Family Services touts “action plan” to fix child protection in Nunavut

Assistant auditor general of Canada, Ronnie Campbell, right, and John MacDonald, Nunavut’s acting deputy minister of family services, appeared before a standing committee of MLAs at the legislative assembly Sept. 16. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)

The Government of Nunavut promises to work its way out of failing grades on its child protection services with an “action plan” that covers weaknesses first highlighted by Canada’s auditor general in 2011.

While this is a step in the right direction, Ronnie Campbell, Canada’s assistant auditor general, said Sept. 16 he believes more progress should have been made by now to improve how the territory protects its most vulnerable citizens.

“When you read our report [of 2014], we would have expected that compliance would have been higher than it is now,” Campbell said.

Campbell made his comments during a hearing of the Legislative Assembly’s Standing Committee on Oversight of Operations on Public Accounts, held in Iqaluit Sept. 16.

Staff with Nunavut’s Department of Family Services attended the meeting to share their “Quality Protects Action Plan” with MLAs on the committee and visiting members of the Office of the Auditor General.

The action plan describes how the department will meet six recommendations the auditor general made to the government this past March 18.

The auditor general’s report is a follow-up to a broader evaluation made in 2011 which included 20 recommendations.

The evaluations in that report were equally dismal.

“In the [2011] report you’ll see that we were identifying some children in Nunavut who were facing some very, very difficult circumstances,” Campbell told regular MLAs at the standing committee meeting.

“Those were the people the department had to help and protect. And in 2011 we observed that the department was not doing a particularly good job in complying with its own standards,” he said, referring to standards set out in the territory’s Child and Family Services Act.

For 2014, “we wanted to come back and audit the things that we thought they had to get right first.”

The Auditor General’s 2014 recommendations focused on staffing and basic compliance on record-keeping and child care standards, but departmental reorganization within the GN, and understaffing, seem to be hobbling program improvements.

The territorial government created the Department of Family Services out of child and family service-related programs in six separate government departments on April 1, 2013, according to the auditor general’s 2014 report.

In its action plan, the Department of Family Services has identified staffing, training, and recruitment as priorities.

John MacDonald, the department’s acting deputy minister, told MLAs that staff shortages are common.

MacDonald is filling in for deputy minister Simon Awa, who is on medical leave. Premier Peter Taptuna appointed Awa to that job this past March, following the abrupt resignation of Aluki Rojas, the family service department’s first deputy minister.

The department has also been advertising recently for an assistant deputy minister. MacDonald’s regular job earlier this year was director of career development with the department.

MacDonald told MLAs that 33 of the department’s 60 employees were hired on the basis of letters of authorization, and 27 through regular processes, he said.

Letters of authorization are used to hire people who do not meet the normal qualifications for social work.

Staff are currently serving 336 children and youth. The department provides services related to child welfare, adoption, foster care and kinship care, family violence, adult residential care and “public guardianship” in all 25 communities of Nunavut, MacDonald said.

“We recognize that the work performed by our staff is difficult and demanding,” MacDonald said. “It should also be noted that these staff are providing emergency after-hours services in all their communities.”

MLAs noted that some communities still do not have full-time social services workers.

To help meet the shortages and retain employees, the department’s action plan calls for improved monitoring of staff vacancies, monitoring of workload standards, and improved staff training programs.

Noting the newness of the department — and its lack of progress on the auditor general’s recommendations so far — Joe Savikataaq, MLA for Arviat South, questioned whether the government’s shuffling of divisions has brought any improvements at all to Nunavut’s child and family services programs.

MacDonald said the department was created to give “full attention” to the needs of children and families. The Department of Health and Social Services used to bear most of these responsibilities through its children and family services division, he said.

Having that group of programs move “from being a smaller piece of a large department,” to a department of its own “has enabled us to focus more, and perhaps raise the level of awareness,” MacDonald said.

“It gets more attention than it would have gotten before,” he said, thus allowing the government to more easily carry out reforms needed to bring it up to speed with the auditor general’s recommendations.

Campbell suggested that bureaucratic changes “probably took a bunch of management time,” but the requirements of the Child and Family Services Act “haven’t changed, and those really need to be complied with.”

“When everything else is moving around and changing, I think that’s the one thing that should be consistent,” he said.

The department’s “Quality Protects Action Plan” has set all its goals for completion by the end of 2015.

Besides a commitment to improve staffing, the department also said it would:

• ensure “compliance with standards set for case file management, facility inspections, foster home reviews and the director’s annual audit,”

• ensure the “timely collection and sharing of information about the children in their care by closely monitoring community reporting, and taking corrective follow-up action as required,” and,

• “actively engage parents and communities in developing strategies for keeping children safe.”

Campbell pointed out that the Auditor General’s 2011 report and recommendations still stand and that his department will continue to monitor progress there as well.

The earlier report includes recommendations on child adoption, for example.

‘There’s probably some chance, some time relatively soon, auditor general staff will be around, following up on the rest of those recommendations,” Campbell said.

“Everything we have in the 2011 report is still alive, and breathing.”

MacDonald said his department is prepared to put another action plan in place to respond to the earlier recommendations as well.