismanaged.
The state asked that the case be dismissed in arguments before Lagueux in January 2008. Lawyers questioned the remedy sought — namely that Alston wanted the court to take control of the DCYF. They argued the case belonged in Family Court, not federal court.
Governor Carcieri, who appointed Alston, praised the decision. “We are pleased with the ruling as we can now concentrate our time and resources on continuous enhancements to the state’s child-welfare system,” Carcieri said in a news release.
The DCYF has worked diligently in the past few years on improvements that have reduced caseloads and the number of children in residential placements, as well as psychiatric hospitalizations, he said.
Alston planned to appeal, saying the ruling leaves in place a system where some children are languishing and not getting needed services. “I still believe children are suffering in our system,” Alston said.
Recent changes involve early intervention, to keep children out of foster care, but do not guarantee well-trained staff and manageable caseloads, she said.
Lagueux’s decision rested on Alston’s ability to bring suit for the 10 children named. A minor may only bring suit when represented by a “next friend” or guardian appointed by the court. Lagueux questioned the three people acting as “next friends” for the children in the case, saying their relationships with the children were minimal or nonexistent.
One “next friend” had been a foster mother for one child from 1996 to 1998, but had not seen the boy in 10 years. Another knew one boy from her time working as a psychologist for his kindergarten class; she had not seen him since June 2007, Lagueux wrote.
The remaining eight children — three of whom are no longer in DCYF care — were to be represented by an associate professor of sociology at Brown University who had never met them, Lagueux said.
Lagueux said he was reluctant to appoint those individuals because the children already have court-appointed advocates who are representing their interests in cases in state Family Court. The court, he said, is hesitant to find that the “next friends” knew the children well enough to make the decision to prosecute the case on their behalf. It would impose a burden on the children that would likely require them to testify about abuse they had suffered at their own families’ hands, he said.
THE CHILDREN come from five families and range from 2 to 16 years in age, according to Lagueux’s ruling. They include “David T.,” who is institutionalized after being shuffled between shelters, foster homes and mental hospitals from age 2. He is now deemed “too damaged” for adoption.
“Sam” and “Tony M.” entered the state foster system when one was 4 years old and the other an infant. They were allowed to return home, where they suffered brutal physical and sexual abuse. Both boys are now institutionalized and separated.
Lagueux noted that Alston had not been involved in their Family Court cases.
Alston said yesterday that she had chosen the 10 children because their experiences were indicative of rampant problems in the state’s foster-care system. Lagueux’s decision, she said, does not address the failings the suit is trying to stop.
“It only further delays getting relief for these children who so desperately need the assistance of the court,” said Marcia Robinson Lowry, Children’s Rights’ executive director.
Typically, a judge would give a party an opportunity to select another “next friend,” not dismiss the case, she said. “He simply closed the courtroom doors on these children.”
Further, Lowry said, state law empowers Alston to bring suit on the children’s behalf. The child advocate’s stated mission is to protect the legal rights of children in state care and to promote policies and practices that ensure their safety.
Children’s Rights has filed class-action lawsuits over child-welfare systems in 14 other states, winning court-ordered improvements in 9 states and Washington, D.C.
DCYF officials said they will continue to strive for improvements. “DCYF is committed to provide the highest level of services to children and their families, and these many achievements could not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the DCYF staff, providers and community partners,” said Patricia Martinez, director of DCYF in a news release.
Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, whose lawyers helped argue the state’s case, stopped short of praising Lagueux’s opinion.
“In ruling on a motion to dismiss, the court must accept as true the plaintiffs’ version of the facts as stated in their complaint. …” Lynch said. “Although we can all agree that our state must do a better job of caring for the children in its custody, it would have been the wrong approach to ask the federal court to assume control of Rhode Island’s child-welfare and foster-care systems.”
kmulvane@projo.com
Source: Providence Journal

Girls Stolen in BC

July 2, 2007

Here is a YouTube video of three girls stolen from mom and dad in British Columbia. Controversial material often disappears from YouTube in a few days, so watch now. The parents describe their own video as:

Added: June 29, 2007
From: abusiveministry
3 sisters taken out of the blue from ... 3 sisters taken out of the blue from their home, separated, isolated, interrogated for months, lied to by the police and social workers. The girls call it jail. They want to see each other more, see their friends, and go home. But BC MCFD have their best interests at heart by antagonizing them to hate the system they have been thrown into. They are not allowed to talk about any thing that happens to them in foster care no matter how outrageous or abusive. If they really have our children's best interests at heart what is BC MCFD trying to hide by not letting the children be allowed to speak out about their feelings and thoughts.
www.abusive-ministry.ca/ — Sign on and tell your story.

The newspaper article below gives some idea of the chaotic state of the social services system in the province, and why it is impossible for parents to get their children back.

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Victoria(British Columbia) Times-Colonist
June 20, 2001
Column: A Closer Look
Jody Paterson
Uncaring bureaucrat the worst of parents
This says it all: One of the things that now counts against you when the B.C. government is deciding whether to take your children away is whether they also took you away from your parents. In other words, child apprehension begets child apprehension.
Each new generation of state-parented children grows into adults who may end up poor parents themselves. With 10,000 or so children in care in B.C. in any given year and 70,000 across the country, it's a substantial concern. I've, heard the explanations as to why the state makes a lousy parent. Too few foster homes, not enough social workers, caseloads beyond reason.
The children are difficult, the parents troubled, the issues complex. And while your flesh-and-blood parents are there for you long after you turn 19, the state hands you a welfare cheque and considers its job done. But if that's how it is, then there has to be a better way.
Because a government that takes messed-up children away from their homes only to mess them up even more has certainly strayed far from the business of child protection.
Listen to the recent court testimony of local social worker David Roy, who did his job so poorly in one ongoing child-protection case that a provincial court judge deemed last month that he'd breached four of his Ministry's laws, most notably not acting in the child's best interests. Asked if he was aware of the rule requiring regular reviews of plans for children in care, Roy told the court, "I'm aware of the standard, and I'm also aware that we are not meeting the standard. Standards are not being met in any particular case in our office, as far as I know." In fact, the child, - now almost four - has been in care most of his life without anyone in government bothering to map out what's needed to raise him right. Roy said he kept his plans "in his head", noting that a 1999 audit found the government complied with its own regulation in less than a third of all cases. That's an improvement; a couple years before that, it was eight percent.
Roy was involved in the case for two years, during which time he never read the child's file, didn't know the boy was aboriginal, didn't develop a care plan, shredded police documents, made up a hospitalization to bolster his case that the father should be denied access, and blocked one parent or another at every turn through 23 court appearances,
The parents were helpless. The act that governs child apprehensions packs plenty of punch when it comes to the government exercising its rights, but has no remedies for wayward social workers.
Roy's supervisors couldn't intervene, as the only one who can yank a B.C.social worker off a child-custody case is the director of child protection. Even the judge had to work hard to find a way to punish Roy. He ordered the Ministry of Children and Family Development to pay $2,000 to the parents' lawyers, Shannon Buchan and Lex Reynolds, in recognition of the lawyers' dogged (and often unpaid) determination to set things right. And he contemplated bringing contempt-of-court charges against Roy, but decided "indifference and neglect" were not sufficient grounds.
Roy was eventually pulled off the case and his other cases have since been audited by the ministry, which isn't commenting I guess it's a win for somebody, although it's hard to say who. The child who sparked it all is still in the custody of the ministry. His parents and their lawyers thought they'd have to answer all sorts of questions when the ministry investigated Roy. But no one ever called.
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist, recovered from Sarnia's Smoking Gun

Sham Court Hearing

June 28, 2007

More on the death of Matthew Reid.

Let's review. A girl is taken from mom and dad for reasons not yet published. She is placed for adoption in a forever family along with her siblings But the adoption fails after she assaults her younger sister, and she goes back to foster care. At age 14 she elopes with a man, but is soon arrested for stealing the getaway car. Children's aid treats her like a baby, putting her in a new foster home without alerting the foster family to her history of assault. Within a day she kills Matthew Reid. Now at age 15 she functions at a mental level of a six year old, a condition that could be congenital or drug-induced.

The girl has "pleaded guilty", though in normal legal practice such a plea cannot come from someone with such diminished faculties. Her parents, the crown, hired a lawyer for her who convinced her to plead. A court is now deciding whether to punish her as an adult. In doing so, it avoids the question of whether to punish the social workers as adults.

The money grabbers are not done with this case. Tony Van Schie, probation manager of youth justice services in Niagara, is maneuvering for $100,000 per year on behalf of the girl.

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Mental capacity key in sentencing of teen who murdered toddler
By Amy Lazar, Standard Staff
Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 01:00
Local News - Fidgeting and unable to sit still, the 15-year-old girl awaiting her sentence for the second-degree murder of toddler Matthew Reid had a hard time paying attention in court Thursday.
The girl, whose identity is protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, is at the “cognitive age of six,” said Dr. Lindley Bassarath, referring to his recent interviews with her and a psychological assessment done last year.
“She can be treated, yes, but how much she can gain from the treatment is the question,” Bassarath said from the witness box in a St. Catharines courtroom.
The psychiatrist, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and head of adolescent services at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, was the first of six experts to be called before Judge Ann Watson to provide insight into whether the girl should be sentenced as a youth or an adult.
The Crown is seeking an adult sentence.
The girl pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Jan. 22, a little more than a year after three-year-old Matthew was found dead, suffocated and smeared with blood in his bedroom.
It happened the morning of Dec. 15, 2005 — less than a day after the girl arrived at the Welland home where both children were in foster care.
At the time, the girl was 14 and had lived in various foster homes before being adopted along with her biological brother and sister.
She was later removed from the home after assaulting her sister and was placed under foster care in Niagara Falls.
While in that home, she started a sexual relationship with a man and later stole her foster family’s van to meet him at a hotel room.
She was arrested and charged, and upon her release, placed in the Welland foster home where Matthew was living.
Matthew’s mother said he was placed in foster care because the Haldimand-Norfolk Children’s Aid Society believed she suffered from depression, though she denies she was an unfit mother and still has custody of a second son.
Calling the girl’s behaviour pattern into question, assistant Crown attorney Patricia Vadacchino asked Bassarath about a diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome.
A lack of information from her biological mother made it impossible to formally diagnose the girl, but Bassarath said she exhibits symptoms of suffering from an alcohol-related neurological developmental disorder.
She also has a mild intellectual disability, an attachment disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder, Bassarath said.
For more than a year, the girl has been in custody at a youth centre, where she has been under close supervision, receiving school instruction and counselling.
Moving her to an adult institution for the remainder of a sentence would disrupt her, Bassarath said, and it would also put a girl who is easily persuaded in the company of older women with poor social skills, which could cause problems.
The court also heard from Terri Austin, a parole supervisor with Correction Services of Canada, who explained that the Grand Valley Institution for women in Kitchener has a program for offenders with special needs.
However, it is a short-term program that transitions women into the regular prison routine, which is not as highly supervised, Austin said.
The downside of placing the girl in an adult institution is that she won’t be able to access the rehabilitative program through the Ministry of Child and Youth Services, said Tony Van Schie, probation manager of youth justice services in Niagara.
Van Schie told court up to $100,000 of federal funding per child per year is available and the girl’s mental health issues make her a good candidate for the program.
Court will resume Aug. 7 in St. Catharines.
Source: St. Catharines Standard

André Marin Reports

June 28, 2007

Ontario Ombudsman André Marin has released his Annual Report 2006-2007. Mr Marin recognizes that readers are more likely to respond to an entertaining report than a dull one, and has livened up the presentation with clever language and cartoons. Below we include the portions relating to children's aid societies.

The Ombudsman has posted the transcript of today's online chat.

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BEYOND SCRUTINY
At times we in the Office of the Ombudsman have to say “no” – and not only to complaints that do not have merit. We are forced to say “no” thousands of times a year to citizens with serious problems because of a discreditable technicality: We do not have jurisdiction. We have been shut out of what I like to call the MUSH sector, which stands for municipalities, universities, school boards, hospitals and long-term care facilities, and other organizations such as police and children’s aid societies. These areas consume the bulk of provincial budgets, and more importantly, they represent the most serious contacts that Ontarians can have with their government. Yet they are immune from our scrutiny.
Over the last year, I have continued the quest to offer oversight in these critically important areas, but to no avail. It is not a mission I initiated. Ever since the great Arthur Maloney, the first Ombudsman of Ontario, filed his 600-page post-retirement report in 1979, my predecessors have been calling for the modernization of this Office’s mandate. It has not happened in Ontario, even though most other provincial ombudsmen have jurisdiction over most of these critically sensitive sectors.
The failure of Ontario to permit its citizens to seek shelter in my Office when things go wrong within these zones of immunity is not due to lack of demand. As the next section of this report – “Oversight Denied” – documents, we have had to decline nearly 2,400 pleas for help involving the MUSH sector this past year alone. Thousands of Ontarians are seeking our help in areas that our statute and our website make clear are outside our purview. How many more complaints would we have if we could act on them? And support of Ombudsman oversight in these areas is not limited to those who are desperately seeking help – an online poll conducted by the Toronto Star in May 2007 indicated that of more than 1,800 respondents, some 94% were in favour of ombudsman oversight of Ontario hospitals.
It is not as if our Office is not up to overseeing these areas. As this report chronicles, our systemic investigations have been done professionally, efficiently and inexpensively and have produced a perfect track record of improvement. Our work has saved tax dollars, improved the quality of life of those who have sought our aid, and without the pain, uncertainty, expense and delay of litigation.
Nor can it be said that the MUSH sector is not in need of independent oversight. As the next section of this report explains, while there are bodies with jurisdiction over some of these areas, deeply disturbing gaps remain. Moreover, none of the empowered agencies has the same combination of independence, investigative experience and investigative powers as the Ombudsman’s Office.
Consider, for example, children’s aid societies (CASs). While spending irregularities at CASs are now subject to the review of the province’s Auditor General, their child protection policies and practices – which if flawed can literally be a matter of life and death for a child – are still not subject to investigative review or a rigorous complaints system.
The legacy of Jeffrey Baldwin, whose terrible death in 2002 highlighted failings in Ontario’s ability to safeguard our children, should have been the establishment of a powerful, independent mechanism to oversee and investigate CASs. Instead, when the Child and Family Services Statute Law Amendment Act, 2006 was proclaimed in force in November 2006, it simply provided for the limited expansion of the Child and Family Services Review Board’s mandate. The board may well be an effective adjudicative tribunal, but it has neither the power to conduct investigations in response to complaints nor the ability to address systemic problems.
In response to my advice that these new provisions fell far short of what was required, the government touted the review board – which remains an agency of the Ministry of Children and Youth Services – as “an independent, arm’s-length third party.” It described the new complaints process as “smoother, stronger and more objective” and even suggested that my Office would play a “key role” as a “critical check and balance,” because ultimately we would have jurisdiction to consider complaints about the Child and Family Services Review Board. What this fails to acknowledge is that my role in such cases would be restricted to investigating only the conduct of the board itself. I continue to be blocked from effectively investigating the complaints it receives against CASs.
To compound this situation, instead of being empowered to tackle significant issues regarding child welfare protection policies and practices, the board’s authority is largely focused on procedural defects relating to the administration of CASs. Substantive complaints regarding the services sought or received from children’s aid societies remain subject only to internal review. The promise of a system of external, transparent, and accountable oversight of the complaints process was never kept. While the government has also put forward Bill 165, the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth Act, 2007, which establishes the creation of a new legislative officer to advocate on behalf of Ontario’s children and youth, this positive step is only a very small part of what is needed to ensure an effective system of protection for Ontario’s children. A strong, independent investigative oversight mechanism for complaints is still glaringly absent in Ontario.
ZONES OF IMMUNITY
As these recent inadequate legislative changes relating to the child protection area illustrate, the government has clearly chosen to keep this zone immune from Ombudsman oversight. As well, it has introduced legislation touching on oversight of the police (Bill 103, the Independent Police Review Act, 2007) and dealing with municipalities (Bill 130, the Municipal Statute Law Amendment Act, 2006), and largely shut us out of both. It has also refused to endorse opposition bills that would give my Office jurisdiction over children’s aid societies, school boards, hospitals and long-term care facilities.
All of this leaves unanswered the question of why government policy-makers have resisted strengthening oversight of the MUSH sector. I have heard rationalizations that range from standard excuses to the truly bizarre and unacceptable. For instance, it has been proposed that individuals can always launch a lawsuit if they are unhappy – an expensive, time-consuming and acrimonious process that would be out of the question for many Ontarians. In the case of children’s aid societies, it has even been suggested that the coroner’s pediatric death review committee was somehow an adequate stand-in for the Ombudsman – even though, unlike that committee, we would not have to await the death of a child to intercede. Then there’s the “we have always done it this way” excuse, which was used to explain the illogical exclusion of the Ombudsman from police oversight. The most incredible explanation might be the “it’s premature” evasion offered by the Ontario Hospital Association, advising that we should wait and see how the province’s praiseworthy but irrelevant “adverse events reporting” initiative works out.
I am reluctant to appear cynical, but it seems the real reason for all this is self-interest. Why would a government resist bringing this Office’s scrutiny into areas costing the provincial purse tens of billions of dollars? The short answer is because it can. If you and those who report to you have been permitted to do your work without someone looking over your shoulder, why would you want to change that? This, however, is not about politics but an important public principle. Institutions that receive funds from the province to perform a public duty should be subject to the full panoply of checks and balances, not some watered-down or incomplete version that allows them to operate in a zone of immunity. Until the Ombudsman’s mandate is modernized, thousands of Ontarians will have no recourse to an independent investigative oversight body in critically important areas of their lives, and the Office will remain powerless to help them.
A PARTING PROMISE
Since I have pursued the theme of promises here, let me end by making a few more on behalf of my team. We pledge to continue to work hard to hold the government to the promises that it has made and to put the “serve” back in public service. As well, we will continue to work to roll back zones of immunity and extend the remarkable tool of ombudsmanry to those Ontario citizens who experience problems in their dealings with their cities and towns, their schools, their hospitals, their police, and the child protection system.

OVERSIGHT DENIED
Unlike in other provinces, the Ombudsman of Ontario does not have jurisdiction over what can be called the MUSH sector (comprising municipalities, universities, school boards and hospitals and long-term care facilities, as well as children’s aid societies and the police). In the past year, our Office has had to decline thousands of complaints because of this. The breakdown is as follows:

Selected Non-Jurisdictional Complaints and Inquiries Received During Fiscal Year 2006-2007 Total: 2,395
Universities 37
School Boards 102
Hospitals and Long-Term Care Facilities 237
Police and the O.C.C.P.S.* 376
Children’s Aid Societies 600
Municipalities 1043

* Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services

CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETIES
The Ombudsman continues to receive hundreds of complaints about children’s aid societies (CASs) – 600 in the past year, up from 436 in 2005-06 – but cannot investigate them. Many of these complaints and inquiries were from families concerned about the welfare of children under CAS care. Some alleged that children were sexually abused while in care, while two distraught families expressed concerns about the adequacy of CAS supervision after their children had died. Others spoke of retaliatory actions taken by CAS staff when families had complained. Some complainants were upset about CAS staff failing to exercise a duty of care; others that they overreacted where they should have shown restraint.
In December 2006, in response to the provincial Auditor General’s first-ever audit of children’s aid societies under an expanded mandate (he reviewed the four largest), the Ministry of Children and Youth Services announced the creation of an Accountability Office to monitor CAS performance. However, to date, children and their families have no recourse to an independent oversight body to investigate complaints about services sought or received from Ontario’s 53 children’s aid societies – a situation that does not exist in any other province.

“Mr. Marin isn’t asking for anything more than to simply answer the hundreds of complaints he receives every month. Until you’ve lost a child or have had your rights trampled on, you’ll never quite know just how important the Ombudsman’s job really is.”
– LETTER TO THE EDITOR, NEWMARKET/AURORA ERA BANNER, JULY 6, 2006

In December 2005, the Ombudsman appeared before the Standing Committee examining Bill 210, which amended the Child and Family Services Act. He urged that it be changed to allow the Ombudsman to investigate complaints about CASs. Instead, the amended Act – which came into force on Nov. 30, 2006 – merely broadened the adjudicative authority of the Child and Family Services Review Board. The regulations confirm that complaints about the accuracy of a CAS file or record must go through the CAS’s internal process before being raised with the board. The board has paltry remedial power, including steps such as ordering a “note of disagreement” to be added to a complainant’s file, confirming a CAS’s decision, or ordering a CAS to provide written reasons for a decision. Moreover, complaint areas within its jurisdiction are essentially procedural. The type of complaints that may be raised include, for example, that a CAS has failed to respond to a complaint within the required time frame; failed to comply with the complaint review procedure; failed to give a child or parent an opportunity to be represented when decisions affecting their interests are made; or failed to provide reasons for a decision. The board does not investigate complaints about the conduct of children’s aid societies and there remains no independent external body that can do so.
The limitations of this framework mean serious cases where children are being hurt or in danger will continue to fall through the cracks – and families will have nowhere to turn for independent investigative help. The Ombudsman recently had to turn away two such families:
THE STORY OF “J”
Eight-year-old J had been diagnosed with and treated for a number of psychiatric conditions when he was made a temporary ward of the CAS and placed in a group home. While there, he was prescribed additional medication. J’s grandparents became progressively concerned about his medication regime, and what they viewed as his deteriorating condition. They claim the CAS did not listen to their concerns. They were eventually able to obtain guardianship of J, supported by a psychologist who criticized the high doses of psychotropic drugs he had been subjected to while in CAS care. After a 10-month period of detoxification, J is now thriving. His grandparents raised a number of concerns with the Ombudsman, including the society’s refusal to act on their concerns, threats of loss of visitation while J was in the group home, failure to disclose alleged sexual abuse, and refusal to respond to their letters. We were forced to decline their complaint as out of our Office’s jurisdiction.
THE STORY OF SERENA AND SOPHIA CAMPIONE
After three-year-old Serena Campione and her one-year old sister Sophia were found dead in a Barrie apartment in October 2006, their mother was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. The deaths took place in the midst of acrimonious divorce proceedings and allegations of domestic assault against the girls’ father, Leonardo Campione. The girls’ mother had reportedly been hospitalized three times in the previous year for psychiatric problems, and the girls had been cared for by their paternal grandparents. After the tragic death of his daughters, Mr. Campione complained to the Ombudsman that the CAS staff responsible for supervising his children while in their mother’s care were negligent. He did not understand how his estranged wife, who had displayed such difficulty in caring for the children, could have been allowed custody. The Ombudsman is powerless to investigate his allegations, and the Child and Family Services Review Board does not have the power to investigate the actions of the CAS. Nor does it have the power to review systemic issues such as what process the society has in place to deal with placement and supervision of children when a parent has suffered acute psychiatric problems. These issues could potentially be examined by the Ontario coroner’s pediatric death review committee or a coroner’s inquest, given that the children are dead. However, there is no opportunity for independent investigative oversight to address errors of the kind alleged before they become fatal.
On April 5, 2006, MPP Andrea Horwath introduced a private member’s bill, Bill 88, the Ombudsman Amendment Act (Children’s Aid Societies), 2006, proposing that the Ombudsman be given authority to investigate the conduct of children’s aid societies. The bill died when the House was prorogued on June 5, 2007.

ANOTHER MISSED OPPORTUNITY

“Despite all the government rhetoric that ‘children are our future,’ we in Ontario are choosing to rid ourselves of hundreds of these serious allegations every year by taking a trip to the dumpster and looking the other way.”
– OMBUDSMAN’S SUBMISSION ON BILL 165

On April 24, 2007, the Ombudsman made a submission to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy regarding Bill 165, the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth Act, 2007, which made the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth an Officer of the Legislative Assembly. He noted that while a welcome voice for children, the Advocate, unlike an Ombudsman, would have no investigative powers. Citing the hundreds of complaints about CASs that must be turned away from the Ombudsman’s Office every year, he repeated his call to be allowed to investigate children’s aid societies. Two members of the Committee moved that the Ombudsman’s authority be extended in this way, but were ruled out of order. The bill was passed and given Royal Assent on June 4, 2007.
Source: Annual Report 2006-2007 (pdf)

Rent Your Uterus!

June 26, 2007

Here is a new business opportunity for healthy Canadian women: rent your uterus to a foreign couple. Canadians have a price advantage over Americans because the Canadian health care system treats the pregnancy at no cost to the family. Canadian doctors are used to seeing a stranger take a newborn baby, so that won't attract any attention. Because there are regulations restricting compensation to surrogate mothers, a minor in money laundering is a helpful adjunct.

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Health: CROSS-BORDER REPRODUCTION
Canada: destination for infertile couples
An increasing number of foreigners are choosing Canadian surrogates because the practice is illegal in their home countries
MARY GAZZE
Special to The Globe and Mail
June 26, 2007
Infertile couples from France, Italy, Sweden and Australia are travelling to Canada to have a Canadian surrogate give birth to their children.
An increasing number of foreigners are making the choice because surrogacy is illegal in their home countries.
Between 200 and 400 couples from France alone have turned to Canada or the United States, according to Maia, a French association that supports infertile couples.
Christine and Thierry are one of those couples.
Christine, 28, has a birth defect that prevents her from carrying a child. She and Thierry, 30, her boyfriend of three years (they asked that their real names not be used), live in Paris and found out about surrogacy from another French couple who went through the process in Canada.
For Christine and Thierry, the long search led to a British Columbia woman. They met her once in March, and they talk with her daily over the Internet.
"We consider them [the surrogate and her husband] as friends," Christine said. "She is not just an oven."
In mid-June in Toronto, their new friend was implanted with two embryos, created using donor eggs and Thierry's sperm.
Christine said she is "happy to have a child who will look like the man I love." And she appeared pleased with the Canadian connection: "We feel more Canadian than American. I mean, I think their mentalities are more similar to ours."
Joanne Wright, who helps both Canadian and foreign couples connect with potential surrogates through her company, Canadian Surrogacy Options, said many foreigners "feel a real affinity to Canada - they almost feel at home."
Nobody keeps official numbers, but Ms. Wright estimated that, in the last five years, the number of international couples coming to Canada has more than doubled.
She said about 15 per cent of the 50 to 60 couples she sees each year come from abroad, many from France and Australia. They seem remarkably trusting.
"It surprises me how often I go to my mailbox, and there's just paperwork in there and a cheque, and nobody's called to say it's coming," Ms. Wright said.
Battling with the cost
Surrogacy can be expensive in Canada, and some couples struggle financially to cover drugs, embryo transfers, lawyers, psychological exams and other costs, with no guarantee it will work on the first try.
Some take out a second mortgage or ask their parents for money.
Foreign couples face the increased financial burden of travel. Christine estimated that the whole process, including flying the surrogate and her husband to France for a visit, will cost $60,000.
But surrogacy could cost foreigners much more if they break the law in their own country.
French couples could be fined $23,000 and face up to a year in prison.
In Italy, people risk a fine of up to $1.5-million and two years in jail.
Ms. Wright suggested there may be other reasons why foreigners are attracted to Canadian surrogacy, including the health-care system.
Ontario pays pregnancy and delivery costs of a surrogate who lives in the province, regardless of where the intended parents of the child come from.
"If an Ontario woman acting as a surrogate meets the eligibility requirements that the ministry demands for health insurance coverage, then she would be covered ... just as anyone else would," a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care said.
Delivering a child costs the system about $800, but the spokesman said the ministry does not track the cost of an entire pregnancy, from conception to delivery.
"In Canada, you get more bang for your buck," Ms. Wright said.
"In the States, it's really big business. It's just a lot more expensive."
Would-be parents who go to the United States have to pay hospital and medical fees that they wouldn't in Canada.
In the United States, surrogates can receive financial compensation. Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act prohibits surrogates from making a profit, but allows them to be reimbursed for expenses as long as they can produce receipts.
Health Canada is not sure yet what is an acceptable expense, or how much a potential cap could be.
"Right now there's no regulations, so ... basically as long as there is an expenditure, you can reimburse," said Francine Manseau, a senior official at Health Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Implementation Office.
"My contracts say the [intended parents] pay all reasonable expenses - that doesn't include a trip to Europe to see what the finest maternity clothes look like," said Larry Kahn, of law firm Kahn Zack Ehrlich Lithwick, in Richmond, B.C.
Mr. Kahn is one of a handful of Canadian lawyers who draw up the surrogacy contracts, which ensure everyone is tested for diseases and has been psychologically assessed.
Mr. Kahn said costs can include food, transportation for doctor visits, folic acid, maternity clothes, massage therapy and fitness expenses. Couples also pay for postpartum care - expenses that can run up to $15,000.
Ms. Wright added that surrogates have claimed phone and Internet bills to keep in contact with the couple, and child care for their existing children.
Some surrogates make cash
Christine said she and Thierry will do everything in accordance with Canadian laws to make sure they bring their baby home.
But other couples are dishing out more than expenses, and at least some surrogates are pocketing that extra money.
Penalties, which can include 10 years in jail and a fine of half a million dollars, are not being enforced until a new agency, Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, sorts out the details in the next few months.
The Health Canada agency, which held its first meeting in March, is designed to regulate the growing field of new reproductive technologies.
In rare instances, posts on infertility message boards tell surrogates looking to receive more than their expenses to use cash, the online payment system PayPal, or offshore bank accounts.
In a March post on an assisted reproduction message board, ivf.ca, a user conceded that some surrogates are receiving more money than their expenses, but denied doing so herself.
"The contracts are being 'done by the book,' but that is not what is going on. People are still making their own separate agreements verbally.
"Obviously, I can't speak for every arrangement, but all the people I know are not doing it for 'expenses only'... The law didn't stop compensation at all, people just figured out how to keep doing it ...
"The government hasn't enacted the board yet that will investigate and enforce the new legislation and I think that's another reason why people aren't too worried.
"If you watch these ads regularily (sic), you still see Canadian couples offering 'generous compensation' or surrogates writing 'fee negotiable.' "
Ms. Manseau said Health Canada will scrutinize clinics to make sure everything happens by the book.
"There are inspectors at Health Canada that have started to visit the clinic, and provide some information," she said.
But Carole Craig, manager at fertility clinic IVF Canada in Toronto, said that because the regulations have not been set, her clinic has not seen inspectors.
"If they found any clinic doing something outside the realm of what the legislation has proposed, they would not get very far with it because they have not provided anybody with any framework," Ms. Craig said.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada would not confirm what implications a surrogacy arrangement may have on the Canadian citizenship of the child.
"We don't comment on hypothetical situations," said Philippe Mailhot, the press secretary at the Citizenship and Immigration Minister's office in Ottawa.
"This is a very specific question as to potential review."
But Audrey Macklin, who teaches citizenship law at the University of Toronto, said birth by surrogacy is no bar to being Canadian.
"As long as the child is physically born in Canada," she said, "there's no question of citizenship."
Sharing the load
As for Christine and Thierry, they have learned to rely on the kindness of strangers - or at least, their new friends across the sea.
"We really had no other choice than trusting people so far away, and we were very lucky because we got along with the surrogate and her husband very easily," Christine said.
"We think it's a great experience to share such a journey with a couple from a foreign country."
But, she admitted, it isn't easy.
"We feel very alone in the process - it can be very risky because we could have met bad people who could take all our money."
Yet they are taking those risks, putting their faith in people a world away because, as Christine said, "Our desire for a baby is bigger than everything."
Surrogacy contracts
Larry Kahn, of law firm Kahn Zack Ehrlich Lithwick in Richmond, B.C., is one of a handful of lawyers who write surrogacy contracts. Mr. Kahn drafts up to 20 surrogacy contracts each year, with one or two of them for foreign couples. The contracts:
Require appropriate medical testing, including STD and psychological testing.
Call for the surrogate and intended parents to follow the advice of their obstetrician.
State the maximum number of children the couple wants from the pregnancy.
Outline any removal of embryos in case of disease or if there are more viable embryos than were agreed upon.
Clarify that although the surrogate mother is the legal mother at birth, she gives custody to the intended parents.
Cost up to $2,500 to be drawn up.
Mary Gazze
A SURROGATE'S TALE
Maria (who asked that her real name not be used) started researching surrogacy after seeing a friend suffer multiple miscarriages. Last year, the 33-year-old surrogate gave birth to a girl, who is now living with a couple in Australia.
"We're talking birth, labour, medication for four months, a complete interruption in your life," she said about the process.
She at first had reservations about working with an international couple, but liked the Australians because they spoke the same language.
She was aware of the risks associated with surrogacy - the same risks associated with any pregnancy - but still went through with it because she felt the couple would make good parents, and the risks weren't too high.
"Pregnancy is pregnancy; giving up your liver is forever," she jokes.
To prepare for the embryo transfer, she had to inject herself with drugs for four months and deal with some negative reactions from her neighbours.
"I was told it was against God from a lady down the street," she said.
She said people need to understand why she was a surrogate before they criticize her choice. "Until you humanize something, it's easy to be judgmental," she said.
After a healthy pregnancy, the Australians were with Maria when she gave birth in a Vancouver hospital.
In Canada, the mother who gives birth is the legal mother, and hospital staff asked Maria if she wanted to hold the baby. "I said, 'Ask the parents,' " she said. "In no way, shape or form did we emotionally, physically, mentally think that this baby was ours," she said about herself and her husband.
Since the birth, Maria talks with the couple on a monthly basis, and she and her family plan to visit them in Australia in five years.
Maria said she had such a good experience being a surrogate that she has now offered to be a surrogate for an American couple.
Mary Gazze
Source: Globe and Mail

Trial on Adoption Disclosure

June 22, 2007

The challenge to the Adoption Information Disclosure Act will be heard next week. Below is the announcement from COAR.

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June 22, 2007
Dear friends,
The Constitutional challenge to Bill 183, The Adoption Information Disclosure Act (AIDA) is about to begin! It will begin at 10:00 AM on next Monday June 25th, in Toronto at Osgoode Hall (attached to 361 University) in courtroom #6, and then again on Tuesday June 26th and Wednesday June 27th.
The bad news is, we have just heard, that the courtroom is very small. It could probably accommodate only five or six supporters. For that reason, if you were planning to attend, we have to advise you that there is seating only on a first-come-first-serve basis.
The COAR Co-ordinating Committee - Wendy, Michael and Karen - will be there to monitor the entire proceedings.
Given that the great majority of you won't be there, we will do our best to keep you informed about the proceedings.
In solidarity,
The COAR Co-ordinating Committee
Michael Grand
mgrand@uoguelph.ca
Karen Lynn
ccnm@rogers.com
Wendy Rowney
wrowney@rogers.com
Source: email from COAR

Addendum: The arguments in the challenge to the Adoption Information Disclosure Act have been completed. A decision can be expected in August.

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A Bulletin from the COALITION for OPEN ADOPTION RECORDS (COAR)
June 27, 2007
Dear friends,
The arguments are all over. Yesterday afternoon the arguments challenging the Adoption Information Disclosure Act (AIDA) and its defence by the Government of Ontario and COAR, the intervenors, concluded.
The arguments essentially focused on section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There were very lengthy debates about whether or not privacy is a "principle of fundamental justice". Judge Edward Belobaba said that under section 7, everyone has a right to "life, liberty and security of the person", but the government can take 'a right' away as long as they do it in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. Hence, the issue at hand is, "Does AIDA violate a principle of fundamental justice?" While many of the questions posed over the two days of the hearing may appear to have common-sense answers, our lawyers reminded us that this is a legal battle and all points must be legally sound rather then simply common sense.
The applicants' lawyer, Clayton Ruby, cited many cases to support his thesis that privacy is a principle of fundamental justice and that it was violated. Janet Minor, arguing for the government of Ontario, made many excellent clear points. For example, she said that everyone would agree that "the best interests of the child" is a legal principle, but it is not a principal of fundamental justice because it may be subordinated if necessary. So, for example, a parent may be sent to jail for robbery even though it may not be in the best interests of the child for the parent to be away for years. There are many legal principles that we all support, but they are not necessarily elevated to principles of fundamental justice
When talking about the adoption order, Ms. Minor made the point that it contains the name of the adopted person at birth. As you know, the surname of the adopted person at birth is usually the mother's surname. Therefore, the adoption order contains the name of two people: the adopted person and his or her mother. Ms. Minor argued that the difficulty is, you don't even know to whom it applies because the information is about two people.
COAR's lawyer, Ivan Whitehall, was accompanied by two junior lawyers and a law student. Showing his very considerable expertise in constitutional law, he gave a robust challenge to Ruby's views on privacy as a principle of fundamental justice. His critique focused on how Ruby had failed to come up to the mark. He also challenged Mr. Ruby over the notion that AIDA is retroactive saying that it is not retroactive, it is retrospective legislation because, although it deals with past events, the legal effect is in the future.
Mr. Whitehall delivered a stirring presentation in defence of "unwed mothers and bastards" in which he claimed that we were discriminated against historically - for centuries. In so doing he was invoking section 15 of the Charter, the famous "equality clause". It was a very emotional moment for many of us in the courtroom, to say the least. It really felt, for the first time, that there was recognition for the historical and discriminatory affects of adoption laws in Canada on those of us who have always had the fewest choices.
Now we wait and see what Justice Belobaba has to say. He had said at the being of the trial that this would be a difficult case to make and that the applicants had the toughest job. He seemed to be a very fair man, but he may not personally support openness unless both sides agree to it. Despite his feelings, he said that he will make his decision based on the arguments presented and not on his own views. He said that he planned to report his decision by the end of August.
Michael Grand
mgrand@uoguelph.ca
Karen Lynn
ccnm@rogers.com
Wendy Rowney
wrowney@rogers.com
The COAR Coordinating Committee
Source: email from COAR

Judge Saves Girl from Marijuana

June 20, 2007

Sarnia judge Mark Hornblower has saved a girl from a mother who gave her marijuana. Now that the girl is no longer in her mother's custody, she can expect prescriptions for Celexa, Risperdal, Trileptal, Ritalin, Concerta, lithium and olanzapine, all administered by force of arms. We congratulate Judge Hornblower for saving this otherwise doomed girl.

In case you are wondering, a mother who does not want to be named watched her child get all of the drugs in the list.

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The Sarnia Observer
Pot used to 'control' girl's hyperactivity; Judge calls it 'extreme' abuse, sentences mother to nine months of house arrest
Bowen, Neil
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 - 16:00
Local News - A Sarnia woman who used marijuana to control her eight-year-old daughter's hyperactivity was placed under house arrest for nine months Monday.
The 34-year-old mother pleaded guilty in Sarnia court to marijuana trafficking because she gave the marijuana to her child.
Outside the courtroom federal prosecutor Michael Robb said the child was given marijuana several times a week, but there was no indication how long it had been done.
Tests showed residual evidence of marijuana in the child's system.
The Children's Aid Society was notified of the problem after the girl told a teacher she was taking marijuana. The mother was charged in fall of 2006.
Justice Mark Hornblower called it "extreme" abuse and said the mother did not appear to fully understand how wrong it was.
The court heard the mother had been suffering from depression.
Defence lawyer David Stoesser told the court the mother was responding to treatment. But Robb said the follow-up to initial treatment has been a problem.
The woman had no prior criminal record and Hornblower said sufficient resources to help the woman could not be provided if she was in a jail setting.
During house arrest the woman must undergo counselling and is prohibited from using drugs or alcohol, and she cannot allow anyone with drugs into her house.
Also, she can be instructed to undergo drug testing and police can enter her home at any time to ensure she is complying with the conditions.
Following the house arrest she will be on probation for two years, during which she must continue counselling.
Contact with her daughter must be approved by authorities or in accordance with a family court order.
There can be no reuniting with her daughter unless she takes the needed steps, Hornblower said.
The woman's name has not been published to protect the child.
Source: Sarnia Observer

Parents to be Criminalized

June 20, 2007

To achieve the worthy goal of reducing the level of spanking of children, reformers are proposing a change that would criminalize the most trivial use of force on a child. In the future all parents will be criminals.

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Parents could face spanking charges
Justice department lawyers warn. Strapping toddlers into car seats could lead to assault prosecutions if law changed
ELIZABETH THOMPSON, The Gazette, Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Removing the parental defence in the Criminal Code to prevent parents from spanking their children could lead to parents being slapped with assault charges for something as simple as trying to strap a screaming toddler into a car seat, Justice department lawyers warned a senate committee yesterday.
Testifying before the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights yesterday, justice department officials Gillian Blackell and Elissa Lieff warned the threshold for charges of simple assault is very low and the Criminal Code is a very blunt instrument.
Technically, all that is needed is the intent to apply any force against someone's will, they said.
Thus, without Section 43 of the Criminal Code which allows parents to use reasonable force by way of correction, parents could easily face criminal charges, they warned.
"If Section 43 was simply repealed, any non-consensual force that a parent or teacher uses on a child or pupil could be an assault, given the broad definition under the Criminal Code," Blackell said.
"There would no longer be a statutory defence to criminal charges where the force used is minor corrective force of a transitory or trifling nature," she said.
"Parents who physically put a reluctant child in a car seat or remove a child to their bedroom for a time-out are applying non-consensual force and could be convicted of simple assault," Blackell added.
The Supreme Court has already put limits on the way in which parents can use force to correct their children's behaviour, they added.
The justice officials were the last to testify yesterday as the committee wrapped up its hearings into a bill tabled by Quebec Liberal Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette, which could open the door to parents who routinely spank their children facing charges of assault.
The bill, which goes to clause by clause consideration, would remove the defence currently contained in Section 43 of the Criminal Code for parents and educators who resort to corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure.
In a comprehensive report tabled in April on the rights of children, the committee recommended that Section 43 of the Criminal Code be repealed by April 2009.
The committee also recommended the government launch an information campaign on the negative effects of corporal punishment, research alternative methods of discipline and examine whether alternate defences should be made available to those charged with assaulting a child.
Conservative Senator Raynell Andreychuk, chairwoman of the committee and a former judge, said the challenge for the committee will be how to balance its desire to prevent corporal punishment while still allowing parents the possibility of using reasonable restraint.
Currently, following a Supreme Court ruling, it is illegal for parents to strike a child under the age of 2 or over the age of 12.
However, it is legal to use reasonable force "by way of correction" for children between those ages.
Many members of the committee, however, questioned whether corporal punishment was acceptable at any age.
"There's no such thing as reasonable force," said Senator Jim Munson, pointing out many countries around the world have banned corporal punishment of children.
"You either hit a child or you don't hit a child."
Recalling his own experience in school, Senator Romeo Dallaire said times have changed and so should Canada's law.
"If I wrote with my left hand, the brothers smashed me with a ruler because God didn't want me to write with my left hand."
ethompson@thegazette.canwest.com
Source: Montreal Gazette

Adoptive Mom Murdered

June 20, 2007

Police and social workers are mystified why a teenaged boy would kill his mother. It's no mystery to Lori Carangelo. In her book Chosen Children she interviews several prisoners who murdered their adoptive parents.

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June 19, 2007
Victim 'very special'
Devoted public servant spoke highly of her son -- the teen now wanted in her murder
By JON WILLING, SUN MEDIA

Aaron Howard is being sought on a first-degree murder warrant.

To neighbours, she was a mystery woman occasionally seen walking her dog or driving in her red BMW.
Many didn't know murder victim Deborah Frankel-Howard, recently retired from Health Canada, where she worked for 35 years and where she was a mentor to younger public servants with whom she became close friends.
"She was a nurturing and caring soul whose heart was always on her sleeve," said Jessica Brinkworth, describing Frankel-Howard as "extroverted, celebratory and loyal."
Frankel-Howard was Brinkworth's supervisor at Health Canada.
"She was incredibly smart and utterly willing to share her expertise with you to help solve an issue," Brinkworth said. "She was a public servant who clearly worked in the public's service. That's a very special employee. She had great integrity."
Ottawa police were looking for her adopted son, Aaron Howard, 19. Major-crime detectives have a warrant for his arrest on the charge of first-degree murder.
The two-bedroom bungalow at 1735 Gage Cres. in Bel Air Heights, where Frankel-Howard's body was found Friday, remained under police investigation yesterday.
Detectives have been working at the house since police found Frankel-Howard's body.
Those who knew Frankel-Howard well said she loved Aaron.
She always spoke highly of him and co-workers could easily tell others about the teenager by simply recounting the glowing details provided by Frankel-Howard.
DAD IN A FOG
Paul Howard, Aaron's father who lives in central Ottawa, said he has been "walking around in circles" in confusion this week.
The 58-year-old man was married to Frankel-Howard for 20 years. He called her a "good mother" who was a "ferocious reader" and loved to travel.
Frankel-Howard, who has always lived in Ottawa, retired earlier this year, Paul Howard said.
He didn't want to discuss his son. He said he hasn't heard from Aaron since police secured the arrest warrant.
While most Gage Cres. residents didn't know Frankel-Howard well, at least one neighbour knew enough about her to notice something unusual at her house last Monday. The neighbour said he saw Aaron Howard showing off his mother's BMW to another man between 30 and 40 years old, as if the vehicle was being sold.
The next day, the car was gone.
Then, last Thursday night, the same neighbour saw Howard come out of the house wearing his baseball uniform and carrying a suitcase. Howard told the neighbour his mother was out of town looking for a new vehicle.
The teenager hasn't been seen since.
Anyone with information about the murder is asked to call major crime detectives at 613-236-1222, ext. 5493 or Crime Stoppers at 613-233-TIPS (8477).
Source: Ottawa Sun

Following are some excerts from Chosen Children chapter 11 Why Adoptees Kill Their Adopters

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11 Why Adoptees Kill Their Adopters
There has been a deliberate effort to debunk the notion that adoption itself has so burdened some adoptees that they are at risk of becoming killers by virtue of their adoptive status. When an adoptee murders his adopter, contributory factors such as drug use or rebellion against parental authority are often mistaken for the root cause of what may be the adoptee's single act of violence. Eric Harris had been prescribed Luvox, a Prozac-like drug, prior to the Littleton (Colorado) school shootings. Such drugs sometimes prescribed to adoptees commonly produce manic psychoses, aggression, and other behavioral abnormalities in children and may be the proximate cause triggering violence. But when an adoptee commits parricide, the trigger or proximate cause can be extremely subtle while the root cause, which is often overlooked, goes back to the moment the child was transformed into an adoptee. Some adoption supporters have advanced the theory that there must be mental illness in their biological parents which somehow predisposes their children to become criminals.
It is believed that adoptees are overrepresented in the numbers of children who kill their adopters. They, as well as adoptees who become "substitute" or "serial" killers, may have been physically, sexually and/or emotionally abused as children. But according to David Kirschner, Ph.D., a forensic psychologist who studied "hundreds of adoptees" in over 25 years of his private practice, all of his subjects reportedly exhibit antisocial Adopted Child Syndrome (ACS) behaviors to varying degrees, including (1) conflict with authority, such as truancy; (2) preoccupation with fantasizing; (3) pathological lying; (4) stealing; (5) running away; (6) underachievement; (7) lack of impulse control, from sexual acting out or promiscuity to sex offenses; (8) firesetting or arousal from fire. Their personalities are characterized by impulsivity, low frustration tolerance, manipulativeness, deceptive charm, shallowness of attachment. There is also an absence of normal guilt or anxiety about one's deeds. However, Dr. Kirschner also refers to ACS as an "extreme form of adoption- related psychopathology."
Adopters are more likely to be frustrated by a child who cannot attach to his substitute caretakers simply because they are not like him, physically or in personality. While adopters may be no more or less skilled in parenting than biological parents, adopters may be overly concerned about acceptance and as a result, may be too permissive or too strict, in either case imposing unreasonable expectations on a child who may eventually rebel.

Adopted children are hospitalized for psychiatric disorders ten times more frequently than other children. This is largely attributed to feelings of rejection and an incomplete sense of identity. It leaves the adoptee not only more vulnerable to other basic factors (such as child abuse) but also more violently reactive. Extreme examples include David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") and Kenneth Bianchi ("The Hillside Strangler"). Nevertheless, adoption records continue to be sealed in most areas of North America. — Trailer at end of movie, Natural Enemy, starring Donald Sutherland, produced in Montreal, Canada, aired 1/29/97 on HBO in the United States by October Films, NY

While the movie Natural Enemy was a fictional dramatization about a male adoptee who seeks revenge upon his mother, the portrayal of an adoptee who has deep seated anger, and feelings of being unwanted and unloved, is, to varying degrees, the reality for most American adoptees. For many, the answers to "Who am I?" and "Who are my parents?" and "Why was I given up for adoption?" are as important as breathing. Others just as adamantly deny having normal curiosity about their pre-adoption existence, afraid of being perceived as less than a "well adjusted adoptees" and to avoid a second rejection ... by their adopters.
Furthermore, the compulsion of these adoptees to kill was specifically directed at their adopters and appears to have been satisfied upon committing the murder. At least, they express no desire nor inclination to kill anyone else. As a fictional serial murder suspect explained (on Law and Order). "I'm not a serial killer. I killed my mother. I only had one mother."
When adoptees kill, rarely is the fact of their adoption ever considered at trial. Most convictions result from plea bargains that endeavor to punish rather than to analyze, profile and discover ways to treat or even prevent similar circumstances which triggered in murder. Perhaps it's because doing so would pit the professionals against those who espouse adoption is a "quick fix" for a variety of social ills, despite that officials resists collecting and publishing data on adoptees' outcomes. Adoption professionals are not unaware of negative outcomes, they either dismiss it as an aberration or blame the adoptee or his genes.
Source: Chosen Children

Foster Mom Convicted

June 19, 2007

Legal action following the death of Isaac Lethbridge has proceeded to the conviction of his foster mother. Earlier stories: Aug 18, Aug 23, Sept 2, Sept 20 (all 2006) and March 31, 2007.

When a ship sinks, does the captain take responsibility, or does he blame a deck-hand? In the current case, the foster mom, with no discretionary control over the child beyond routine food and shelter, has been convicted. Others with even less authority may be prosecuted next. The social worker who had real authority and responsibility for Isaac has remained out of the picture. She is not named in the press reports, and will not come forward to accept responsibility for the death of her ward.

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Detroit Free Press
Foster mother guilty in Isaac's death
Adams-Rogers jailed before sentencing

(MARY SCHROEDER/Detroit Free Press)
Charlsie Adams-Rogers listens Monday in a Detroit courtroom as a jury finds her guilty of involuntary manslaughter and child abuse in the death of 2-year-old Isaac Lethbridge in August.

June 19, 2007
BY JACK KRESNAK, FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Saying she questioned the character of a former Detroit foster mother and her family, a Wayne County judge jailed the woman moments after a jury convicted her Monday of involuntary manslaughter and child abuse in the death of a 2-year-old boy in her home in August.
The jury of nine women and three men took a little more than two hours to convict Charlsie Adams-Rogers, 60, on charges related to the Aug. 16 beating death of Isaac Lethbridge, who had been placed in Rogers' foster home six weeks earlier. Adams-Rogers, also known as Paris Rogers, was acquitted of a misdemeanor child abuse charge involving Isaac's 4-year-old sister.
In sending Adams-Rogers to jail pending sentencing July 2, Judge Vera Massey Jones said the woman and her family showed they could not be trusted and that she might not return to court to be sentenced.
Last week, Jones barred Adams-Rogers' family from the courthouse after complaints from the jury two days in a row that her family members were intimidating them.
Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Lisa Lindsey said Adams-Rogers' family has obstructed the search for truth in Isaac's killing. Because Adams-Rogers is not believed to have inflicted any of Isaac's injuries, Lindsey said, charges may be brought against others in Adams-Rogers' home that day, including a now 13-year-old emotionally disturbed girl suspected of abusing Isaac and his sister.
"There's a lot we still don't know about exactly what happened in the house," Lindsey said after the verdicts were reached about 3:36 p.m. "Who else was culpable, we're still looking into. But, obviously, we don't have the cooperation of the people who were there."
Lindsey said she and Detroit police Sgt. Constance Slappey had spoken to neighbors who were afraid to testify about what was going on in Adams-Rogers' home. According to testimony, after a neighbor called Child Protective Services about how the foster children were being treated, Adams-Rogers wrote a letter to neighbors telling them to mind their own business and had her adopted daughter deliver it.
"Now that the conviction has been had, perhaps those people would feel more comfortable about giving more information about exactly what they know," Lindsey said. She urged witnesses to call Slappey at 313-596-2266 anytime.
Adams-Rogers could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison on the involuntary manslaughter charge and up to four years on the second-degree child abuse charge.
A Free Press examination of the case after Isaac's death showed that the Lula Belle Stewart Center of Detroit had placed him and his sister in three troubled foster homes in 11 months.
None of the homes appeared to be suitable, according to records obtained by the Free Press. There also were irregularities in how Adams-Rogers was assessed for her foster care license and a string of nine complaints about her that failed to raise alarms.
Isaac's father, Matthew Lethbridge of Canton, said he was happy with the verdicts.
"I hope they don't stop here. There are many people who are responsible, who could have protected Isaac from the fate that he received," he said.
Adams-Rogers, whose testimony last week was seen by several observers as disingenuous, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read. After the judge sent her to jail, she calmly handed her purse to a woman who had been with her and was led away by sheriff's deputies.
Her attorney, Warren Harris, had no comment about the verdicts but said his client "handled it very well, I think."
"Naturally," Harris said, "she doesn't feel good. It hurts."
A family member said Adams-Rogers is likely to appeal her convictions.
In a written statement, family members said a key witness lied, the judge was biased, and the verdict by a jury with only two African-American jurors was unjust.
Isaac and his sister entered Michigan's foster care system in September 2005 after being found by Westland police in a filthy home rented by their parents, Matthew and Jennifer Lethbridge. The Lethbridges had previously lost permanent custody of six other kids in Washtenaw County because of environmental and medical neglect.
On June 29, 2006, Isaac and his sister were removed from one foster home because the sister may have been sexually abused and their Lula Belle foster care worker, Karl Troy, placed them in Adams-Rogers' home on Greenlawn in northwest Detroit.
The Lula Belle agency apparently did not consider the risk of placing such young children in a crowded home with an emotionally disturbed girl who needed medications to control her behavior.
According to his autopsy, Isaac had brain hemorrhaging, a broken right collarbone, many bruises and abrasions and second-degree burns on his torso.
"The last days of his life were a living hell," assistant prosecutor Lindsey told the jury. Then, motioning to Adams-Rogers, Lindsey said, "and that is directly her responsibility."
Contact JACK KRESNAK at 313-223-4544 or jkresnak@freepress.com. Staff writer Ruby L. Bailey contributed to this report.
Source: Detroit Free Press

CAS Holds Three Kids

June 19, 2007

Mark Bonokoski gets a CAS story almost right. CAS does not remain mum because of any law — when they want to talk about a case, they do so with real names. Here they don't want to. And the real reason for keeping three kids in foster care is the buckets of money CAS gets from the taxpayers.

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June 19, 2007
The father is an upstanding, sober citizen. The drug-addled mother can't care for their children. Why is he being denied custody?
By MARK BONOKOSKI
From the outside looking in, it was the perfect Father's Day weekend. The kids' eyes lit up when they heard they were going for a boat ride on the lake where their paternal grandparents ran a country store and inn.
The store had a candy counter, of course.
It was a kid's dream come true.
From there, it was off to a reunion of his father's side of the family. Lots of pop and hot dogs. Lots of cousins to play with. Lots of fun.
And then it was home to the Oshawa area, the kids fast asleep from the exhaustion that comes from burned energy and fresh air.
When their father dropped them off, however, it was not at their mother's house, even though the courts had once given her joint custody.
No, instead of dropping his children off at his ex-wife's house, he had to drop them off at the homes of their foster parents -- the oldest boy, at 13, going to one foster home, while the two youngest, his 10-year-old son and his 8-year-old daughter, having to go to another.
'BREAKS MY HEART'
"It breaks their heart, and it breaks my heart," the father says. "All I can tell them is to trust me ... that things will work out eventually.
"But what a nightmare."
The Durham Children's Aid had scooped his kids from their mother's custodial care and, from the outside looking in, social workers could not be criticized for their initial actions -- not by a long shot.
They had responded to a 911 call from one of the children. There was no food in the house, the child had said, and they were hungry.
When Durham Regional Police arrived, the children's mother had trouble talking coherently and negotiating the hallway.
Drug use was suspected.
Before the children's parents broke up, and later divorced, their mother was a pharmaceutical technician. Unfortunately, it also led to her allegedly treating each pharmacy as if it were its own kind of candy store.
It led to lost jobs for suspected theft of narcotics. It led to an addiction to prescription painkillers. And it led to her going into detox and rehab.
In rehab, she got knocked up by another patient.
That child, now 3, is also in foster care.
And that, in a nutshell, is all she wrote on this mother -- other than the impaired driving charge she is also facing, having blown into the balloon at 0.14, almost twice the legal limit, and all while driving on a suspended licence.
It would seem, however, that the Durham CAS is doing everything it can to give the children's mother more chances than she deserves to straighten out her life than it is willing to give the children's' father even one chance at trial custody.
STEADY JOB
And here is what he has to offer, as compared to the woman he divorced several years ago. He has a steady job that earns him $65,000-plus a year. He is married to a woman who holds an executive position as the general manager of a Holiday Inn and who wants, and has said so in writing, to be the stepmother of his children.
Unlike his ex-wife, the father has no substance abuse issues. He also has no criminal record, all which can be verified because, as a licensed aircraft mechanic, he has done high-level contract work for the American military, which had him checked out every-which-way but Sunday.
The reason the Durham Children's Aid is balking at giving him custody is as simple as its reasons are complex for siding with the drug-addicted mother who is now facing a drunk-driving charge.
The mother lives in Durham Region.
The father lives eight hours away, but those eight hours take him across the border into a small town in the northeastern United States.
He lives in a three-bedroom townhouse in what he describe as a "picture postcard town, with blue-ribbon schools." And he is employed by a subsidiary company of the Sikorsky helicopter corporation as manager of its composite shop, a job which had its beginnings in Toronto when it accepted an offer to do a contract job in West Virginia five years ago when his marriage tanked and his divorce was finalized.
No calls were made to the Durham CAS, by the by, for either confirmation or denial of the scenario presented here. The Privacy Act prevents the CAS from commenting on any specific case and, from past experience, the Privacy Act is also used as blanket to cover any and all controversy -- which is one reason Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin wants to oversee CAS operations province-wide.
But there is such a thing as court documents, and those in the Sun's possession paint a fairly clear picture.
Within the week, the lawyer representing the father of these children will be appearing before the Superior Court of Justice, yet again, in an attempt to persuade the judge to cut the father some slack.
By month's end, the children's school year will have ended and, rather than have them spend their summer in a foster home, he is seeking the court's permission to take them home to the States -- first for two weeks, then possibly for a month.
The childrens' mother, it should be noted, also remarried, but it was not to the man who made her pregnant while in drug rehab.
Unfortunately, this marriage, too, is reportedly ending in divorce.
Source: Toronto Sun

Child Protector Convicted

June 13, 2007

A child protection caseworker in Indiana has been convicted of 17 charges of sexually molesting two teenaged boys in his care, one of them mentally handicapped.

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TheIndyChannel.com

Cory Heinzman

Caseworker Convicted Of Molesting 2 Teens
Man Was CPS Caseworker In Hamilton County
UPDATED: 12:38 pm EDT June 13, 2007
NOBLESVILLE, Ind. -- A former Child Protective Services caseworker was convicted Wednesday of molesting two teenagers, including an autistic boy he had mentored.
A Hamilton Superior Court jury of 10 men and two women found 38-year-old Cory Heinzman guilty of 17 counts and acquitted him of four. Three of the molestation counts are felonies that carry 20 to 50 years in prison each.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Sonia Leerkamp said in closing arguments Tuesday that testimony proved the Acardia man breached the trust of the mentally challenged boys.
"This defendant ... preyed on these young men," she said. "He knew full well their limited abilities to make good judgments on their own behalf."
The form of autism in one of the boys limits his social skills to that of a 10-year-old, officials said. His mother called Riley Hospital for Children in May 2005 to report that her then-13-year-old son had been molested by Heinzman over eight months beginning in 2004.
After Heinzman was charged in that case, a 15-year-old boy came forward to accuse him as well, officials said.
Heinzman was an Indiana Department of Child Services caseworker for the 13-year-old, who had been referred to the agency after a school official reported that the boy claimed his mother abused him. Heinzman had worked for the agency in Hamilton County from 2002 until he was accused in the crimes.
Heinzman met the 15-year-old in 2004 and arranged for the boy to be admitted to a youth psychological treatment center, according to court testimony.
Heinzman testified that the younger teen, who is now 16, slept in the same bed during overnight visits to Heinzman's home but said both of them always wore clothes. He also denied molesting the other boy, now 18, who testified Heinzman fondled him when they went on drives during off-site visits from the treatment center.
Defense attorney Andrew Barker called the charges "lies and false allegations" and tried to convince the jury that there was no physical evidence to show improper sexual contact had taken place.
Eight of the 29 charges against Heinzman were dropped Monday after defense attorney Rodney Sarkovics convinced Judge Daniel Pfleging the state lacked enough evidence.
"What does that tell you about the state's case? It should tell you they're playing roulette," Sarkovics said. "If you question the truth or voracity of one of these charges, you have to question them all."
Sarkovics also questioned the reliability of statements made by his client's accusers.
Heinzman was convicted of nine felonies: two counts of sexual misconduct with a minor; five counts of child molestation; one count of corrupt business influence; one count of sexual performance in the presence of a minor. He also was found guilty of eight counts of official misconduct, all misdemeanors.
Source: WRTV 6 Indianapolis

Pedophile

Perjury Charge for Social Worker

June 13, 2007

An Iowa social worker lied to the court in an effort to terminate parental rights. Now she has been charged with perjury. This is an extraordinary event. Maybe it shows a change in mood toward the social services system, or maybe it will be like the case against Denise C Moore, convicted of lying in a case that led to the death of her ward, but ultimately exonerated by an appellate court.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007 12:02 PM CDT
Social worker charged with perjury
By JOSH NELSON, Courier Staff Writer
INDEPENDENCE --- A Buchanan County social worker was charged last week with three counts of perjury for allegedly filing false child welfare reports to the court.
Marie Mahler, 39, of Cedar Falls, filed three reports between Aug. 27, 2004, and Oct. 7, 2004, used in a juvenile court case that she "knew or reasonably should have known were false" and that the reports would be used by a judge to make a decision in the case, according to court records obtained by the Courier.
Mahler entered a written plea of not guilty Thursday.
According to court records, the case was to determine whether or not a mother's parental rights should be terminated. Mahler repeatedly included misrepresentations of conversations, events and relationships of the people involved with the case, according to court records.
Court records say she claimed that Jesup police officers were called to the mother's home for a drug investigation in August 2004. Records indicate an officer was called to the home not for drugs, but to prevent an altercation between two siblings. No signs of drugs were found.
Roger Munns, spokesman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, confirmed Mahler is an employee of the department. Mahler received her social work license in 1998. She has no record of disciplinary action and still is on active duty, according to department records. She has been a social worker in Buchanan County since 1998.
In a parental rights termination case, the decision is made by a judge, Munns said. People involved in the case, like biological parents, adoptive parents or social workers, can give input to help the judge's decision, he said. It's rare to have people charged with such a crime in these cases, Munns said.
"This is really quite unusual," he said.
Munns did not comment further on the case.
Delaware County Attorney John Bernau has been appointed special prosecutor to the case because of a conflict of interest. The Buchanan County Attorney's Office has represented Mahler in juvenile court proceedings.
Bernau said he couldn't comment on specifics about the case, but said perjury charges often are hard to investigate.
While the offenses occurred in 2004, Bernau said Mahler is exempt from Iowa's statute of limitations law because she is still a state employee. In most felony cases, charges have to be filed within three years of the offense. However, that three-year period begins for state employees only after they are no longer working for the state.
Perjury is a Class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Contact Josh Nelson at (319) 291-1565 or josh.nelson@wcfcourier.com.
Source: Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier

Half of Crown Wards Drugged

June 9, 2007

What is the best way to induce compliance among children resentful toward the workers who stole them from their parents and placed them with strangers? Force them to take drugs that shut down parts of their brain. That is done to half of Ontario's nine thousand crown wards.

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Nearly half of children in Crown care are medicated
MARGARET PHILIP
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
June 9, 2007 at 2:09 AM EDT
Psychotropic drugs are being prescribed to nearly half the Crown wards in a sample of Ontario children's aid societies, kindling fears that the agencies are overusing medication with the province's most vulnerable children.
According to government documents obtained by The Globe and Mail under Ontario's Freedom of Information Act, 47 per cent of the Crown wards – the children in permanent CAS care – at five randomly picked agencies were prescribed psychotropic drugs last year to treat depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety and other mental-health problems. And, the wards are diagnosed and medicated far more often than are children in the general population.
“These children have lots of issues and the quickest and easiest way to deal with it is to put them on medication, but it doesn't really deal with the issues,” said child psychiatrist Dick Meen, clinical director of Kinark Child and Family Services, the largest children's mental health agency in Ontario.
“In this day and age, particularly in North America, there's a rush for quick fixes. And so a lot of kids, especially those that don't have parents, will get placed on medication in order to keep them under control.”
Psychiatric drugs and children are a contentious mix. New, safer drugs with fewer side effects are the salvation of some mentally ill children. But some drugs have not been scientifically tested for use on children, and recent research has linked children on antidepressants with a greater risk of suicide.
Yet the number of children taking these drugs keeps rising, even in the population at large.
Pharmacies dispensed 51 million prescriptions to Canadians for psychotropic medication last year, a 32-per-cent jump in just four years, according to pharmaceutical information company IMS Health Canada. Prescriptions sold for the class of antidepressants, including Ritalin, most prescribed to children to tackle such disorders as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) rose more than 47 per cent, to 1.87 million last year; a new generation of antipsychotic medication increasingly prescribed to children nearly doubled in the same span, climbing 92 per cent to 8.7 million prescriptions.
And with close to half of Crown wards on psychotropic medication, their numbers are more than triple the rate of drug prescriptions for psychiatric problems among children in general.
With histories of abuse, neglect and loss, children in foster care often bear psychological scars unknown to most of their peers. But without a doting parent in their corner, they are open to hasty diagnoses and heavy-handed prescriptions. Oversight for administering the drugs and watching for side effects is left to often low-paid, inexperienced staff working in privately owned, loosely regulated group homes and to overburdened caseworkers legally bound to visit their charges only once every three months.
Unease over the number of medicated wards of the state is growing: This September, when provincial child advocates convene in Edmonton for their biannual meeting, the use of medication to manage the behaviour of foster children across Canada will be at the top of their agenda.
‘whole range of disorders'
Nowhere is concern greater than in Ontario, where the provincial government recently appointed a panel of experts to develop standards of care for administering drugs to children in foster care, group homes and detention centres.
The move was made after the high-profile case last year of a now-13-year-old boy in a group home outside Toronto came to light. The boy was saddled with four serious psychiatric diagnoses, including oppositional defiant disorder and Tourette syndrome, and doused daily with a cocktail of psychotropic drugs before his grandparents came to his rescue. Now living with his grandparents, he is free of diagnoses and drugs.
Marti McKay is the Toronto child psychologist who, when hired by the local CAS to assess the grandparents' capacity as guardians to the boy, discovered a child so chemically altered that his real character was clouded by the side effects of adult doses of drugs.
“There are lots of other kids like that,” said Dr. McKay, one of the experts on the government panel. “If you look at the group homes, it's close to 100 per cent of the kids who are on not just one drug, but on drug cocktails with multiple diagnoses.
“There are too many kids being diagnosed with…a whole range of disorders that are way out of proportion to the normal population. …It's just not reasonable to think the children in care would have such overrepresentation in these rather obscure disorders.”
The report from a government investigation into the case obtained by The Globe uncovered group home staff untrained in the use and side effects of the psychotropic drugs they were doling out; no requests from the psychiatrist to monitor the boy for problems, and little evidence of efforts to treat the boy's apparent mental-health issues other than with heavy-duty pharmaceuticals.
James Dubray, executive director of the Durham CAS where the boy was a Crown ward, acknowledges that the agency's monitoring of children on medication was lacking.
But it is no small feat, he said, for agencies like his to raise challenging children and adolescents – including some with behaviours so insufferable that their parents turn them over – when there is a chronic shortage of children's mental-health services across Canada and disruptive young people are stranded on waiting lists for psychiatrists and therapies for as long as a year.
With few specialists available, growing numbers of child-welfare workers are turning to family physicians, typically with next to no training in psychiatric disorders and no expertise in the new cutting-edge psychotropic drugs.
Are children being overmedicated out of expedience?
“I don't think that's an unfair conclusion,” Dr. Dubray allowed. “I find it hard to make a judgment. I just know we tend to see kids for which there are either no resources or their parents can't handle them.”
Behaviour management
For Judy Finlay, Ontario's chief child advocate, the use of psychotropic drugs is a burning issue.
Since the inquests into the deaths of a handful of troubled adolescents being forcibly restrained in group homes a few years ago – and the tougher regulations on the use of physical restraints that followed – she has observed a growing trend among group homes to turn to chemical restraints to control unruly behaviour.
These children have trauma and loss in their backgrounds and, as they grow older and foster parents can no longer tolerate their behaviour, they are moved to group homes operating on a culture of strict curfews and rules. Here, too often, troubled teenagers live in close quarters, staff turnover is rapid, police visits are not uncommon, and watching television is the usual pastime.
“It's more about behaviour management than it is about intervening into mental health issues,” Ms. Finlay said.
“It's the adolescents who are being given medication usually, and it's adolescents who are noncompliant. But they're supposed to be,” she added. “That's their job. So as adolescents grow and challenge the system or challenge staff, it's at that time that we begin to medicate them. They are going to be challenging, and medicating isn't the way to help them through adolescence.”
In fact, child psychiatrists and physicians say they face a tricky call when confronted with a tormented child or adolescent whose behaviour appears to be the symptom of a disorder that, if not treated with drugs and other therapies, will inevitably grow harder to tame.
The newer drugs are safer and backed by a growing stack of research, and physicians insist they allow some mentally ill children to function normally when nothing else works. Yet many drugs have never been tested on children by the pharmaceutical companies funding most of the research; have been studied for only short periods that fail to measure the impact of prolonged use; and are not formally approved to treat the condition being addressed.
“Just because it's safe and effective in adults doesn't mean it's safe and effective in a young person, and that's one of my concerns about the lack of research in young people,” said Stan Kutcher, a child psychiatrist and Sun Life Financial chair in adolescent mental health at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax.
“Young people aren't little adults. They have different physiologies. They have different metabolisms. Their brains react differently. Their bodies react differently to drugs.”
And therein lies a “horrible conundrum” for doctors. “I'm uncomfortable with kids being really sick,” Dr. Kutcher said, “and I'm uncomfortable with the treatments that we have.”
The National Youth in Care Network, an advocacy group for young people raised in the child welfare system, is just completing a three-year study, funded by Health Canada, of psychotropic drug use among children and adolescents in care across the country.
The researchers have found that not only were psychotropic drugs prescribed to a clear majority of the current and former wards interviewed, but most were diagnosed with mental-health disorders by a family doctor, never visited a child psychiatrist or another doctor for a second opinion, and doubted the accuracy of their diagnosis.
A disturbing number, the network's research director, Yolanda Lambe, added, have traded the child-welfare system for a life on the street.
“A lot of people are using drugs now,” she said. “There's a lot of homeless young people who have been medicated quite heavily.”
Source: Globe and Mail

Addendum: The reader comments on this article were shut down for a while on June 9 while lawyers looked over them. They are back now.

The sidebars Ritalin's reign and Doctor's orders give lots of facts regarding use of psychotropic drugs by children in Canada.

Child Abuse Investigator Sets Example

June 8, 2007

How does London's top child abuse investigator end a love affair? With a murder-suicide.

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Cops in murder-suicide had a relationship
The Canadian Press

Acting Inspector Kelly Johnson, 40
The Canadian Press

retired superintendent David Lucio, 57

LONDON, Ont. (Jun 8, 2007)
Two police colleagues involved in a murder-suicide had a "relationship," police said yesterday as they struggled to come to grips with the loss of their own.
Flags in front of the police station in this southwestern Ontario city flew at half mast for the victims -- Acting Inspector Kelly Johnson, 40, and retired superintendent David Lucio, 57.
Police Chief Murray Faulkner said Johnson and Lucio had a relationship, although the exact nature of it was not immediately known.
Both were shot before the vehicle they were travelling in crashed into Johnson's apartment building early yesterday. Only two shots were fired.
Johnson's service pistol was found at the scene. She was off-duty and did not have permission to take the gun home, Faulkner added.
Johnson had been promoted only a few days ago from within the police sexual assault and child abuse section to the professional standards branch.
Source: Hamilton Spectator

Addendum: The police have not been forthcoming about this case. The parents of the dead man want an inquest to expose the facts about their son's killer. It could also give public insight into the life of a child abuse investigator.

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Angry parents want inquest
Dave Lucio's parents seek details of how police handled the murder-suicide case.
By PATRICK MALONEY AND RANDY RICHMOND, SUN MEDIA
The outraged parents of a former London police officer killed by another in a murder-suicide want an inquest into how police handled the case.
But while police Chief Murray Faulkner rejects that, yesterday -- for the first time -- he said he will ask an outside party to assess what happened and how police missed any signs of trouble brewing.
Just how formal such an outside examination would be, Faulkner couldn't say. "I am not sure of the process yet."
Those twists come a week after acting Inspector Kelly Johnson shot retired superintendent Dave Lucio then turned her gun -- a service pistol she wasn't authorized to have at the time -- on herself in his van. The two had been lovers who had left marriages.
An angry Doug Lucio, father of the slain retired officer, contacted The Free Press to vent his frustrations. "She killed him. She murdered him -- premeditated. Nobody's saying that," the father, 80, said.
Angry about the handling of the case, including what the public was told and when, the father insists discussion about the tragedy has been stifled.
"Out of discussion comes action plans. And out of action plans comes results," he said.
"I will not tolerate this. (An inquest could) let people stop it from happening again."
Regional supervising coroner, Jack Stanborough, said he's weighing whether to call a so-called discretionary inquest. "If a family writes me a letter and says, 'I want an inquest into this and here's why,' and it makes a lot of sense, I give it serious consideration," he said.
Among other things, Lucio wants to know why Faulkner met with the family of Johnson -- the shooter -- but didn't call he and his wife, the parents of her victim and a fellow although retired officer.
He also wants to know why police didn't erase any public doubts about which of the two was the shooter -- thus clearing Lucio's name -- when the truth was clear long before autopsy results were released five days after the shootings.
"They knew. So how come it just came out the day of his funeral (June 11)?" he asked.
Lucio described a dramatic confrontation with Faulkner at his son's funeral Monday.
"I said to him, 'You got a hold of (Johnson's former) husband and you got a hold of her father.' Then I said to him, 'Why didn't you call his mother and I?"
Johnson, cnsidered a rising star on the force, was the daughter of Merv Johnson, former London deputy police chief.
Faulkner said he told Lucio at the funeral he purposely dispatched an inspector close to the family to break the news, only hours afterward.
Faulkner also said there's no need for an inquest. "I don't think an inquest is the proper way to go about it."
Lucio, 57, and Johnson, 40 had had a relationship for several months.
Sometime the night of June 6, Johnson shot Lucio, then turned her service pistol on herself while Lucio was driving the pair to her condo on Picton Street.
Doug Lucio said he has great respect for members of the police force but also wants his son's legacy upheld.
"We still count our blessings but we want to hold onto our respect. And my son's reputation. We don't want to destroy the wonderful things he built up in his life, or see anybody else do it," said the retired Northern Telecom executive.
Faulkner noted family and friends of Lucio and Johnson are grieving and he won't publicly discuss either of their personal lives.
"There are different emotions at this time. Both people need to be protected because they cannot speak for themselves."
Among other concerns raised by Lucio, and Faulkner's responses:
- Why did police not set the record straight sooner about who shot whom?
Faulkner reiterated police couldn't release that until after a June 11 autopsy determined exactly what happened. "That is police procedure."
- Why did a London police officer write a letter, published Tuesday in The Free Press, urging people, on behalf of affected "families," not to talk publicly about the case?
"Families, friends, co-workers and anyone whose lives have been touched by tragedy have so many emotions to deal with as it is," read Const. Pam Matatall's Tuesday letter.
"Out of respect for them, please do not add to their suffering."
Lucio said he "resented" the letter and disagreed with its message.
"They should be talking about it to the high heavens," he said."Quit talking about it?
"That's exactly what you shouldn't do because feelings cannot mend unless you talk about it."
Faulkner said he had no idea a letter was being written by a constable and gave no direction to his staff to do so.
Other members of the Lucio family declined comment, but indicated they hold no ill will toward anyone on the London police department.
The loss of his son has been a heavy blow for the elder Lucio, who plans to spend the next couple of days with his wife at their cottage, privately wrestling with their grief and frustration.
"He was our light, my wife and I. He was the light in the complexities of life," he said. "Couldn't have got a better son, couldn't have got a more compassionate person, either.
"We loved him very much."
Source: London Free Press

Addendum: A curious footnote three years later. This case does not count as domestic violence.

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Barbara Kay, London, Ontario Police statistics on domestic violence show classic signs of abuse
Posted: January 28, 2010, 12:08 PM by Jonathan Kay
After six years of service, Chief Murray Faulkner, 57, of the London police force is expected to announce his retirement at noon today.
He leaves with a statistical stain on his record. For 2007 his department's statistics under the heading of domestic violence (DV) show that there was one DV homicide of a woman by a man, but zero homicides of a man by a woman. Not true.
On June 6, 2007, in a shocking case of love gone awry, police inspector Kelly Johnson, inflamed by her lover, retired police superintendent David Lucio's ending of their affair the day before, shot Lucio in the head with a .40-calibre Glock pistol (which she was not authorized to have in her possession) as he was driving his van through downtown London, and then killed herself with the same gun as the van careened into an apartment building.
If Johnson were a man, the case would have been labelled a cold-blooded DV murder, and exploited as yet another example of the pandemic of male violence against women. But the incident was spun as a kind of bilateral tragedy with no villain, just two victims.
Critics of Faulkner have long grumbled about his preoccupation with male violence against women and his tendency to downplay or ignore female violence against men. Normally it's tough to get the evidence to back up such a claim. But the obviously purposeful refusal to classify the Lucio murder as a case of DV, when it so screamingly is a world-class example of DV at its worst, supports Chief Faulkner's detractors' claim of bias against male victims of DV.
Naturally this lapse calls all the other statistics in Faulkner's tenure into question. We all depend on statistics to help us make up our minds on issues, so it is extremely irresponsible to muck around with them in support of an ideological position. Presently the London police 2007 statistics tell us that DV-related homicide is 100% male on female and 0% female on male. In fact it is 50-50. It would be fitting if Chief Faulkner's last official act were to admit that the Johnson/Lucio homicide was indeed a case of DV, have the 2007 statistic formally changed, and give his successor the nod to review all the stats on DV posted during his tenure.
Source: National Post

Zuker Protested

June 6, 2007

Here are three reports on the protest against Judge Zuker today, one by Canada Court Watch, one by an observer using screen name Litigator, and one by Fathers-4-Justice.

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Citizens protest against Justice Zuker at 47 Sheppard Ave. E. courthouse in Toronto!

Protesters outside of the court at 47 Sheppard Ave. E in Toronto carried signs and handed out thousands of flyers and brochures

(June 6, 2007). A group of Ontario citizens carrying signs and handing out flyers and brochures outside of the Sheppard Ave. E. courthouse in Toronto today, protested the recent judicial scandal in which Justice Marvin Zuker admitted to the Ontario Judicial Council that he had tampered with court transcripts in a court case in which he was the presiding judge. According to participants of the group, Justice Zuker should be charged criminally and that there should not be one set of laws for ordinary Canadians and another set of unwritten laws which appear to allow judges to break the law. Altering transcripts is an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada.
According to ex-lawyer Harry Kopyto from Toronto, Justice Zuker altered transcripts and fabricated evidence in his client's court matter. A motion will be heard at 10 am on July 3, 2007, 10:00, to have Justice of the Peace, Dunbrook, make a decision as to whether criminal charges should be laid against Justice Marvin Zuker. Mr. Kopyto indicated that there has been facing staunch resistance by the legal establishment to have charges laid against Justice Zuker. Information about this court hearing will be posted as it becomes available. Members of the public are urged to attend.
Source: Canada Court Watch

Toronto Protest a Smashing Success!!!
screen name: Litigator!
Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:39 pm
As many of you know there was a protest being held in Toronto at the 47 Sheppard Ave E courthouse this morning. This protest was about Ontario Court of Justice Judge Marvin Zuker altering court transcripts and breaking the law. I am pleased to report that the protest was a huge success. People came from far and wide. We had huge signs, a gallows with a hanging Judge and a megaphone being contantly manned. We gathered a large number of signatures on our petition to have Justice Zuker removed from the bench. Cars were stopping in the street to request the flyers being handed out. There was a steady crowd of people who were quite disturbed to learn of this. The Police were present and trying to intimidate people however they were generally well behaved lol. There were supporters present from a number of citizen's rights groups including, F4J or Father 4 Justice, Canada Court Watch and the Citizen's Coalition for Judicial Accountability.
Source: Canada Court Watch message board

... our brothers and sisters in the fight for Justice were all descending on the Sheppard St. Courthouse protesting the institutionalized corruption that is manifested in the criminal behavior of INJustice Zucker. We were thinking about you. Hopefully that will be the start of a core of people who will go out twice a week at that courthouse.
The day was a little cool and windy but mostly uneventful. A lot of the regulars and people who have already signed the petition. Their is a Female Lawyer who says she was stalked by Fathers 4 Justice and they even killed her dog. It was not anyone I know. A couple of months back she talked to me a little more and it turned out it was something that apparently happened years ago, sounds like it was in the days of Fathers FOR Justice. In telling the story she comes off as quite loony.
Detective Hanlon also came out who has warned me twice about affixing signs to the fence. Jeet wanted to put up the banner so I said OK but no tying it down. Luckily it blew over just before he came out.
Denis Van Decker
York Region Coordinator
Fathers 4 Justice Canada
Source: Fathers-4-Justice

Addendum: There is a slide show of the Zuker protest.

Zuker protest

Life in a Group Home

June 6, 2007

A woman, Jeanette Antoine, gave testimony of her experiences living in a Cornwall Ontario area group home in the 1960s and 1970s.

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June 5, 2007
Woman tells of grim trail of abuse
Project Truth Inquiry hears more unsettling allegations
By CP
CORNWALL — A former city woman told an inquiry on Monday that she was sexually and physically abused by a Children’s Aid Society caseworker and even held for a period of time in the trunk of the man’s car.
Jeanette Antoine first became a ward of the CAS when she was five years old in 1965 and over the course of the following 11 years endured what she claims was repeated physical and sexual abuse at the hands of foster parents and even her own caseworker.
Antoine told the inquiry probing the institutional response to allegations of systemic sexual abuse in the Cornwall area that when she was 16, she and a handful of other teens ran away from a CAS-run group home where she says they were being abused by workers.
The group broke into a cottage in Summerstown, and stayed on their own for a few days before being apprehended by police and dropped off at the CAS office in Cornwall. Antoine said there were a group of workers there to take the kids from the police.
“One worker would take a kid,” said Antoine, who said she was under the care of her caseworker, a man by the name of Brian Keough. “Brian grabbed me and put me in the trunk of his car while the other workers talked to the kids.”
The woman, who is now 46 years old and lives in Edmonton, said she can’t remember exactly how long she was in the trunk, but she remembers she fell asleep.
“He came out and took me back into the CAS office into this big conference room,” said the woman. “I remember all the kids were there and there were a lot of workers there.”
The woman said she and other teenagers who were living at the group home in the 1970s were physically and sexually abused by Keough and other workers on a regular basis.
“He (Keough) would do something to at least one of them every week,” said the woman. “Each week it would be a different girl.”
Antoine said she remembers a time when all the girls in the home were prescribed birth control pills, although she says she was never in danger of becoming pregnant.
“He (Keough) never actually had sex with me,” said Antoine. “He molested me, but it was never sex.”
Antoine testified she was also sexually abused by other men during her time in foster care.
When she was six years old and her sister was eight years old, the girls were living in a foster home in the city. Antoine said her foster father began to sexually and physically abuse her and her sister within months of their arrival at the home.
“He would come downstairs (to the girls’ bedroom) and get in bed between us and put his hands on both of us at the same time,” said Antoine, speaking in a voice barely above a whisper. “He would tell his wife he was reading us a book.”
Antoine said she was also physically abused by the man, his wife and their biological daughter.
She said she told Keough about some of the incidents of abuse, but wasn’t believed.
“He said I was a liar,” said Antoine. “He said that was the best foster home they had and I was lucky to be there.”
No one has ever been charged with any crime related to Antoine’s allegations.
The inquiry continues.
Source: Ottawa Sun

Motherhood Criminalized

June 5, 2007

Mothers are now getting the treatment previously reserved for pimps and drug smugglers. Women who try to reunite mothers and children are hunted down and spend years in jail.

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Jun 4, 4:39 PM EDT
Women prosecuted for smuggling children
By AMANDA LEE MYERS, Associated Press Writer
PHOENIX (AP) -- An increasing number of illegal immigrants who left their children back home are hiring complete strangers to bring the youngsters into this country by bluffing their way past U.S. border inspectors.
Typically, the stranger poses as the child's mother or another relative as she drives through a checkpoint. Sometimes the children are given cough syrup to sedate them and ensure they don't say or do anything to make border guards suspicious.
U.S. officials say they are seeing more such cases because stepped-up enforcement along the border has made it more dangerous to sneak into the country by trekking across the desert.
"People who may be afraid or think it's too dangerous to bring a child through the desert when it's 120 degrees think it's better to place a child in the hands of a total stranger," said Roger Maier, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Texas.
U.S. officials warned that entrusting children to a stranger is foolish, too.
"There's no guarantee that you're going to be reunited with your child. There's no guarantee that your child is being cared for," said Brian Levin, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Arizona.
Nevertheless, officials at the border could not cite a specific case of a child being hurt or stolen in the smuggling scheme.
Dozens of U.S. citizens, permanent residents and other women with a legal right to be in this country have been prosecuted in the past few years for trying to smuggle children into the U.S. Border officials said they do not have exact numbers but believe such cases are on the rise.
The women are typically poor, and are hired by smugglers for $100 to $500 for the transaction. They are often mothers themselves, and use their own children's birth certificates when they drive through a checkpoint.
"They're a vulnerable class of people who get sucked into this," said Joel Parris, an assistant federal public defender in Tucson who has defended several women smugglers. "These women are so focused on surviving and taking care of their own kids, when someone comes with a pity trip, their sympathy is so strong they can't resist."
Ana Meza-Montano, a 36-year-old single mother from Agua Prieta, Mexico, across the border from Douglas, Ariz., had a border crossing card that allowed her to enter the United States for short periods to shop and run other errands.
Meza-Montano was caught at the Douglas port of entry trying to smuggle a 1-year-old girl who she said was her daughter.
Parris, who defended her, said Meza-Montano agreed to the transaction because a smuggler offered to pay off her son's $100 bicycle, which was on layaway at a Wal-Mart. The woman is serving a 15-month prison sentence.
Sandra Ramirez, a 24-year-old single mother of four, was caught trying to sneak an 11-year-old boy through the Nogales, Ariz., port of entry, and said a co-worker offered her $1,000 to do it. Now Ramirez is serving a 15-month prison sentence and will be deported to Mexico after she gets out.
"This is just one of the most overwhelmingly saddest cases," said Ramirez's lawyer, Stephanie Meade. "She had no idea of the kind of consequences and trouble that she would get in."
Officials say the smuggling tactic has become more common partly because more illegal immigrants are deciding to bring their families into the country. In the past, it was more common for men to leave their families behind and return periodically for visits.
Also, because of tighter enforcement by the Border Patrol and the National Guard, illegal immigrants who want to sneak across the desert are being forced to make the attempt along more remote, more rugged - and more dangerous - stretches of the border.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona has made prosecuting these child-smuggling cases one of its top priorities.
"Children are being put in situations where the risk of something happening to them is high, and we felt that people need to be held accountable for this," spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said.
He added: "There are many examples of how violent these smuggling organizations are and how ruthless they've become, and they'd be the last people I'd entrust my kids to."
Source: Associated Press

Ritalin Mystery

June 4, 2007

Researcher Lisa Strohschein has found that children of divorce get Ritalin prescriptions at a higher rate than the children of intact families, though she has no explanation of why. Following a news article below is the explanation.

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SCIENCE NEWS
June 04, 2007
Ritalin use doubles after divorce, study finds
By Scott Anderson
TORONTO (Reuters) - Children from broken marriages are twice as likely to be prescribed attention-deficit drugs as children whose parents stay together, a Canadian researcher said on Monday, and she said the reasons should be investigated.
More than 6 percent of 633 children from divorced families were prescribed Ritalin, compared with 3.3 percent of children whose parents stayed together, University of Alberta professor Lisa Strohschein reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The study of more than 4,700 children started in 1994, while all the families were intact, Strohschein said. They followed the children's progress to see what happened to their families and to see what drugs were prescribed.
"It shows clearly that divorce is a risk factor for kids to be prescribed Ritalin," Strohschein said.
Other studies have shown that children of single parents are more likely to get prescribed drugs such as Ritalin. But is the problem caused by being born to a never-married mother, or some other factor?
"So the question was, 'is it possible that divorce acts a stressful life event that creates adjustment problems for children, which might increase acting out behavior, leading to a prescription for Ritalin?"' Strohschein said in a statement.
"On the other hand, there is also the very public perception that divorce is always bad for kids and so when children of divorce come to the attention of the health-care system -- possibly because parents anticipate their child must be going through adjustment problems -- doctors may be more likely to diagnose a problem and prescribe Ritalin."
Ritalin, known generically as methylphenidate, is a psychostimulant drug most commonly prescribed for the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.
There is a big debate in much of the developed world over whether it may be over-prescribed -- given to children who do not really need it. In March, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the use of drugs to treat ADHD has more than tripled worldwide since 1993.
Strohschein said it is possible that some mental health problems pre-date the divorce, so "it is possible that these kids had these problems before, but are only being identified afterward."
Her study was not designed to find out why the children were prescribed the drug.
"I might be finished with the survey, but I am not necessarily finished with the question," she said in a telephone interview.
Source: Scientific American

June 4, 2007
Strohschein, Lisa
University of Alberta
lisa.strohschein@ualberta.ca
Subject: Ritalin use
Madam:
In several articles in today's press you are quoted as the author of a study showing that Ritalin prescriptions are more frequent for children of divorced couples than for children of intact families. Research other than yours shows that children of single mothers also have higher prescription rates. The articles say you are now looking into why divorce leads to higher prescription rates.
I can save you some effort. The reason is the Canadian therapeutic system, which in the case of children is largely coercive. Divorce courts and child protection cases both steer children to psychiatrists in large numbers. The children of intact families are more likely to stay away from psychiatrists, and the parents who stay together are better able to resist the coercion.
Once referred for psychiatric help, the rest is driven by financial incentives for the professionals, and coercion for the parents and children. Wives are tempted to divorce their husbands by the prospect of generous child support and custody of the children. Child protectors get large per-diem rates for children in foster care, but the rates multiply as soon as a doctor diagnoses a disorder qualifying the child as "special needs". Doctors are not, as far as I know, rewarded per prescription, but they are assured of a steady stream of clients as long as they diagnose disorders and prescribe psychotropics. The drug companies can be relied on to mount a lobbying effort to preserve the current regime any time reform is on the legislative agenda. As for parents, refusing to follow a doctor's prescription is treated as medical neglect, allowing child protectors to take the child into long-term foster care.
In any future research, I hope you can include methods for measuring the effect of the therapeutic system on the rate of Ritalin use.
Robert T McQuaid
email: rtmq@fixcas.com

Fund Kids, not Bureaucrats

June 3, 2007

The article below shows how at the political level the appropriation of money to take power from parents is sold as a benefit for children. Stephen Harper started his government with a policy to give daycare money to parents instead of the bureaucracy. We will be watching to see if he sticks to that policy.

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Web-exclusive comment
In child care, 'the greatest choice for the greatest number'
KATE TENNIER
Special to Globe and Mail Update
June 1, 2007 at 2:04 AM EDT
Last month, I appeared as a "witness" at the parliamentary committee reviewing Bill C-303. "Combatant" would be a more accurate term, as these committees often resemble full-blown contact sports, especially when it comes to emotionally wrought subjects such as child care.
This New Democratic private member's bill is another attempt to impose a government overlay on family child-care decisions by forcing any future federal money going to the provinces to be used only for state-regulated care. The whole exercise could be for naught — it could die a quick death if an election were to be called, or a slow painful one if federal money is never funnelled into it. Those who still believe in universal daycare, however, insist that the bill's greatest strength is to keep the daycare debate going. So be it.
That it is one of the most illiberal bills ever proposed in Canada is enough reason to hope for its early demise. With brown being the new black, liberalism appears to be the new conservatism when it comes to the lives of working mothers.
A recent article on super-mothers in Britain — CEO moms — found that these women could not pull it off without serious domestic help. On average, they paid 2-1/2 women to perform the domestic chores they had no time to do.
What is not as well appreciated is that domestic help is just as much a necessity for mothers working in lowly paid jobs as it is for the corporate mom. Research and experience show that without it, many of these mothers simply choose not to be in the work force, even with the offer of fully subsidized daycare.
Since the 1996 U.S. introduction of the euphemistically titled "welfare reform program," there has been a decidedly mixed level of success for single mothers. While analysis is still being teased out on why some benefited and others didn't, a report called "The Effect of Work and Welfare on Living Conditions in Single Parent Households" by the population division of the U.S. Census Bureau sheds some light.
In classic academic understatement, it notes: "That single mothers in the work force may have lower material well-being despite higher income is a potentially interesting finding." Even controlling for the cost of daycare, the report suggests several reasons why this may be so, not the least of which is "loss of time to take care of household needs." Many poor women realize that this loss of time — the kind CEO moms can buy — is simply too high a price to pay. Their best option is to remain on income support.
Canadian universal-daycare advocates routinely point out that our experience can't compare to that of Americans. But when it comes to the hardships many parents face, similarities prevail.
Such is the lack of "daycare uptake" by poor mothers that in 2004, British Columbia's child-care advisory council actually lamented that "families are not applying for subsidies." And, while the Toronto Children's Services website shows waiting lists, it also reports numerous vacancies for subsidized spots in all wards. Furthermore, the amount of children whose parents have applied for these spaces is but a fraction of those living below the poverty line in Toronto.
One would think that if parents saw the offer of heavily subsidized daycare as the poverty-alleviating solution it is purported to be, Canada's poor mothers would be beating a path to its door. Clearly, they are not. Each parent is so unique in their life circumstances that although daycare may be a solution for one, it may be the defeat of another. That parents are in the best position to determine this should be the basis for all child-care policy in this country and should be a guaranteed right for all parents. To not do so is tantamount to promoting a monoculture.
Indeed, it was truly liberal U.S. feminists such as Anna Quindlen and Barbara Ehrenreich who saw their country's "welfare reform" for what it really was — workfare — and correctly predicted that many lives would be the worse for it.
While Canada's daycare policies are not yet workfare, poor mothers do receive a massive and disproportionate amount of state benefits only if they fit themselves and their children into the market economy. Toronto will pay the full $18,000 daycare fee if a mother goes out and earns the same. Will it pay $36,000 if she has two children? If we follow Sweden's lead, it will. It was reported that a mother in that country along with her truck-driver husband requested a small subsidy to lift them above the poverty line while they looked after their own children. City officials said no, offering two $20,000-a-year daycare spots instead.
Returning to the committee proceedings, irony abounded. The sight of two eloquent witnesses, a Christian minister from Ontario and a home-schooling mother of five from Alberta, arguing for diversity, choice and inclusiveness while never once criticizing daycare or a family's right to choose it was something to behold, especially when compared to the intransigence of the federal parties still supporting this bill.
Perhaps we need a 21st century update of a classic liberal doctrine. "The greatest choice for the greatest number" should be our country's new mantra. Family policy would be a wonderful place to start.
Kate Tennier was an organizer for the "Fund the child (not the system)" rallies that took place in 17 cities across Canada on Nov. 19, 2005.
Source: Globe and Mail

Politician School

Zuker Alert

May 30, 2007

Judge Marvin A Zuker violated the criminal code by falsifying the records of his own court. There was no penalty. There will be gathering outside his courthouse next Wednesday to draw public attention to the abuses in family courts.

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NOTICE:

PROTEST AT COURT CORRUPTION
and Criminal Activity involving Judge Marvin Zuker
6th June 2007
Courthouse- 47 Sheppard Avenue E
Toronto
Time: 8.30 AM
Judge Zuker- A picture of Corruption

There will be a public awareness event on Wednesday June 6, 2007 at the 47 Sheppard Ave E court in Toronto. It is located just east of Yonge St on Sheppard and is fully accessible by public transportation. The focus of the event is to make the public aware of the corruption and abuse of families going on in the Ontario court. Aptly we have chosen Justice Zuker as the focus of this event. Participants will be asked to pass out flyers at the court house and in the surrounding community. An activist alert will follow as we would like to see as many people as possible come out and stand up for their rights and expose the corruption in the courts.

Distributed by:
Jeremy Swanson
Fathers and Men's Rights Activist
"For The Children”
Ottawa, Ontario
Phone: (613) 237-1320 ext 2438
swanson@storm.ca

Source: email from Jeremy Swanson

Addendum: Here are two more items from Canada Court Watch, one promising more cases of altered records in Judge Zuker's court, the other calling for volunteers to collect petition signatures to have Judge Zuker removed from the bench. Punition toward judges is not the only way of solving the problem. The attorney general could alter court procedures to place the preparation of transcripts out of the control of judges.

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More tampering with transcripts at Sheppard Ave E court claims local citizen
(June 1, 2007) - Another citizen contacted Court Watch today to advise us that his transcripts from the Sheppard Ave. E. court in Toronto have serious problems with them. According to this citizen, significant sections of what was said in court was missing from the transcripts which it would make it more difficult for him to appeal the judge's case. In light of the recent story of senior judge, Marvin Zuker, being caught for altering court transcripts, could the altering of court transcripts at the Sheppard Ave. E. courthouse be widespread? The citizen has indicated that he will be writing a letter to Court Watch for publication on this website.
Source: Canada Court Watch

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Petition to remove Justice Zuker from the bench
(June 3, 2007) - Court Watch was contacted by citizens from Ontario who indicated that Justice Marvin Zuker of the Ontario Court of Justice should be removed from the bench for breaking section 139(1) and section 122 of the Criminal Code of Canada (Obstruction of Justice for tampering with transcripts and Breach of Trust). In response to the Ontario Judicial Council's inability to protect the public's interest in the administration of justice as a result of Justice Zuker's criminal acts, they have started a petition to have Justice Zuker removed from his position as judge.
If you are a citizen anywhere in Canada who would like to participate in protecting democracy and the administration of justice in Canada by assisting in the effort to have Justice Zuker removed from the bench by collecting signatures on a supplied petition form in your own area, then please send in your request to info@canadacourtwatch.com and we will put you in touch with those involved in this effort. Although many have e mailed us about Justice Zuker, please, only those who are willing to collect some signatures and submit them to their local member of Parliament need apply.
Please include your name, address and phone number as all requests will be verified by phone. An information package will be sent out participants about collecting signatures in their own areas. Participants will be expected to deliver their petitions to their our local Member of Canadian Parliament (Federal) and additionally to their local member of Ontario Provincial Parliament if they live in the Province of Ontario. This will be done in coordination with the other Canadian citizens who will participate in this initiative.
Source: Canada Court Watch

Addendum: The following letter by Marvin A Zuker, published in the Toronto Star, shows that he shares the mindset of a social worker. In solving the problems of children, two words conspicuously missing are "mother" and "father".

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Toronto Star
Letter to the editor
Social inequality matter for us all
The Toronto Star, letter to the editor, by Marvin A. Zuker, Ontario Court of Justice, Toronto, Aug. 17, 2006.
re: Should 10-year-olds face a judge? Aug. 15.
With reference to Tracey Tyler's headline, I would suggest, with great respect to the minister of justice, that if the answer to crime in Canada is to lower the age of responsibility to 10 under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, then this is not the answer. Many young people today have no hope in their lives. Many think nothing about the consequences of their actions. It is as much about filling the gaps in community programs. It is as much about evening recreation events, summer jobs, and college tuition. We must begin by compensating for family disadvantage and look at the background and resources of families in need and children at risk.
Social inequality is a matter for all of us. Child protection agencies, given the expertise they provide, are far better able to deal with our youth, many of whom have mental-health disorders, developmental disabilities or are the victims of abuse, violence and neglect. We need an interdisciplinary approach to deal with the 10-year-old "criminal." Our understaffed, underfunded child protection agencies are still better equipped than the criminal justice system to deal with those under the age of 12.
It is more about keeping kids in school longer, e.g. up to 18; it's more about extending child protection to those up to 18; it's about providing the means for welfare recipients to go to college; it's about providing the opportunity for those children who have gone through our foster care system to be able to go to college. It's about parental behaviour, lack of supervision, rejection of children and the lack of involvement with children. It is about unconscious stereotyping.
The dichotomy of the child as a victim and the child as an offender is mirrored by the canyon between child welfare and corrections. If jails worked, then the United States would be the safest place on earth.
Marvin A. Zuker,
Ontario Court of Justice, Toronto
Source: Canadian Children's Rights Council

Treatment Centres Expand

May 29, 2007

Today we present two contrasting items: Another proud announcement by Mary Anne Chambers, part of a $24.5 million expenditure on children's mental health across Ontario, this one targeted at the Niagara region. And a diary by the mother of a now twelve-year-old boy who is a "beneficiary" of the mental health services in the Niagara region. Read her chilling story before you celebrate the mental health expansion.

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McGuinty Government Providing More Assistance For Children And Youth With Special Needs In Niagara Peninsula
McGuinty Government Investments Are A Boost For Ontario's Most Vulnerable Young People
ST. CATHARINES, ON, May 28 /CNW/ - Minister of Children and Youth Services Mary Anne Chambers, Jim Bradley, MPP for St. Catharines and Kim Craitor, MPP for Niagara Falls, met today with children, youth and families with developmental disabilities and mental health challenges in the Niagara Peninsula to talk about new investments that are improving programs and services.
"Children's treatment centres are an important part of the continuum of services that provide young people with disabilities the best opportunities to succeed," said Chambers. "Our government is committed to providing children and youth with a range of complex special needs the support they need to not only reach their potential but realize their dreams just like other children and youth."
The Niagara Peninsula Children's Centre will receive an additional $291,600 in 2007-08. The funding will be used to provide services to 245 children and youth with special needs, including 45 currently on a waiting list. The centre also received $436,450 in funding as part of government investments last fall to better serve children, youth and families while strengthening local economies.
"This is terrific news for children and youth in Niagara with special needs," said Tim Wright, Executive Director of the Niagara Peninsula Children's Centre, site of today's announcement. "This additional funding will increase the centre's ability to provide rehabilitation treatments and other support services to children, youth and their families facing significant challenges."
The government is also providing $354,605 in new funding to six Niagara Peninsula agencies to enhance services to children and youth with mental health and behavioural challenges. The funding is part of an additional $24.5 million annual investment in child and youth mental health across the province and builds on previous investments in more than 260 child and youth mental health agencies and 17 hospital-based outpatient programs. One of the six agencies, Niagara Child and Youth Services, also received $135,500 in funding as part of government investments last fall.
"When we were elected, our government made it a priority to give children and youth with mental health challenges the support they need to reach their potential," said Bradley. "That is why we have increased funding for the child and youth mental health sector by nearly $80 million since 2004 and that is why we will continue to strengthen community programs and services."
This is the second increase in base annual funding to the child and youth mental health sector by the McGuinty government since 2004. Prior to the 2004 budget, the sector had not received a base increase for 12 consecutive years.
"We are working hard on many fronts to make a real difference for our province's most vulnerable young people," said Craitor. "Our government's investment will help our community organizations provide families with the programs and services that help children and youth succeed in school and in life."
Source: Press release from Minstry of Children and Youth Services
There is much more than copied here

Addendum: The story of the twelve-year-old boy has been removed.

Increased funding for child protective services

News You Don't Need to Know

May 29, 2007

Yesterday the Toronto Star published a series of articles showing failings of Ontario's daycare system. The articles became the topic of discussion in the legislature, which disclosed that the Star had to prevail in two years of litigation to be able to publish the story. As far as the Ministry of Children and Youth Services is concerned, it is news you don't need to know. Sadly, being the Star, the series suggests that the remedy is to give more tax money to the same ministry. We show one of the articles below. For the next few days you can read the whole series by clicking on "Source" and following the links.

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Dirty little secrets: Abuse in daycares

TARA WALTON/TORONTO STAR
By filing a series of freedom of information requests that took more than 18 months, the Star obtained records detailing many disturbing incidents at daycare centres in the past three years.

You're not supposed to know it, but children in licensed centres endure filthy conditions, bad food and physical and emotional harm
May 28, 2007, Robert Cribb, Dale Brazao, Staff Reporters
Children in provincially licensed daycares have been hit, kicked, allowed to play in filthy conditions and fed allergy-triggering food that nearly claimed their lives.
A Star investigation based on thousands of never-before-released daycare incidents and inspection reports has uncovered a myriad of serious problems including children wandering off unattended, being forcibly confined in closets and storage rooms as punishment, and served meals prepared in mice-infested kitchens.
But even in the most egregious cases, the provincial Ministry of Children and Youth Services is often slow to act.
Daycares with a pattern of problems are allowed to operate for months or even years on provisional licences, while children are exposed to substandard conditions, internal government documents show.
"The conditions you highlight are unacceptable and we take it seriously," said ministry spokesperson Tricia Edgar.
"It is a concern. We're going to be looking at this. I can give you our assurance that we will do that. It isn't consistent with the health and well being of kids."
The records are typically kept secret. Parents who trust their children with a licensed daycare have no way of finding out if their daycare is exemplary or riddled with problems.
The Star obtained the records – which relate to the last three years – following a series of freedom of information requests that took more than two years.
They revealed serious problems at several hundred of the 4,400 licensed daycares in the province.
The highest rate of reported problems was in Toronto, but that may be because the city's daycares are more tightly regulated than others in the province.

Failing Care
Analysis by the Star’s Andrew Bailey
The Star’s investigation is based on three streams of documents and data relating to the last three to four years. The information obtained includes nearly 6,000 serious occurrence reports made by licensed daycares in a two-year period; three years' worth of city and provincial inspection records for food, safety and other issues; and four years of complaints filed by parents or others to the province.
Here’s a breakdown of the serious occurrence reports the Star obtained.
Serious injury accidental:
Toronto (1,150); Outside Toronto (1,281)
Disaster on premises:
Toronto (354); Outside Toronto (333)
Missing child:
Toronto (394); Outside Toronto (280)
Alleged abuse/mistreatment:
Toronto (433); Outside Toronto (242)
Serious injury self-inflicted/or unexplained:
Toronto (249); Outside Toronto (205)
Complaint made by or about child:
Toronto (303); Outside Toronto (204)
Complaint about service standard:
Toronto (135); Outside Toronto (178)
Serious injury caused by daycare provider:
Toronto (15); Outside Toronto (11)
Use of physical restraint-no injury:
Toronto (0); Outside Toronto (5)
Racial incident/human rights violation:
Toronto (42); Outside Toronto (0)
Toronto total (3,075); Outside Toronto (2,739)

While the majority of daycares appear to be well run, child care in Ontario suffers from a lack of funding that often translates into troubling conditions and poorly trained or unqualified staff.
"We've had an avalanche of problems," says Bobby Bhar, who operates two Etobicoke daycares that have had repeated problems.
The inspection reports on his two Children's Corner Day Nursery locations are a parent's worst nightmare.
One centre is at Royal York Rd. and Wilson Ave.; the other is on Kipling Ave. south of Steeles Ave.
The reports detail allegations of abuse and mistreatment of children, filthy conditions and child injuries. Repeated problems have meant the daycares have operated beneath minimum legislated standards for much of the past three years.
Despite repeated visits from provincial inspectors, threats of closure and deadlines to make fixes, the two daycares have continued to look after more than 120 children.
Bhar said he would like to provide better care but lacks the funds.
The Star's research is based on four types of information: reports by provincial and city inspectors; serious occurrence reports made by daycares when there is an injury, an allegation of abuse or a child gone missing; enforcement actions by city or provincial authorities; and complaints made by parents.
Since 2000, nearly 500 licensed daycares have received provisional licences, which are granted to centres that do not meet minimum standards on the condition that they will correct serious problems. The ministry has shut down only 13 daycares during that period.
Daycares in Ontario are operated by non-profit organizations, colleges, municipalities and for-profit companies.
Of the nearly 4,400 licensed daycares in Ontario, 78 per cent are non-profit and the remaining 22 per cent are for-profit centres.
Many daycares with the most serious problems, according to provincial and municipal records obtained by the Star, are for-profit operations. Studies have shown higher quality childcare is most often provided by non-profit organizations – findings that are disputed by organizations representing private commercial daycares.
At one commercial daycare in Brampton, a 2-year-old almost died of an allergic reaction to peanuts because the daycare did not call 911.
Instead, staff at Rise-N-Grades Montessori School and Daycare monitored the child and eventually called the parents. When Sylvia and Neil Miggiani arrived they found their daughter covered in hives, eyes nearly swollen shut, vomiting and choking. Sylvia ordered staff to call paramedics who saved the girl's life.
"I went through so much to have a child and to think that in one meal at a daycare centre, that it could have all ended," says the mother.
"I can't even begin to tell you how horrible that was."
Contacted by the Star, Tim Waghorn, who runs the daycare with his wife Karen, declined to comment on the allegations, saying they now have a clear licence to operate.
Experts say problems in Ontario daycares are the result of a childcare crisis in Canada caused by chronic underfunding and the lack of a national program for funding.
A major international study last year ranked Canada at the bottom of a list of 14 industrialized nations when it comes to spending on early childhood education.
The study, conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), found Canadian child care services rely on underpaid child care workers who receive little support for training, high parent fees and small subsidies.
The Conservative government's decision to scrap funding for a national daycare program in favour of direct payments to families has failed to address what child care advocates call a "mounting social problem."
"We're not even in the game," says Martha Friendly, a child-care advocate and co-ordinator of the Toronto-based Childcare Research and Resource Unit. "We're the lowest spender, which shows how much value we place on it."
The chronic shortage of daycare spots leaves parents with little choice.
Nearly 17,000 families are on waiting lists in Ontario – nearly 9,000 in Toronto alone.
The children's ministry's spokeswoman said that while daycare spots are in short supply, the ministry does not tolerate poor conditions in order to keep substandard centres open.
"The issue of child safety is not a balancing act or something we would waver on. In a situation of immediate danger to health or well-being (a daycare) would be closed immediately. And that does happen."
One harrowing example is Weeza's Wee Ones in Emsdale, Ont. It lost its licence in 2001 after the ministry alleged staff yelled, kicked, slapped and spanked children and even shoved an eraser in the mouth of a child who refused to "shut up."
The operator did not appeal the closure order.
It's legal to operate an unlicensed daycare as long as there are fewer than five children. More than five children in an unlicensed daycare is illegal.
Last month, the operator of an illegal daycare with 26 children in a small Riverdale row house was charged with criminal negligence after a 22-month-old child was allegedly bitten 18 times by another child.
Fewer than 20 per cent of Ontario children attend licensed facilities. The rest are cared for by their families or are in unlicensed daycares.
Even those who are in regulated programs have no guarantee of high quality care.
The provincial Day Nurseries Act sets only a minimum level of care and although the legislation requires daycares to voluntarily report serious occurrences within 24 hours, provincial inspection records contain numerous examples of serious incidents that went unreported.
Dale Brazao and Robert Cribb can be reached at daycare@thestar.ca or (416) 945-8674
Source: Toronto Star

Addendum: Today after much criticism, Mary Anne Chambers conceded that this is news you have a need to know after all — but only after a delay of months. The editorial in the Star below discusses this unnecessary foot-dragging.

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Get daycare data online promptly
May 29, 2007
Parents who are contemplating sending their child to any licensed daycare in Ontario should be able to find out easily whether it meets the minimum standards of safety and cleanliness. But a lengthy Star investigation, based on thousands of daycare incidents and inspection reports that had been kept secret for years, uncovered a wide range of serious problems about which parents had no way of learning.
Among the incidents were cases of children being kicked and slapped, left unattended and forcibly confined in closets and storage rooms. As well, the government had records of numerous centres throughout the province where mice had infested kitchens and where children were forced to play and takes naps in filthy conditions. Overall, there were 5,814 serious occurrences reported in 2005-06 alone.
Despite such appalling findings, the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, which licenses the centres, apparently dragged its feet when it came to cracking down on the centres, especially on daycares with a history of problems. Some daycares were allowed to operate for months and even years with provisional licences, granted to centres that fail to meet provincial standards.
So why can’t parents easily learn which daycare centres are operating with provisional licences?
Only through repeated Freedom of Information requests that took more than two years to complete was the Star able to obtain the records on Ontario’s 4,400 licensed daycares for the past three years. Even then, large parts of the records were blacked out.
Such secrecy is unconscionable. The ministry has an obligation to inform all parents, not just those whose children might be attending an affected centre, when a daycare is in violation of its licence.
That is especially true given that the Star investigation found that since 2000, some 500 daycares have received provisional licences on condition they would correct serious problems. Yet some of these centres have been allowed to operate on provisional licences for much of the past three years despite repeated threats of closure.
To her credit, Mary Anne Chambers, minister of children and youth services, said yesterday that information on daycare inspections will start to be posted on a government website.
But she says it will take months before the website is operating. Such delay is nonsense. If some teenagers can construct a website and have it up and running in less than a day, what is Queen’s Park’s excuse for taking several months? There is no reason why the site cannot be running by the end of this week. The ministry has all the information, as the Star’s investigation clearly proved.
The website should include reports by city and provincial inspectors, provide easily understandable information about which centres are operating on provisional licences, what steps they must take to get their full licence and how long they have to do so. If an allegation of abuse or neglect is proven, that information should also be posted along with what actions were taken against the owner and staff.
If Chambers cannot have the website running by Friday, she should explain why. Our children need protecting now.
Source: Toronto Star

Addendum: On August 17 Mary Anne Chambers announced the opening of the licensed child care website.