Coroner´s panel calls for overhaul of Ontario child protection system
(The Star Canada)

A scathing report from Ontario’s coroner presses the provincial government to reform a child protection system that “repeatedly failed� 12 youths who died while in care.“Change is necessary, and the need is urgent,� said the report, written by a panel of experts appointed by chief coroner Dirk Huyer last November to examine the spike of deaths between January 2014 and July 2017.The 86-page report found that the 12 youths — eight of whom were Indigenous — were all in the care of Ontario’s child protection system and living in unsafe homes when they died. The report describes a fragmented system with no means of monitoring quality of care, where ministry oversight is inadequate, caregivers lack training, and children are poorly supervised. Vulnerable children are being warehoused and forgotten.“Despite complex histories and the high-risk nature of these young people’s lives, intervention was minimal and sometimes non-existent,� said the panel in a withering report released Tuesday.On average, the youths were moved to 12 different foster homes and group homes in their short lives. Lack of resources in the North resulted in most being sent to residences 1,600 kilometres from their communities, cut off from their culture. All of them suffered from mental health challenges and eight of them died by suicide. Read more:They loved dancing, swimming, math and science: Portraits of young people who died in careYouth will have say in coroner’s review of group and foster home safetyKids are going through trauma. Staff are getting assaulted. ‘We are all in the trenches together’In an interview, Huyer said the report describes a system that is basically non-existent because there is “no co-ordination, (and) no integration� of services.At Queen’s Park Tuesday, Children, Community and Social Services minister Lisa MacLeod promised to move quickly.“From the CASs to group ho ...