Quebec social services minister defends use of temp youth workers

Team work will help solve Nunavik’s youth protection crisis, Line Thériault, the Quebec minister responsible for social services, said earlier this week.

“People in the North are part of this solution and they need to work together with us, all of us together, to make a better future for children,” Thériault in a June 29 interview from Quebec City.

Thériault said she’s taking the despair of Nunavik’s overworked youth protection workers very seriously, and that’s why she and Pierre Corbeil, the provincial native affairs minister, decided to visit Kuujjuaq and Puvirnituq as soon as possible.

But she admitted Quebec government doesn’t have all the answers to the problem — just a sincere wish to change things and “see how we can do it.”

Youth protection is always a tough issue, she said.

But, in Nunavik the distances between the region’s 14 communities and the lack of nearby resources complicate the provision of services, she said.

“It’s a challenge for Quebec. All the ministers are involved in this file. We still have work to do,” Thériault said.

Right now, her department’s team approach means bringing in fill-in youth workers from the South, a move that has rankled full-time youth protection staff in Kuujjuaq who say these temporary workers get higher pay and benefits.

But Thériault defended the decision to import short-term workers as consultants, saying it’s a necessary, temporary move to provide youth protection services in Nunavik.

Quebec is considering the suggestion of giving a “northern bonus” to youth protection workers in Nunavik as a way of upping recruitment and retention, she said.

“[But] We’re not going to wait for the analysis to be done before ensuring youth receive services,” she said. “The youth in the North have the same right to services as youth all over Quebec.”

Over the long-term, the solution to understaffing won’t come from southern workers, but from trained Nunavimmiut who will take on jobs as youth or community workers in their own communities, she said.

Solving the lack of staff is not the only way to out of current crisis in youth protection, she said: building more housing is also essential.

A lack of staff housing makes filling jobs that much harder.

And the lack of space in overcrowded social housing units means families often have no way of taking in foster children or young relatives who have been removed from their homes.

“On housing, we have to be able to work with federal government to build more housing so children [removed from their homes] can live with their close immediate family,” she said.

Sending prefabricated housing units north could help, she said.

But the crisis facing youth protection is also much larger than housing, she said, because it’s also linked to the need for more treatment for mental illness and addictions.

To this end, Quebec has funneled in an additional $700,000 a year since 2007 for treatment centres, $600,000 more a year for women’s shelter as well as more money for prevention activities, such as the Kativik Regional Police Force’s cadet program, she said.