Troubled teen becomes test case for social safety net

SARA MINOGUE

A young man with no living parents and a history of run-ins with police has become a test case for extending financial and other assistance to troubled youths between 16 and 18 years of age.

At that age, youth in Nunavut are too old for automatic foster care, and too young to receive income support.

Nunavut’s health and social services department fills the gap by striking deals with youth aged 16 to 17, called “support services agreements.”

The agreements provide youth with money for rent, food and clothing (but no housing) until the child is eligible to get income support at age 18. In exchange, youth must agree to conditions set by the director of child and family services, usually to either go to school or hold a job.

The GN struck about 30 such deals with youth in 2004 and 2005.

Whether a 16-year-old is mature enough to make these deals, or decline this assistance, is now in the hands of Justice Beverly Browne, who heard the first part of a Charter application against the practice in an Iqaluit courtroom last week.

Any youth who breaks his agreement with social services has fallen through the social safety net, says Chris Debicki, a legal aid lawyer in Iqaluit, who launched the lawsuit after encountering more than one homeless youth in trouble with the law.

Debicki wants the Nunavut Court of Justice to declare that denying services to children under 18 is unconstitutional.

In his view, 16- and 17-year-olds are still kids who need special protection.

“We have examples in this community of kids who have lived in stairwells, bounce around from home to home to home without any stability in their lives,” Debicki said.

“We encounter them when they get into conflict and enter the criminal justice symptom. I think that is symptomatic of the core problem, which is that there aren’t any services that are available for these kids.”

Debicki’s case sprung from an event last Christmas, when a 17-year-old was released from Young Offenders, with no family, no job, no education and no money. Previous foster parents refused to take him, because of past behavior in their homes.

At the last minute, an employee in the GN’s justice department volunteered to take him home for the holidays.

That arrangement was short-lived, as the youth was caught stealing and huffing propane, and was detained in RCMP cells. It was just the latest of a string of encounters with the law that began around age 13, and which has landed him in Young Offenders on several occasions.

Four months after his narrow escape from the streets, and after Debicki launched his case, the youth is living with a relative in Montreal. The GN covered his airfare there, and now has a new voluntary support agreement to provide for the youth’s day-to-day expenses.

In his affidavit to the court in response to the lawsuit, Norm Murray, director of child and family services, says this meets the youth’s needs for shelter, food, clothing and support.

Murray has 18 years of experience as a social worker in Nunavut. In his opinion, voluntary support agreements make sense because youth aged 16 to 18 cannot be compelled to receive services, but rather, must consent voluntarily.

Murray’s affidavit points to a long list of efforts made to help the youth in question, and an even longer list of criminal charges, as well as an incident where a caring foster home was forced to give up the child, after he repeatedly ignored house rules.

“The director has been willing to reach out and offer services, however, his historical pattern has been a reluctance or an inability to accept the services offered or homes proposed,” the affidavit reads.

Changing the rules under which social services operates is a decision that should be made by politicians, not a judge, says Sheila MacPherson, the lawyer representing the GN.

Now that the youth has turned 18 (two days after the hearing took place) and is housed out of the territory, she argues, there is no immediate need for a judge’s ruling, and any ruling in favour of the application would be an overstepping of boundaries.
Justice Browne will deliver her verdict later this month.