A former group home in Abbotsford, B.C., is seen in the fall of 2020. Two months earlier, Traevon Desjarlais-Chalifoux, a resident of the home, died by suicide. He was 17.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
The B.C. government will require a new layer of oversight for Indigenous child-care agencies that enter into contracts with group home operators, a move that comes as the government acknowledged Thursday that, for years, it has known that the care it is providing children and youth in its authority has been inadequate.
Indigenous Child and Family Service Agencies, which are delegated by the provincial government to provide culturally appropriate care to their own communities, will now have to get the approval of the provincial director of child welfare before hiring a contractor to run a group home or provide other services. Previously, the agencies had their own approval processes, the ministry confirmed in a statement to The Globe and Mail.
The move comes following an investigation by The Globe that found care workers charged with looking after Cree teenager Traevon Desjarlais-Chalifoux, aged 17, were said to be verbally abusive and neglectful. The workers sometimes withheld food as punishment, and locked the teen outside – sometimes for hours. He was left alone in his tiny bedroom for days at a time in the early weeks of the pandemic.
Traevon died by suicide in an Abbotsford group home in September, 2020. It took four days for Traevon’s body to be found in his tiny basement bedroom.
In the legislature Thursday, Child and Family Development Minister Mitzi Dean acknowledged that her government has been aware of the problems surrounding services for kids in care.
“We’ve known for many years that the system of in-care services has not been adequate,” she said.
Cheryl Casimer, political executive with B.C.’s First Nations Summit, an Indigenous forum, noted there has been no accountability for Traevon’s death.
“There was no follow up. There was no accountability. A boy died because adults failed him on all fronts. There need to be consequences.”
The Globe’s work prompted the B.C. Opposition Liberals to call on the government to “immediately” remove youth from the care of the agency charged with caring for Traevon – Rees Family Services. The Liberals are also calling for a moratorium on new for-profit care providers in B.C., and for an investigation into the management and oversight of B.C.’s Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD).
“This is so egregious, and the potential for harm to another young person is much greater than any impact this might have,” Karin Kirkpatrick, the Liberal critic, said in an interview. “Youth cannot be sent to a place where they may be in danger. The government needs to take action immediately.”
The Liberals revealed during Question Period that the NDP government had cancelled a contract aimed at providing advice on how to better manage group homes run by outside agencies on behalf of the government.
The government cited “expenditure management” as the reason for the contract’s abrupt cancellation just months before Traevon died.
The cancelled contract tasked Ernst and Young, the global auditing and professional services firm, with providing the B.C. government with a new management framework for contracted care. This step came in response to multiple reports detailing serious faults in the way B.C. was procuring and managing it. Among them was a scathing 2019 report on contracted care by B.C.’s Auditor-General.
Auditor-General Carol Bellringer found that the ministry was failing to adequately oversight and that no guardrails were in place to ensure that staff hired by group home operators were equipped to care for some of the most vulnerable, high-needs youth in the province. Ms. Bellringer also found that Indigenous children were not receiving placements with an Indigenous cultural component. It is alleged that Traevon was placed in the care of two white men, and received no access to cultural care.
In Question Period, the B.C. Liberals also accused the government of misleading the Auditor-General when the ministry claimed in 2019 that, “each child and youth has been seen and their homes visited within the past three months as required by policy,” as of June, 2019.
The Liberals noted that an audit of the MCFD, conducted that year, showed the ministry didn’t come close to achieving even that basic standard. The audit, published in July of 2021, showed that just 7 per cent of the children in MCFD care had seen their social worker in the previous month, as mandated. It further noted that one third of the time, there had been “zero” contact between the child and their social worker in the previous 12 months.
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