A 10-year-old girl has been in “legal limbo” for nearly half her life after she was “wrongly apprehended” from her mother who had failed a flawed drug test.She wants to be adopted by her foster mother but “hopes and prays” for contact with her parents.Her foster mother is ready to adopt, but not if there is contact with the parents, who have been “consumed and trampled” by the child welfare system yet continue to fight for the right to see their daughter.This is the heart-rending dilemma depicted in a scathing Ontario Superior Court ruling that delivers a broad indictment of a “broken” child welfare system. Justice Grant A. Campbell reveals how reliance on discredited hair testing from the Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory contributed to a “perfect storm” of “errors, incompetence . . . and mistakes.” Throughout, the parents were “ignored, demeaned and disbelieved,” while their child was shuffled between placements.So significant was the damage that Campbell included an unqualified apology to the parents in his ruling, which he delivered orally in a Kitchener court last week.“It should not have happened. You should have been treated better,” he said to the mother and father, identified by their initials, C.T. and J.B. “It did and you weren’t, and for that, on behalf of the very system that perpetrated this upon you, I apologize to you both.” From apprehension to appeal, his ruling outlines the “failures of the court process,” including a Children’s Aid Society that ignored the mother’s claims of native heritage, which should have triggered special considerations for her daughter’s placement; “incompetent” trial lawyers who neglected to challenge the Motherisk tests; and a trial judge that held her decision in reserve for nine months.Privacy laws th ...
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