CFS agencies suing province for $226M

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This article was published 27/04/2018 (3069 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — One of the Pallister government’s closest allies in child-welfare reform said he hopes suing the province will bring them closer.

“I’m hoping that the lawsuit will start a dialogue that I think this government wants to have,” said Richard De La Ronde, executive director of the Sandy Bay Child and Family Services.

The agency is one of the plaintiffs in a $266-million application, which was filed Thursday, seeking the removal of a clawback of all federal funds for children under the province’s care.

Commonly known as a “baby bonus,” Ottawa administers the Children’s Special Allowance (CSA) for children in CFS care, at the same amount that as parents who receive the Canada Child Benefit. But Manitoba takes that money from all CFS agencies in the province.

It amounts to $39 million of the $523 million allocated for CFS in this spring’s budget.

Manitoba has one of the world’s highest rates of child-welfare cases, jumping by three-quarters in the past decade to more than 11,300 children. As of spring 2016, 87 per cent of them were Indigenous.

Families Minister Scott Fielding told reporters Thursday CFS is undergoing a “massive amount” of reforms, including to the CSA. But the plaintiffs in this week’s lawsuit say it’s not happening fast enough.

Manitoba’s former NDP government started the clawback in 2010, and collected funds going back to 2006. At the time, the province said these funds were meant for looking after children in care, which is a CFS responsibility.

“Indigenous children in care should not be a source of revenue for the provincial government,” said lawyer Harold Cochrane, whose plaintiffs want the money taken from 2006 to the present returned.

The Children’s Special Allowances Act says that funding can only be used for caring after and educating the children associated with the funding. Lawyers involved in the lawsuit pointed out that money has been transferred into general revenue.

Fielding told reporters general revenue pays for CFS, and that the clawback accounts for just seven per cent of that cost.

The exiting CSA policy also compels agencies to provide the funding; those who hold it back have their provincial funding drop by one-fifth. Thursday’s notice of application claims that makes the funding “forcibly and illegally obtained.”

Fielding stressed his government “inherited” the policy from the NDP, and has said since January that it is part of an ongoing, in-depth review of CFS policies. He hasn’t explained why the clawback continues during that review.

Three months before the suit, Fielding took De La Ronde to Ottawa for a national “emergency meeting” aimed at curbing the jarring number of Indigenous kids apprehended by social workers.

De La Ronde caught the government’s attention for bending the rules at Sandy Bay. He purchased an air-conditioner for a few hundred dollars instead of taking a child away from a home that was uncomfortably hot.

Existing CFS laws allow more funding to kick in when a child is apprehended, leaving little to prevent children from being apprehended. The Pallister government says it wants to restructure the rules.

That’s worsened by a funding gap for First Nations children that only started closing in February. First Nations CFS agencies in Manitoba estimated an annual shortfall of $104 million a year, half of which Ottawa says it has fixed after a decade-long case at the federal human-rights tribunal.

De La Ronde believes CFS needs to make its bureaucratic structure more efficient instead of simply providing more funding. That falls in line with the Pallister government’s view.

But De La Ronde said maintaining the clawback puts children behind at the start of their lives. He also said it makes the system untenable.

For example, because money is remitted differently for children on reserve, Sandy Bay CFS thought about moving its Winnipeg children onto reserve land, or even transferring those children into the general child-welfare system, which has no First Nations control.

De La Ronde said he realizes a government can’t suddenly “walk away from $40 million overnight.” But he said seeing no change to the policy in March’s budget is what drove his agency to join the lawsuit.

“Those conversations are now forced to happen, rather than us being at the mercy of the government when they decide they’re ready.”

The suit includes no agencies in Manitoba’s north. Cochrane said some agencies support the suit but “don’t want the possible retribution from the province.”

Before the Progressive Conservatives took power two years ago, its MLAs decried the CSA.

For example, current Education Minister Ian Wishart chided the NDP for “not thinking about the children,” and leaving First Nation agencies “at risk of financial failure,” in February 2016. In December 2015, he said putting the money into general revenue was like putting it into “a black hole.”

Federal Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott, who has made CFS reform a key plank of her job, hadn’t read the court documents, but said federal tax credits and grants are meant to support children and keep them out of CFS care.

“It’s something that’s an important issue and we expect it to be properly addressed,” Philpott said. “Anything that is intended for children should go to children.”

Earlier this year, she said Manitoba could consider emulating other provinces that store baby bonuses in a trust that can be used for education and training.

The Manitoba Metis Federation is part of the suit. At the January summit, federation president David Chartrand said he was considering a lawsuit over the roughly $5 million the Métis CFS Authority loses each year.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs has long been critical of the clawback, calling it a commodification of First Nations children.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

CFS clawback notice of application