A memorial for Traevon Desjarlais-Chalifoux sits outside the Abbotsford. B.C., group home where he died.Handout
A coroner’s jury has recommended British Columbia stop housing Indigenous foster children in group homes as soon as possible and do more to ensure the care they get is professional and sensitive to their cultures and histories.
The five jurors spent eight days hearing frequently shocking testimony from the adults responsible for varying degrees of Cree foster teen Traevon Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s care before he killed himself in his Abbotsford, B.C., group home on Sept. 13, 2020. Many of the jurors’ recommendations centred on the clear need for teens like him to receive much more care specific to their Indigenous cultures, something he got little of from the workers at Rees Family Services Inc., which operated his group home and still has a handful of others in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver.
The jury issued more than a dozen recommendations to the province’s Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), as well as Xyolhemeylh, the organization in charge of Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s care, and the company it contracted to run the group home where the teen lived. The recommendations include measures to ensure workers keep notes of their interactions with their clients and shared information between professionals caring for their clients’ mental health.
Their first recommendation urges MCFD to expedite the process of cutting group homes – as they exist now – out of foster care. The last witness of the inquest, James Wale, B.C.’s acting director of child welfare, said his ministry will soon pilot a new approach to group homes by offering wraparound support for youth with complex needs and staffing them with people who have clinical training. More support will also be offered to Indigenous families so their children don’t have to be moved out, the inquest heard.
Michael Crawford, president of the BC Association of Social Workers, said this recommendation is relevant because MCFD contracts out a lot of services and then doesn’t properly monitor them.
“Private companies cut costs by hiring less qualified people and group home residents do not receive the care they need,” Mr. Crawford said in a statement e-mailed shortly after the recommendations were read out in a Burnaby court. “MCFD is charged with looking after children and youth with complex needs and they need to be around qualified people with culturally appropriate clinical to receive maximum benefit.”
Mitzi Dean, Minister of Children and Family Development, declined an interview request late Thursday, with a spokesperson sending a brief statement saying her ministry is reviewing the recommendations.
There is no clear tally of how many of the roughly 5,000 foster children in B.C. die while in care each year. The inquest heard the province reviews about 40 cases a year where a minor in care dies or is seriously hurt. Earlier this year, MCFD told a Globe and Mail investigation into the death of Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux, 17, that the government had reviewed the cases of 45 youth who died in care in 2018 and 2019, of whom 62 per cent were Indigenous.
The inquest was called this spring after The Globe investigation, which found serious deficiencies at Rees Family Services and the organization in charge of his care, Xyolhemeylh – also known as the Fraser Valley Aboriginal Children and Family Services Society; it is one of 24 Indigenous Child and Family Service agencies charged with providing foster care to First Nations, Métis and Inuit children and youth in B.C.
The jury heard how Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux was apprehended by provincial officials a day after his birth in 2003 and cycled through the homes of numerous relatives, getting sexually abused by a male relative outside his immediate family when he was 6. Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux, who had learning disabilities, fetal alcohol syndrome and ADHD, eventually reconnected with his birth mother, Samantha Chalifoux, and began living with her for a spell in 2019.
Ms. Chalifoux had two lawyers participating in the inquest. It heard that, outside of financial support, there was no mechanism for Xyolhemeylh or the ministry to offer outside-the-box solutions to keep her son in her care, such as moving her to another apartment.
Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s counsellor testified how he missed his client’s “quasi-threat” to harm himself badly as a warning sign that he might be suicidal just three weeks before his death. The jurors recommended that MCFD ensure its new IT system is accessible to all the professionals on a foster child’s team of caregivers so reports of such interactions are shared immediately.
Theresa Campiou, the aunt of the teen’s mother, ended the inquest by thanking each juror for trying their best to bring solutions to a very dark problem. Before a closing prayer, Ms. Campiou also stated how Indigenous peoples must now seek new ways to care for foster children and cement their identities after being failed so badly by the provincial government.
“We’re becoming more and more independent and we’re realizing that the only way we can fix a broken system is to fix it for ourselves.”
Mike Hager