child welfare

Tuition bursaries offer former youth in foster care a path to continued education with less of a financial burden

People teaching their kids independence risk censure by preachy neighbours, zealous police and overreaching child services officials

Opinion: The machinery of our children’s aid systems are doing harm, writes Andray Domise—but the machinery is built and operated by people

Jane Philpott’s emergency summit reflected a new era of good will. Concrete agreements were harder to come by.

Opinion: Why government officials had a responsibility to seek Canadian citizenship for the Somali refugee

The Ontario Superior Court’s Charter finding against prostitution-related provisions of the Criminal Code has unexpectedly cast light on the new Alberta politics. The hard-charging Wildrose Alliance talks a good game when it comes to defending provincial rights; the logical corollary, one might suppose, would be for it to observe a dignified silence about matters reserved to the federal government. This is never how things work, of course, and the Alliance couldn’t move fast enough to issue a joint statement in the names of its two turncoat MLAs, Heather Forsyth and Rob Anderson.

Behold the compound stupidity that emerges from ill-made privacy law. There was a terrible murder near the entrance of Edmonton’s Hotel Macdonald early Monday; the Edmonton Journal conducted a careful, sensitive investigation into the background of the victim, who had committed a murder himself in 2001. Because the Journal disclosed that the dead man had once been in foster care and that he had been a young offender, the broadsheet couldn’t report his name for fear of inviting reprisals from multiple levels of government. Meanwhile, every other news organ in town was left free to identify him precisely because they didn’t have, or didn’t tell, the full story. The law, in its infinite wisdom, endowed this lucky brute with privacy rights that did not expire with this death. But for whatever it might be worth, those rights did absolutely nothing to shield his identity from anybody.

The Manitoba government has completed its independent review of abusive practices at the Cathedral Valley Group Home (1971-83) near Grandview. Barry Tuckett’s report is an impressive work of historical inquiry, but it is, perhaps inherently, somewhat unsatisfying. The government, clearly eager to quell the entreaties of former residents at the work farm for troubled and delinquent children, immediately endorsed the report; its family services minister also issued an apology “to those harmed by their residency.”