How do we find the human face of justice?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/03/2018 (2386 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Our community is grieving the loss of Tina Fontaine and is looking for answers as to how we failed her. The justice system was not able to provide those answers. A fair criminal trial is an important function of the rule of law, but it does not address our search for social justice. No one knows how Tina died — only that she was found at the bottom of the river, wrapped in a duvet cover and weighted down by rocks.

What is known, however, is that she was a child who became invisible to our society. The child welfare system lost track of her and failed to let her family know that she had gone missing. Despite having contact with the health-care system and the police, Tina disappeared from our community — until she turned up dead.

It has been more than four years since commissioner Ted Hughes released his report from the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Phoenix Sinclair — another little girl who disappeared from our community until we discovered she was dead — some nine months after she had been murdered. I was commission counsel to that inquiry.

In the opening statement I made on the rst day of the proceedings, I said a central theme for the inquiry to consider was how it was that a child could become so invisible to an entire community — one which included social service agencies, schools, neighbours, family and friends — so invisible as to literally disappear? The mandate of that inquiry was to make recommendations to better protect Manitoba children, not simply to look at the child welfare system.

The inquiry acknowledged that the child welfare system alone cannot be expected to address the underlying social conditions which lead children to become vulnerable and in need of protection. To that end, in the third phase of the inquiry we looked at the circumstances that lead children and families to become vulnerable, in particular Indigenous families and children, given their overrepresentation in the child welfare system. We also examined the prevention services, programs and departments — whether government or community-based — that were available or ought to be available to support families and children.

We heard from kookum — grandmother elders — from community-based organizations and from experts who have studied how to deliver empowering and supportive services for children and families. One of those experts was Kerry McCuaig, who last week published an article in this paper about the report she and colleagues from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education had just released — “The Early Childhood Education Report 2017,” which studied the benets of early childhood education and the challenges for community-based child care.

McCuaig gave important evidence at the inquiry, not only about the benets of early-childhood education but also about the importance of providing such programs in community-based centres which offer other supportive services to families.

In addition to hearing from McCuaig, the inquiry heard from the director of the Manidoo Centre, which is located in the Lord Selkirk Housing Community in Winnipeg. It provides daycare and early-childhood education for that community, along with a range of supports for the whole family, including food assistance, employment counselling and addiction services.

The inquiry heard that within six months of that centre being established, the parents of the children who participated in the program were able to go back to school, seek employment and receive addictions treatment — for the simple reason that they had a community that helped them look after their children and nd assistance with the issues of daily living.

This evidence led to some of the most important recommendations in commissioner Hughes’ report, calling for the government to establish a legislative framework for the delivery of universally available early-childhood development programs and the establishment of integrated service delivery centres to provide a range of other services for families relating to public health, employment, income assistance and adult education.

The report also recommended that the government establish a structure of funding to support community-based organizations, recognizing that these organizations promote social cohesion in neighbourhoods, combat poverty by enhancing families’ capacity to be self sustaining and provide places for young people to gather, thereby increasing their visibility in the community.

Phoenix and her family lived in Winnipeg, but the type of recommendations the inquiry called for could be adapted to satisfy similar needs in rural and remote communities.

I recently read a book by Jonathan Sacks entitled To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility. Rabbi Sacks was the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of Great Britain and the Commonwealth; in the book, he denes “community” as being a place where people “miss you when you are not there.” He describes community as “society with a human face.”

We still don’t know how Tina met her end, but MKO Grand Chief Sheila North has identied that it is up to all of us to take responsibility for Tina. As commissioner Hughes concluded in his report, strong leadership from politicians is needed in order to better protect Manitoba children, but so is public support. We all need to take action to answer the question, “Where is our human face?”

Sherri Walsh is a Winnipeg lawyer and partner in the firm Hill Sokalski Walsh Olson.