“It is no excuse for a government official to act wrongly against a person no matter how annoying they may be to them.” - Prince George (City) v. Riemer

I can’t write this article and do it justice; I am not quite up to the task. What needs to be written is a piece that makes some sense of how the 314-page judgment released last week by Justice Paul Walker excoriating the Ministry of Children and Family Development in JP v. Director of Child, Family and Community Services came to be. To do that justice, I would have to have much more resources than my own experience at my fingertips.

We’ve all read the headlines and heard the sound-bites about how our child protection system so monumentally failed to protect four children in the system from being horrifyingly sexually abused by their father (and not only failed to protect, but fought hard in order to offer up the children on a silver platter to their father). The JP case defies all sense of what we know is right and wrong. The awful reality is that this case is a prime example of the everyday issues with our child protection system when taken to the worst extremes. This case is what happens when there is no oversight and accountability for a government body.

Shortly after the judgment was released, our representative for children and youth, Marie Ellen Turpel-Lafond, told CBC that she had approached the Ministry of Children and Family Development and asked them what it thinks we can learn from this judgment. Their response? We don’t think there is anything to learn. To be fair, since then it has been reported that MCFD is conducting its own investigation into the circumstances case.

An investigation, however, is not an acceptance of the fact that the JP case came to be due to a toxic culture at MCFD; a toxic culture which promotes the view the MCFD is above the law and accountable to no one. I am no longer shocked when MCFD does not follow court orders; I’m frustrated that there is so little I can do to bring them to task for it.

For those fortunate uninitiated B.C. residents, I can tell you that from the cases I have seen, having MCFD in your life is like entering a parallel universe, where suddenly a child protection worker, who has known your children for five minutes, knows 100 times more about them than you do and also knows how you should fix your broken life (keep in mind that most child protection workers are 10 to 20 years younger than you are). As in the JP case, it's not uncommon for child protection workers to also stipulate how you are supposed to react to their intervention in your life.

In total there were almost 200 days of trial to sort out the sexual abuse issue in the JP case and determine who was accountable, and it's still not completed. Throughout the course of the two trials, which lead to this judgment being made, MCFD was more concerned about protecting itself from any liability and declaration of wrongdoing.

To go back to the beginning, MCFD removed the children from their mother because they deemed she had mental health issues when she persisted in going to them with reports about her children’s graphic disclosure of sexual abuse by their father. She was emotionally distraught and frantic—as most parents are when they realize their children have been preyed upon by the other parent. The father, however, was calm, cool, collected, and presented with an intelligent and squeaky clean manner. He advised MCFD and promoted the idea that the mother had mental health issues.

While the children were in foster care, MCFD supported the father’s application for custody of the children. The father needed to have an order from the courts saying that he was the custodial parent before MCFD could return the children to him. Saying that MCFD supported the father’s application for custody is actually not quite right; it is more accurate to say that MCFD child protection workers were just shy of actually making the application for the father on his behalf.

This was done even when there were reports from psychologists and doctors saying that the mother did not have mental health problems and the mother was able to forward MCFD pornographic images obtained from the father’s computer, some of which showed women who appeared to be underage.

When it became clear that the father’s application was not going his way and there would be a very negative finding against him, MCFD quietly withdrew mid-trial.

The second trial was JP suing MCFD for not playing its proper role and protecting her children. In the second trial, MCFD persisted in minimizing any errors it made during the child protection process and defending its decisions on other questionable matters. At the second trial, in order to save time, JP and the MCFD agreed with the judge that they would not re-litigate any finding of fact made in the first trial. However, when it was clear that MCFD's withdrawal from the first trial would be used as a fact that reflected negatively on it in the second trial, MCFD tried to reopen the issue of why it withdrew from the first trial long after agreeing that they wouldn’t. This is how your tax dollars were spent.

How can we have any faith in our child protection system after this? We can’t, but it doesn’t matter because it will soon be forgotten and life will continue on as normal for the majority of B.C.’s population. Next week, I will get a call from a frantic parent telling me that a child protection worker from MCFD has called them and they are being investigated or that their children have already been removed, but they’ve got it all wrong. I will listen to their concerns and their explanation of what occurred and how the child protection workers have been dealing with them. Then I will have to explain how little power they have in this situation and that we have so very few ways to get them out of this parallel universe.