HALIFAX, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2003
STANDING COMMITTEE ON COMMUNITY SERVICES
9:00 A.M.
CHAIRMAN
Ms. Marilyn More
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Excuse me, I think we will get underway. Since all the members of the committee are here, we will start with apologies to our guests for a late start. Perhaps we will begin with introductions. Russell, do you want to start?
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
MADAM CHAIRMAN: We have two official representatives from the Department of Community Services today and I believe there are other staff available. They may possibly answer questions later on but perhaps you two would introduce yourselves for the record for the moment and when the others come up to the mic, they can give their name and perhaps their position within the department.
MS. VICKI WOOD: My name is Vicki Wood. I am the Director of Child Welfare and Residential Services. It's a pleasure to be here.
MS. JEANETTE HAY CONNOLLY: Good morning. My name is Jeanette Hay Connolly and I am the Facility Manager at Wood Street Centre Secure Care.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Great. Thank you for coming. So, as you all know, our topic today is the secure treatment facility in Truro. I believe we are going to start with a presentation.
MS. WOOD: I see you have mics so I guess it's fine to stand.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Yes, please.
MS. WOOD: I will say it is a pleasure to be here and to answer any questions you have. It is quite exciting to have reached the point of opening. What we have done is prepared a presentation where I will give you a bit of background on the development and how it fits within the child welfare system and other programs serving children and youth and then Jeanette will talk in more detail about the program itself.
So what we are going to present today is an outline of the legislation, the characteristics of the children and youth who would benefit from the centre's program, to introduce the program model to you, to talk about the admission and referral process, and then make room and time for your questions and answers. Secure care, as you know, arises from the Children and Family Services Act. The specific reference begins at Section 55(1) of the Children and Family Services Act, "Upon the request of an agency . . .", referring to a child welfare agency, ". . . the Minister may issue a secure-treatment certificate for a period of not more than five days in respect of a child in care, if the Minister has reasonable and probable grounds . . . " Then there are three - actually, I would point out that there are a couple of important points in that. One is, that the child is in the care of the minister and the second is, while we have the capacity to have children in the program for longer than five days, the first five days is really the admission process and the Minister of Community Services determines that.
In order to do that, there are three criteria under the legislation that need to be met:
"(a) the child is suffering from an emotional or behaviourial disorder;", and I point out that it is not a mental disorder, which would, perhaps, lead you to Mental Health Services; "(b) it is necessary to confine the child in order to remedy or alleviate the disorder; and (c) the child refuses or is unable to consent to treatment." So we have to meet all three of those criteria before it would be lawful to admit them to the program.
The legislation addresses other aspects as well in terms of the required court appearances and the issuing of the certificates, renewals, appeals. One that I would highlight is that the child has a right to Legal Aid representation. In fact, Legal Aid is notified the moment that the child is served. It has been working with us through the process to ensure that they have ready access to their lawyer. One really exciting thing about that is, although there was a somewhat heavy expectation locally, all the Legal Aid representation will take place in Truro, so that the young person has ready access back and forth to their lawyer. Then the legislation also talks about the duties and responsibilities of each party under the Act.
It is obviously a very highly regulated procedure or intervention with children because we're really confining them, taking away their liberty. That's a very intrusive thing to do, that's not common in society. So that being the case, we really have to balance the child's civil rights to liberty with the need for confinement and the burden of proof has to be met by the minister at three phases. If we issue a five-day certificate, we must be in court within five days to justify doing that and when we issue that certificate to the child, it tells them when the hearing will take place and where. So we have to know that going into it, we
have to meet the burden of proof before the judge as to why we would have taken that action. Again, the judge can order a 30-day or 90-day order and we would need to be able to present and explain and justify why that's necessary for this particular child, on each of those occasions.
[9:15 a.m.]
In terms of who the program will serve. It will serve up to 20 children in the care of the Minister of Community Services at one time. Because it is under the Children and Family Services Act, it doesn't stipulate a particular age and we have within the child welfare system infants all the way through to age 21. But it is our expectation that the range will likely be somewhere between age 9 and 17 and that the majority of youth, when you look at similar programs across Canada, there aren't a lot of them, they tend to be within the 12- to 15-year- old range. That's probably where a lot of our clients will be but not necessarily limited to that.
The children and youth who we would see benefiting from this kind of program, their backgrounds, they are based on the fact that this falls under the Children and Family Services Act, all of these children have been found to be in need of protection previous to this intervention and so they generally are victims of abuse and neglect or family breakdown. For the most part, they're hurt and their behaviours are reflecting those circumstances that they've encountered in their life. They tend to protect themselves by resisting help, which is understandable, if adults haven't been trustworthy and you've had losses in your life you're going to be more guarded.
They require ongoing therapeutic support from their social workers, foster parents and residential programs. So the treatment at secure care doesn't begin and end at the door but the range of programs that we offer children and youth reflect that need of theirs to have us provide therapeutic programming for them. So, again, when you see the length of the certificate, five days, children and youth, we have the opportunity to have up to 30 days on a judicial order and then can extend that, but those are limited periods of time. So from our perspective, this addresses one piece of the treatment aspect for the young people, but it's really only one component of a longer-term treatment plan.
The presenting problems that we are anticipating both from children and youth from the child welfare system who have gone out of province for treatment, and also just looking at other programs of a similar nature, the presenting problems of the young people in those systems, they tend to be self-harming - slashing, cutting, doing things which are self-destructive; out of control, extreme defiance, in other words, the strategies that you put in place to address their difficulties, they're not willing to collaborate or co-operate with those and defeat your attempts, I guess, to try to assist; addictions or other self-destructive behaviour may be issues; habitual running away - I remember a young person who ran away, I was directing a treatment program, we admitted her, she was 13 and it was perfectly
understandable why she did this, but she got up in the morning and left and came back at 3:00 a.m. every day for the first 40-plus days, then she would be gone again by 7:00 a.m., we couldn't slow her down long enough to be of any assistance whatsoever; and destructive behaviour.
Before I turn it over to Jeanette, I would just want to say that the secure treatment program, secure care, is one of several exciting initiatives being brought on line concurrently for children and youth. There are actually some projects taking place on the mental health side, which is exciting, which include residential treatment as well as intensive community-based treatment teams, which are going to be looking at interventions in the home with children and youth who are not coming from backgrounds of neglect or abuse but who have similar kinds of difficulties, destructive, disruptive behaviour disorders, mental health has established some treatment teams to work with them. As well, they are in the process of establishing another residential treatment program. There are programs that have been developed arising from the new Youth Criminal Justice Act, and then secure care. They are all critical to serve youth. We need that full continuum of services to serve youth.
Something I would point out, because sometimes that's a little bit confusing for people, I am guessing that from some of the media questions I have had. Mental health is a universal program, we all have access to the health program. The Youth Criminal Justice Act programs and the secure care programs are targeted; that is, they're not just for every young person that's out there, but you have to meet the tests under the Youth Criminal Justice Act of having broken the law and being convicted of something, and in child welfare, you would have been found in need of protection under another procedure. So because they're all coming on line at once, sometimes people don't realize that there are three separate sets of initiatives that are occurring from three different government departments and all good news for children. I'm going to ask Jeanette to tell you a bit more about the actual program.
MS. CONNOLLY: Good morning, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about our mission statement. For us, it is to provide care that is child-focused and respectful and individualized. I think one of the very important pieces for us is that when the child comes in we look at the needs, what are the circumstances for that child and then work with them to develop that program and also work with whoever referred the child, whether it be a foster family or residential care, and also, looking at where the family can be included. I will tell you a little bit about our centre and you will see what I'm talking about in including the family.
The really exciting thing for us, and this picture really doesn't do justice of how nice the facility actually looks for us. This is where the child comes in, it's our admission area. This also has administration and a large recreation area. In here, in behind, you can't tell but there are classrooms and there are clinical offices and there are interview rooms and meeting rooms, and down in here are two units that we have, they're divided up but both units have 10 children. For us the really nice thing is that it is a very large staff office that looks at both
sides and we have really nice sight lines. This picture doesn't do it justice for us. It has a nice red colour along the windows and things like that and it is a really nice peaceful setting. It is up beside Victoria Park. There is not a lot of traffic, there are no other houses, we've beautiful scenery up there and deer and things like that, it's very peaceful. So, for us, it's quite nice.
I will show you the floor plan but I almost feel like I want to flip it up the other way, the reason why I am saying that is because here are the two living units, which when I showed you the picture, they were over here, so I apologize. But two living units and this is the staff suite, office and bedrooms along here. We have four bathrooms for all 10 children. We also have a kitchen right on the living units and we have our dining area here and some recreation area. Then along here we've got clinical offices; we also have a nurse with us, so there is a nursing office and a medical examination room.
Further down, we have two classrooms, one here and one here. We have a really nice large recreation area inside and we also have one that's out here, it has a basketball net and things like that, that's really helpful to burn energy off, because youth have quite a bit of energy. In this area, we have a large boardroom and one of the things that we're talking about here is that we have meeting space that's also available to the community. So if people want to call our secretary, Marilyn, and book it, they're able to come into the facility. We also down here in the yellow area, have a family suite, which has already been used. It's a space where families can come and visit with their children, or if we have an agency social worker who has driven a long way and it's late and they want to stay over with us. So we have two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a small living room area. It's separate from the facility. Then back here we have some storage areas.
It was quite innovative in the way that it was developed. There was a lot of consultation with the community and also with groups that were interested, there was a parent group that we've had meetings with, also, with other agencies and other departments, like Education and Justice and Health. We also had an expert who helped us, Dr. Grant Charles. So there was a lot of thought and consultation that went into our development. It's the only program east of Montreal of this type, and it's unique because it also differs from some of the other secure care facilities in the country. We're trying to be very interactive in our approach with the children. So our philosophy in our treatment program is a bit different.
I just wanted to tell you a little bit about what, for us, secure care is not. We provide a treatment, a service program, it's not a placement for children to come and live. It's expected to be very short term. So we're looking at bringing the child in, what are the needs that the child comes with, what are the presenting issues, and then how do we work with the child and the other agency and the family to stabilize the child, and then what interventions can we use that will work with the child while they are at secure care and then when they go home or back to whoever has referred them, whether it be the foster home or residential care, that whatever we've put in place they can use it there too, so it's transferable. That's really
important for us, because otherwise the child is going to do well with us but perhaps when they leave not do as well. So that's what we're working on right now.
It's not a long-term living arrangement. It's not a panacea for all youth with difficulties. It's a very targeted population, it's for children who are in the care of the Minister of Community Services. It's not an alternative to more appropriate or a least intrusive community resource, so if there are other resources that are available in the community that do not include confining the child, then we would look to those resources before we would bring the child into our facility. We want to be clear on what's been tried with the child and what's worked or what hasn't worked. It's also not a psychiatric treatment for major mental disorders or medically-based disorders.
Our program goals are - and we work with the staff to develop these - firstly, to stabilize during a period of crisis. I think, for us, what's exciting is that we have a multi-disciplinary team that we can work with. So we have professionals who come with different orientations and different experiences. We've been really fortunate to have our nurse and both of our social workers, who worked as youth care workers before they went into their profession and came to work for us. They have an excellent understanding of what is going on, and also to be able to provide support to our youth workers, which is quite helpful. It is a very challenging job for our youth workers, on a day-to-day basis.
So, we will be able to complete a thorough assessment, an individualized one. As I mentioned before, about developing our treatment plan in collaboration - because we can't be a silo, secure care can't be a place where we do something and it's not transferable or we don't work and co-operate with the people who are providing the care to the child. Our goal is also for that reintegration and that treatment plan to extend from us back to where the child is going. If I had our Chief of Clinical Services with me, Margaret Aucoin, Margaret would tell you that from the day the child comes in, we start our discharge plan, because it's a very intrusive service. We want to figure out, how do we work with the child, stabilize and get the child back to where they need to be, so we're not taking their liberty from them any longer than we need to.
Our treatment model. It's incorporated throughout all aspects of the program. I guess the easiest way I could explain that to you is that even if a child is sitting eating lunch and the child asks for the salt or pepper and is actually demanding that you give it to them as opposed to asking, then we would call it a teachable moment. So whichever youth worker is working with that child will actually intervene at that time and work with the child. It's integrated through our whole program.
[9:30 a.m.]
We have a well-trained, I would have to say an excellent, multi-disciplinary team, and I'm very excited because all of the staff that we've hired have had work experience with youth. So that's really great for us. Security is provided through the treatment and the program structure, not just the building and the fence. So that means that our staff are interactive with the children, and they know what's going on and they're working and talking with the children. So, although, yes, we do have a secured facility, that's not the only part of our security.
The really nice piece that I like is the youth care model, and it's utilizing the daily life events as they occur, and that's what I talked to you about, the salt-and-pepper issue. So it's all part of looking at what's going on at the time, how do we work with the child, and how do we look at what are the needs of the child, how do we meet those and how do we work with them. It's also being the provision of an individualized and a sensitive intervention. I think one of the things that's been really great for me working with the team - we had a training program before we started - was listening to the creativity of our team and listening to their experience and their excitement and enthusiasm of starting with a new program.
I just want to walk you quickly through our referral process. The agency social worker, who would come from a child welfare agency, will make the referral to the Wood Street Centre, and our Chief of Clinical Services, Margaret Aucoin, chairs a case conference. So what happens is we get a call that there's a child who's in need, and I can talk to you about this because we've done this this week because we've accepted our first admissions this week. Margaret talks with the agency social worker, and based on that information she then asks the person to send us - we have forms, and they fax the forms.
She gets together with our social worker, looks at Section 55 (1) - as Vicki spoke to you about - (a), (b) and (c), and tries to determine does the child meet that (a), (b) and (c). This is what it is: the existence of emotional/behavioural disorder, the necessity of confinement and the refusal or the inability to consent on the part of the child. We also want to know what's been tried, what has worked and what hasn't, and is there another option in the community that's less restrictive where the child could go.
Once Margaret's had her discussion with the social worker, and they also have a telephone conference, back with the referring agency social worker and the supervisor, a discussion back and forth about that criteria, and paperwork that Margaret fills out, Margaret meets with me and talks about Section 55 (1) (a), (b) and (c). That's actually how we fill our forms out. She, along with the social worker, makes a recommendation to me, yes, we should issue a secure treatment certificate or no, we shouldn't.
I, being the minister's delegate, actually decide whether or not we admit the child. I determine whether or not there's reasonable, probable grounds that those three criteria are met, under Section 55. Then, if I do, I will sign and issue a secure treatment certificate for five days.
The other thing that I think is going to make our job a bit easier - today is the first day we're going to be in court, this afternoon - is that all of the applications are going to be heard at the Family Court in Truro. Judge David Hubley has agreed to hear them. Chief Judge John Comeau and other judges within Family Court have also agreed to assist, if there's extra workflow. So we have a time set aside, at 1:30 in the afternoon, so that's going to be helpful for us. We will have lunch and everything already done.
Mr. Peter McVey is our lawyer, who is going to be working with us. He's already started that process with us. He comes with long experience, working within the child welfare system, so he's very well-educated on this and, for us, has been very helpful and informative with us. Also, there is a lawyer who has been appointed to assist us through Legal Aid, and right now it's Anne Malick who is assisting us. She's right in Truro, also, so that's helpful because she can come back and forth, their office is just down over the hill.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you, both, very much for that excellent overview. Mr. Langille.
MR. WILLIAM LANGILLE: I had an opportunity to look at the facility and tour it and I must congratulate everyone involved, especially the people who designed it because it is a state-of-the-art facility, there's no question about it. I would like to go back a while, if I can, to the need for this facility. Why was it determined and we are sending children outside the province, what was the cost per child and where were they being sent? What was the average length of stay?
MS. WOOD: I will address that. I can address the children sent out of province through the child welfare system. I think there has been some misunderstanding in the media that all the children that have gone out of province have gone to a secure treatment centre somewhere, that's not really true. Where they have been placed, we have had young people in programs primarily in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and a few in the U.S. There are specific programs, for instance the ones in Alberta that we've used have been secure care programs but some other facilities that we've used have actually been to address a fairly complex combination of - we could say - dual disordered children, complex medical/mental health/developmental behavioural issues.
When you asked the question, what was the need for this facility and why was it built, the young people who have gone out of province because of presenting problems of emotional behavioural disturbance, and that represents most of the young people who have been going out, this facility is designed to address. The smaller group that I was talking about
that have those very complex problems are accessing treatment services, we don't have enough children looking like that to require a program in Nova Scotia. The costs, generally, are very comparable to the costs in Nova Scotia, it's really not more expensive to send a young person to a program outside of the province and that's one we've looked at a great deal.
The average length of stay, that really does vary because it depends on the kind of program the young person has gone to. The length of stay of the young people who have the dual disorder, serious medical/behavioural/emotional problems - I'm thinking here of somebody with an organic brain disorder who can't speak but is sexually acting out, as an example of a young person that we had in our care. That young person has been in a program in Ontario for several years and would continue on and our expectation is that he will need adult supports as well, it's not a condition that can be changed. The young people who have gone out more for the behavioural issues, tend to go out, have a period of stabilization and then leave that program.
One of the misunderstandings, I think, sometimes, is that there are 30 discreet children that have gone out of province in a particular year. The number is higher than that, they have come and gone, come and gone, and what the 30 represents is just on any given day there tend to be. The ones who are being stabilized in a fairly intrusive type of intervention that we're describing here, once they have that structure, they tend to settle down and this issue seems to be resolved.
MR. LANGILLE: So these aren't children in need of protection, these are children with behavioural problems?
MS. WOOD: No, they're all first children who are in need of protection, even the young person that I was talking about with the organic brain syndrome, he came into the care of an agency for serious abuse and neglect at around 5 years of age and he's probably about 17 now. The Minister of Community Services, child welfare serves about 14,000 children a year. Most of our work is with families trying to address abuse and neglect in the home. Of those 14,000, we have about 700 court cases a year where we are seeking to take the child into care because we can't resolve the situations at home. Of those 700, there's always a certain number that are granted permanent care and custody, so if you go from 14,000, we have about 2,000 children who are in the care of the minister at any given time. Of those 2,000, there's a very small group who, because of their life experiences, would need a program like this. So we are going 14,000, 2,000, 20, but they are all first children in need of protection.
MR. LANGILLE: Just as a closing for me because I know there are other people who want to ask questions, but there's a case that arose, and they arise all the time, if you are having a problem with a child and I'm looking at a school principal which happened in my
area, he could not get that child out of the home and placed. Now would this resolve that problem?
MS. WOOD: That's not enough information for me to know.
MR. LANGILLE: But could it?
MS. WOOD: It entirely depends on whether or not the young person would meet the criteria laid out in the legislation. The first thing, that young person would need to be in need of protection. There are criteria under Section 22 of the Children and Family Services Act, which outline physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, all those kinds of areas. If that young person were to be found in need of protection and was taken into the care of the Minister of Community Services, then they may have a placement, what you were just requesting. A placement doesn't necessarily mean this kind of program because we have a range of programs for children: foster parents; residential programs. It would be a small proportion of them that we couldn't provide them the level of service the need in those programs and so when that's not working then we would look at this one.
MR. LANGILLE: I guess where I'm going with this is, somebody who has to be taken out of the environment right away and you have the option of maybe a jail, because in the middle of the night, who are you going to call? The first person you would call is the police, obviously and then a social worker. Where do they keep these children in the meantime?
MS. WOOD: Can you tell me what the child is?
MR. LANGILLE: Well say he's a pyromaniac, or whatever.
MS. WOOD: When you said jail I wasn't sure if you were meaning he was in conflict with the law or had broken the law.
MR. LANGILLE: Just uncontrollable, bad behaviour and there are many around. That's what I'm saying, your first steps, but this doesn't include that.
MS. WOOD: Because it's so intrusive, the legislation sets out that we have to meet certain criteria and if we can't meet those criteria, we can't lock them up. The situation that you're describing, that young person would have to be first found in need of protection, in terms of abuse and neglect at home, then if he were to be in the care of the minister, we would have to demonstrate to the court that he was unwilling or unable to consent to treatment, that treatment in the community wouldn't be appropriate, and that he had emotional or behavioural disturbance. If he met that, then . . .
MR. LANGILLE: And that's where I was going with this because there is some confusion about a secure treatment centre and other scenarios, and that's not to get people confused on this aspect.
[9:45 a.m.]
MS. WOOD: Would it be helpful if I showed a slide? I have another slide that shows what some of those other programs are.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Sure.
MS. WOOD: What I'm going to do is show you the children's mental health system, the options, and the child welfare system, and then explain where secure care fits. The Department of Community Services and the Department of Health have been working together under a joint children's mental health project to develop initiatives as well. So as well as bringing secure care on line, some really exciting things have come on line over the last year at children's mental health.
This is a slide of what's been, and it includes some gaps that these programs are intending to address. So if we look over on the child protection side, this is while the child is still at home, we have family support workers, social workers, youth workers, other folks who, through child welfare agencies, provide support and assistance to parents and children at home. If we're not able to resolve the situation and the child is at risk, then, and again I'm talking about risk of abuse and neglect, not at risk of leaving school or other kinds of risk but abuse and neglect, then they enter the care here. Then, what we've had in the past for services for those young people are supervised care in the home, where we take a staff person and wrap around services for them, they're still in the minister's care, we put that right in the home.
The next thing we have as options are foster care, we have approximately 700 foster homes, we have small options homes for children with developmental disabilities and other kinds of things - again, for children who are first abused and neglected but then have that presenting problem. The minister is the parent of about 2,000 children, and of those 2,000 children, some of them are disabled. So that's why we would have that. We have group homes, residential child care facilities. We have 32 programs, combined, when you look at the small options and the group homes. Then we've had a couple of residential centres which are assessment/treatment programs, one in each of the four regions, and we have a very intensive program called the Children's Response Program that the IWK manages for Community Services. It's for younger children with really high disturbance, again children in care.
When young people have exceeded our ability to provide support in Nova Scotia, we've had out-of-province placements, which I know have been in the media and people have asked about. Secure care is designed to intervene or replace this with a Nova Scotia-based program, to curtail most of those young people leaving the province.
On the mental health side, we have nine children's mental health clinics, each of the districts, all across the province, all have specialists in mental disorders but also behavioural and other issues. We have a day treatment program in Nova Scotia with 22 spaces at the IWK for kids who need all day - like an appointment at a clinic is just not going to do it, this would be more like weekly appointments - this would be the all-day intervention. Then their next piece was an in-patient unit at the IWK, about 17 beds. Residential rehab program for children - more like the young person I described out of province with organic brain syndrome, it's for kids with a combination of mental illness and emotional disturbance. That's what they've had until recently.
While we've brought in secure care to deal - oh yes, I will just finish by saying all of these programs are universal, that is every one of us has access to the mental health system, but if you're talking youth justice, you have to break the law; if you're talking about the Minister of Community Services, you have to be a child in need of protection. So recognizing that there are lots of families and children who need something more than what these two services can provide, Mental Health Services, working jointly with Community Services, has brought in two new pieces which are very exciting.
They've developed a residential treatment program down here, not that different than secure care, but it's for the general population. That's not open yet, but the facility is being designed. You may have heard about it in the news and all of that, so that's a residential treatment. And here, they have developed intensive home-based services, they've just put in specialists in disruptive behaviours in each of their clinics who will actually go out into the community and do intensive work there, similarly to what we do here. I don't know if that helps you but if the young person was not in need of protection he would have access to service but it would be on this line and not this line.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Next we have Mr. Hines.
MR. GARY HINES: Thank you for coming in today. The question I have is I would like to have an overview of actually the number of staff you have and an overview of the service you provide over 24 hours, in terms of your staff. Do some do security measures and then you have your instructors as well, or how does your staff break down? What is the ratio of staff to client?
MS. CONNOLLY: I have an overhead if that would be helpful, just to go down quickly who the staff are. Would that be helpful?
MR. HINES: Yes.
MS. CONNOLLY: There is myself, the Facility Manager; we have a Chief of Clinical Services; we have two social workers; we have six unit supervisors - we have a unit supervisor on 24 hours a day to provide supervision; we have 25 youth workers and that is about three children to one youth worker; we have a registered nurse; we also have a cook who works back and forth between the two units - she makes the food but the children are also going to be able to assist with that once we get moving and the youth workers; we have a teacher; and we have two administrative support staff.
MR. HINES: My second question is, in determining the five days, that figure that's going to work best for you, did you determine that from research from other jurisdictions that do similar care? If you found five days not to be adequate, are you prepared to make an adjustment to say, a 10-day period, because in my way of thinking - and I might be totally wrong - if I go on vacation for five days everything is new and exciting and I'm not sure what I get out of it that would be life lasting and that would provide me with the tools to do something different and more productive in life. Is five days enough or is that just a period of children being placed in a situation where they have five good days in their lives, because they are obviously troubled when they go there? Do you think five days is enough and are you prepared to move on it if you found it not to be?
MS. WOOD: I want to answer that because it's related to the whole of the Children and Family Services Act. You're probably familiar that social workers coming across children in severe situations can apprehend those children and we have the authority to do that, but that's a very intrusive thing, to be able to go into a family and take the children. How we have a check and balance against that so we don't abuse that authority is that we have to be in court right away to justify why we did that.
The purpose of a five-day is just simply like the child is being apprehended from themselves. We have issued a certificate, taken them against their will to a facility, we have to be within the court in five days to explain why we did that, that's the purpose of the five-day, it doesn't meant that the treatment is necessarily over at five days. Then the judge determines whether we were correct in that or not. If he or she felt that we had overstepped our authority and the child didn't meet the criteria, the judge could dismiss them.
What mostly happens across Canada is that, in fact, the judge gives a 30-day order, so they remain in the centre for 30 days. How we came up with those time periods was based on the research of what has worked well in other provinces. In particular we modelled ourselves against a secure care program in Calgary because it served a population of approximately 1 million, which is close to Nova Scotia. Most of those children are in and out within the 30 days, not within the five. It's just that we have to justify to the court why we pulled somebody off the street.
MR. HINES: Do you have any idea, in other facilities, what the rate of return might be? Do you get a rate of return coming back? What is the rate of return?
MS. WOOD: I don't have a figure but it's expected that you would. If you have a young person who is somewhat testing limits, or just because of their life experiences they go through rough peaks and start to settle down, we don't want to keep them in past their ability to manage themselves well in the community, but at the same time if they start to go through another period of crisis, we would see them coming back in. So that's not uncommon, that's similar to most of the work we do with children, they go up and down like this.
MR. HINES: So it's expected and it's not a measure of success or failure of the program, that's what I was getting at. Some might stand up and say okay, you have had those individuals in here and you have 50 per cent to 60 per cent returning. It's not because the program failed, it's an ongoing process, that's what I was getting at.
MS. WOOD: Yes, and there would be lots of crises that might lead to that in a young person's life.
MR. HINES: Thank you.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parent.
MR. MARK PARENT: Thank you for the previous slide because I was thinking of a case, when Bill was speaking, that I had to deal with in my riding. Really they would fall on the mental health Act side because they didn't need protection from their parents, they were acting out very severely and there was no place to put them besides the county jail, which is not appropriate for a 14-year-old teen. So I think we still need to do more work on that side and I'm glad to hear of those two new aspects.
Following up on secure treatment, it was issued in 1997, the announcement was made. What took so long in actually getting it in place? What were the factors involved in that, was it just financial, or was it looking at appropriate models for treatment? And number two, following up on Gary's comments, I can see how you would have recidivism but over a long-term period there should be some way of measuring your success rate. So they are two very distinct questions.
MS. WOOD: In terms of your question about why from 1997, I don't have that background, I'm sorry. I can speak from 1999 on, which is that we did take a long time to study other programs across Canada. We also began with a steering committee that included experts from within Nova Scotia, so we had a representative from the Department of Health; we had a representative from the IWK Childrens' Mental Health; and representatives from Education and student services and whatnot. A lot of that developmental work began there
with how this will fit into the broader range of programs that government is establishing for children and youth that might be distinct. So it was working both on the model and then I guess the Nova Scotia system and it does take time to get it right.
We were really starting with some exciting opportunities, like building a facility from the ground up, but that means you don't usually get that opportunity when you're working with children. We put a tremendous amount of time trying to design a program from the ground up that's child friendly and child specific, Nova Scotia hasn't had that opportunity very often. The design phase itself took a couple of years and was very, very exciting and that's because the program itself is integrated into each and every piece of that physical plant. When I look at the schematic again, I can tell you about every single piece of every single floor plan, it was very complex trying to design that, so it did take us a while to get it going. It just took as long as it took, I guess that's the best I can say.
The only interruption would have been through some physical issues in construction. We had a hard time pouring cement and it sounds funny but we had to pour the cement for the floor three times, that delayed the construction quite considerably. We had difficulties with water and that delayed us. We were going for a Spring opening and had delayed it until the Fall.
In terms of your second question, I apologize but what was . . .
MR. PARENT: To be expected that you will have recidivism but over the long term there must be some measurement, in terms of whether the program has been successful or not?
MS. WOOD: One of the difficulties with not being able to manage a crisis for a young person is that foster homes and residential programs unable to manage the situation ended up discharging children. One of the key factors that we're going to be looking for is that if we can assist in managing the crisis, the child returns to their original home or placement, then that's so much better for them because they're maintaining their school connections, their community, their friends. So a key indicator for us will be whether or not the length of stay in their regular program increases. We want to be there for the period of crisis, and we would rather re-admit them and help settle them down. We're looking for success in the community, not success of the program.
[10:00 a.m.]
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Ms. Raymond.
MS. MICHELE RAYMOND: It's a beautiful looking facility and I'm glad it's there. I have a bunch of questions about admission, is it okay to ask several questions? Okay. A very quick one is, the children are sometimes only in temporary care of the minister, so in
that case if there is a question of their being apprehended from themselves, as you describe it, is there any kind of notice to the natural parents?
MS. WOOD: We actually have a slide on that. We must serve the parents, if the child . . .
MS. RAYMOND: You're referring to notice to the child and so on and Legal Aid.
MS. WOOD: When they're in permanent care, the minister is the parent.
MS. RAYMOND: When they're in loco parentis. Okay. So there is a notice provision and they have the opportunity to be represented at that five-day hearing as well, do they? The parent as well?
MS. WOOD: No. Well, they could petition to be represented. We don't have enough experience under our belt for me to say what would be the normal practice. Our experience is that the parents are seeking support and treatment for the children. I don't think there would be a lot of cases where people would be wanting to do that, to contest it.
MS. RAYMOND: Yes, although these are people who have been apprehended and are going into ministerial care.
MS. WOOD: They're not apprehended from their parents.
MS. RAYMOND: No, but they have, at some point, been put into ministerial care.
MS. WOOD: Yes. Previously.
MS. RAYMOND: That was one question. You have 20 spaces and one of them is full right now, and you're going for another. Do you have any idea how large there is a reservoir of children who are actually waiting, who are really going to be ending up there? I know you have a couple of places on Lemon Walk and so on, where you've got these other facilities that have up to this point been the next-to-last stop before leaving the province. Do you know?
MS. WOOD: Where kids are emotionally and behaviourally is very fluid, and so I would say yes, there will be pressure on the program. My sense is that if we can stabilize young people during - part of what creates placement pressure is the cycle of admissions and discharges from other programs. So by having the facility itself, we're believing that it's going to settle down a tremendous amount of that pressure. The other programs are then going to be able to fulfill the mandate that we wish them to have.
Our sense is that 20 is more than adequate right now. I would say that based on the fact that we traditionally have vacancies in almost every region in our current residential programs, it's just the in-and-out that's causing the pressure. I do look at the vacancy figures every month, and I feel we have enough placements.
MS. RAYMOND: This would never be a person's first step or their first contact with ministerial protection? It might be, I don't know.
MS. WOOD: It could be. It mostly won't. We do have children arrive . . .
MS. RAYMOND: You don't know who's out there.
MS. WOOD: We've had children arrive . . .
MS. RAYMOND: Directly in crisis.
MS. WOOD: Directly in crisis, in some horrible circumstances. We're not thinking that that's not going to happen, but just that that's not the majority. Most will be planned admissions.
MS. RAYMOND: So you don't really have a sense of who's out there waiting who would be treated here if it was possible?
MS. WOOD: In one way I would say we do know. We're aware of which young people are struggling. It's a small province and a small system. On any given day, it would not be difficult to have different children in a period of crisis than on another day. So you're asking a question about fluidity really. A young person who may have benefited from it two months ago and instead we put an individualized wraparound service in place for them, because we've been doing something in the meantime, may be fine now and we could start to settle down. So it's not like there is a process of a lineup of individual children that will come in here and then go out the other door. It's more like it's a constant . . .
MS. CONNOLLY: We will have children moving in and out. It's hard because we just opened . . .
MS. RAYMOND: I know. This is almost for my own curiosity. Are there some indicators out there that would say to you, okay, this is a child who is likely to, at some point, end up here? One of the ones that I was wondering about is, have some of these children been sort of medicated or had a long time lag between a first referral to a school psychologist and then into some kind of care, are there some objective things that you can look at and say, there are numbers of kids . . .
MS. WOOD: None of the children are unknown to us, they're all known to us, unless somebody arrives - and I have had it happen, I directed a child welfare agency where we had a 12-year-old brought to the door in extreme crisis, whose grandparents were just killed in a car accident, who had previously lost her parents and she was an abandoned child or a child with no one and she was in a terrible state of distress. That can always happen but most of the young people we've tended to work with in their parents' homes first, brought them into care, we know how they're doing in foster care, residential programs, I mean most of the children we know are there. They're really not unknown to us. I'm not sure what you're asking but we know our children.
MS. RAYMOND: It's a question about that reservoir of children who may be waiting to come in.
MS. WOOD: The waiting to come in within our own system . . .
MS. RAYMOND: Or not waiting, but there they are, at some point you suspect that you may be seeing them.
MS. WOOD: Yes.
MS. RAYMOND: But you don't know exactly how many that would be. Just curious, thank you.
MS. WOOD: I would just say that it changes, but usually most programs have one or two children who are really struggling, going through a period of crisis, but whether or not that would go high enough to meet the threshold is a different question.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Do you have another question?
MS. RAYMOND: I think I asked them all.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: I have Mr. MacKinnon and then Mr. Pye.
MR. RUSSELL MACKINNON: My first question was not premeditated but given the fact that you've indicated that you had to pour the concrete three times, I'm curious as to why and who paid for it?
MS. WOOD: The contractor paid for it, it wouldn't harden, and I think we still don't know why, it just wouldn't harden. There was no easy solution to that. It wasn't that the ground was particularly wet, I can't tell you why. But the contractor paid for it and it just delayed our taking over the building after construction.
MS. CONNOLLY: It was under warranty, so that's why the contractor paid for it.
MR. MACKINNON: What was the time frame in delay?
MS. WOOD: I would really have to look that up, so I wouldn't want you to quote me on this but I would say that it was over a period of a couple of months.
MR. MACKINNON: My premeditated question is on the issue of subjectivity, and I go back several years to when they had to amend the piece of legislation because of the Mrs. X case in Cape Breton. I believe some of you may be familiar with that, that warranted a change in legislation. What checks and balances do you have in place to ensure you're following the proper protocols as opposed to abiding by a subjective perspective? I know that's kind of a loaded question but you can understand the implications because of that particular case.
MS. WOOD: There have been a number of initiatives. I'm not going to link them directly to Mrs. X, because it is not exactly the same . . .
MR. MACKINNON: That's fair.
MS. WOOD: . . . but the department has introduced standards for all residential programs, those came on line in April of two years ago. With training we have introduced licensing, in addition to the standards we're regularly auditing for compliance with those standards. In fact, Jeanette just had to live through that. So we decided that the minister would have to be licensed as well as anyone else and we've been putting her through the paces. So, those would be two things that were introduced to heighten the checks and balances.
Another is this requirement that we be in court in five days to justify why we've done this. The child is served right away with notice and legal aid. We have worked in the Department of Community Services for the last few years to develop a children's complaints register with the Ombudsman's Office, the children's section, so that they will independently have field officers coming in, meeting them, the staff understand that the children can call them at any time. We've transferred money out of our budget in Community Services, over to them so that it would be somewhat at arm's-length. So, we're responsible through that process.
The standards themselves have a complaint's procedure so that any child in a facility can complain directly to myself, the Director of Child Welfare, if they don't want to go through the other routes that we've established. So, we have put a lot of checks and balances in place to ensure that children are aware of their rights and that it's as simple as a phone call to have a quick response to them.
So that is on that side but on the other side, to just raise the capacity of staff, the training. I omitted that we've done a lot of training for all of our residential programs and, in fact, before Jeanette began she had five weeks of training with her staff. So, we're trying to address it from a competency capacity and a children's rights side, even including giving children, when they come into care, booklets that talk about their rights and responsibilities.
MR. MACKINNON: I noticed the secure treatment centre has the capacity for 20?
MS. CONNOLLY: Yes.
MR. MACKINNON: So for every resident you have two staff on average, correct?
MS. CONNOLLY: We have on average about three youth workers per child, that doesn't include the teacher or the social workers or our nurse.
MR. MACKINNON: I guess I was going by the figures shown on the board, you have a total of 39 for 20, so that's 2 to 1.
MS. CONNOLLY: Although it runs 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and some of the staff don't work around the clock.
MR. MACKINNON: I know in this particular case it is hard to gauge but can you tell members of the committee as to whether the demand for this particular service is increasing or decreasing in the province over the last 10 years and why?
Do you have figures? Do you keep data?
MS. WOOD: We don't keep data. Obviously, we have no data from this program.
MR. MACKINNON: Why not?
MS. WOOD: We just opened a couple of days ago.
MR. MACKINNON: That's this facility but in terms of . . .
MS. WOOD: I was going to say but we do have data on the numbers of children that required out-of-province treatment and placement.
MR. MACKINNON: Will you provide that to the committee?
MS. WOOD: Yes, but I can tell you right now - and I had it on a slide - that it was on average 30 to 32.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Can I just clarify? That would be people or youth who met all the criteria for admission to your program or are you talking about the broad category?
MS. WOOD: No, the broad category.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Can you break that down in terms of how many people would . . .
MS. WOOD: I would say that it's approximately 80 per cent.
MR. MACKINNON: One final question, Madam Chairman, since I received the designation as critic in our caucus for Community Services and Housing, surprisingly the volume of calls that I receive from grandparents who want to take custody of their grandchildren who are either in foster homes or in some other care of the Department of Community Services, is that a major issue within the department? I suppose I'm asking the question because why am I receiving so many calls from grandparents who appear to be in rather stable, wholesome environments that are rejected as caregivers?
MS. WOOD: I guess I would want to start by saying that, in fact, when we're placing children who have had to come into care and we're planning for them, the extended family is always the very first place we look, because we're wanting to maintain family ties. So, that's our very first strategy. If there aren't extended family members who can take over custody of the child and the child, even for other reasons, our next group would be to make families, perhaps they need ongoing support so that it is not 100 per cent but with support they could, then we designate them as foster home child specific. In other words, I could be a foster parent of my nephew if he needed to come into care, but if I needed ongoing support services from an agency, they would treat me as a foster parent and provide me with all the training and support that would go with supporting him. So that would be our next step and that's very successful; in most cases, that's where we go.
[10:15 a.m.]
The second thing I guess I would probably say to you is that if a child is in the care of the minister, anyone may present a plan of care to the court. A court would determine if that was an appropriate plan of care. So even if a child is in the care permanently of the minister, if they are not placed for adoption, the parents themselves, the grandparents, anyone can make an application to the court and present a plan of care. It would be assessed and if the circumstances have changed and they were able, then we would definitely go in that direction. We try to preserve family ties as best as we possibly can.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Mr. Pye.
MR. JERRY PYE: Thank you, Madam Chairman. I must say it's only fitting that I'm sitting here today listening to you make the presentation with respect to the Wood Street Centre for secure treatment for children with severe behavioural problems. I have to tell you that this was a very long time coming. I remember first being elected to the provincial Legislature in 1998 with the former Minister of Health, Jamie Muir, who was the Opposition Critic for Community Services at that time and speaking about the need for a secure treatment centre, and then when they became government in 1999, making the announcement that there would be a secure treatment centre. Some five years later through the whole process, we finally end up with a 20-bed facility. Back then, as a matter of fact, there was a real need for some 25 spaces in the province. Now I see that there are approximately 32 children with severe behavioural problems on any given day, and I would assume those are the children who are out of the province.
I guess my question is, how far have we succeeded with respect to making sure that no more children leave the province? I recall back in 1999, at a community meeting with a group called KIN, Kids In Need, in Sackville, with some 30 family members. They were quite concerned about having to have their children out of province, taking flights out to see their children from time to time, coming back and not having that connect with their children, and being very restricted with respect to having that connect. My understanding is that I still see that even if you were to fill the Wood Street Centre facility now, which you're not going to do, with the out-of-province placements, there would still be approximately 12 children out of province, or out of country. Now some of them may be in the U.S., as we have seen in the past.
The concern I have is we really aren't meeting the needs. I know what you said with respect to the five-day program, doing the assessment coming in and then the 30 days or even the 90 days. To me, many of those children outside the province are there for a year or maybe even two years or more, and they're there for a very special treatment because of their behavioural problems. Why did we not build a facility that would meet the needs of those children here in the province so that their parents could be closely connected?
Another concern that I had with respect to your presentation, often you made presentation with respect to these children with behavioural problems coming out of foster homes or group homes. Unfortunately, that is the case because the parent has no choice and ends up giving the children off to the province because they can't handle the child and the child ends up in a foster home or a group home. Many of the parents who I have talked to in those meetings said, what is the problem here? Why do we have to do that? Why can't we have our own children and be able to have the secure treatment centre and go through that avenue?
So I guess my question is, are you dealing with that kind of an issue where the parent can directly have the child come to the secure treatment centre without having to go through the ministerial process of the three steps to meet the requirement and if, in fact, that is
possible? I would like to know just how many children are still locked up - I shouldn't say locked up, I apologize for that - still housed in hotels within this province, waiting for secure treatment and can you tell me how many there are today?
MS. WOOD: To my knowledge there are none but you have asked a lot of questions and I will try to capture them. With regard to the 25 spaces, that is new information for me. When I started working on it . . .
MR. PYE: Twenty-six, actually.
MS. WOOD: . . . I was actually in Mental Health Services at the Department of Health and it was 20 but you have a longer history, perhaps, than I do. I am starting back with my own direct involvement in 1999. When we say that they are going to serve 20 children, we are talking about 20 children on any given day. In fact, our estimation is that we are probably going to serve somewhere between 200 and 250 children a year. So we feel that that is actually very good.
In terms of the children being out of province, and why we didn't just bring them back here and fill up the secure centre, the children who would fit the profile that we are talking about have often gone to organizations that have a secure component, then they have group homes, little cottages, after care, that sort of thing. What has happened is that shortly after going into the intrusive intervention, put the brakes on, something very similar to secure care, the children have settled down and they have gone into the other programs. We have not interrupted that and also, if they have settled down and are doing better, we wouldn't meet the test of our legislation to take them out of those less intrusive programs and put them in our secure care program. That wouldn't be appropriate. What they do though, is they are coming back in all the time and being reintegrated back into our existing programs, our other programs that I talked with you about. So we have many kids who have been out of province and who are now in a host of foster homes and residential programs in Nova Scotia.
What we are trying to do is stop them having to leave in the first place and that is where the strategic point of this is because kids' behaviours, you can say someone has an emotional behavioural disturbance and it might be at this level versus another child but it goes up and it's the up that is difficult to manage. They come back down. Our goal is always reintegration back into the community. We don't want kids locked in facilities. It's the trying to help with this piece that allows them to get right back into the stream of things in a more normal light.
In terms of your other point about why would parents have to bring the child into care in order to get that treatment, I agree with you totally and that is why Community Services and the Department of Health initiated a joint children's mental health project again in 1998 or 1999. I see you have reference to some of that in here. After that report was done, you have one of the reports in here called A New Step Forward, that launched a joint initiative
between the Department of Health and the Department of Community Services and children who are not victims of abuse and neglect but who require residential treatment will come into the program that is being developed here by mental health. I was making reference to that. The children who require the wrap-around services and other really intensely at home, you can see that in the mental health continuum, it has not had that, it has had sort of hourly appointments with children once or twice a week here and then it has gone into a much more intensive program which would be the whole eight hours a day over in day treatment.
What they are designing here, and they have already hired and some of these teams are already going, are setting up teams of professionals very similar to the ones we have at secure care, that will be working with families and parents and trying to assist and stabilize that young person at home. So they are working on both sides to stabilize at home and then if they require residential treatment, it would fall here. So that is being addressed and it's good news that people won't have to come through child welfare to get it.
MR. PYE: Is that where the Reigh Allen Centre fits in?
MS. WOOD: Reigh Allen is actually on our side of it.
MR. PYE: On your side of it, is it?
MS. WOOD: It's one of these residential centres. We have group homes and then we have residential programs that are higher level service, one in each of the four regions.
MR. PYE: And behavioural problems are not considered to be a mental health issue, are they?
MS. WOOD: Yes and no. It's not a major mental disorder. A lot of our kids, there is a grouping of mental disorders called disruptive behaviour disorders and it might include conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder. You often have children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who also have disturbed behaviour. You have children with autism who may have disturbed behaviour. Those are not major mental disorders. The major mental disorders would be a mood disorder, psychotic, eating disorder, those kinds of things.
When we were saying that we are not a psychiatric facility, what we are saying is that we are not set up to deal with kids with psychosis, mood disorder, eating disorder, depression that would be truly suicidal, as opposed to gestures and acting out. We would be relying on mental health to continue to provide that. So some behavioural disorders are within the mental health diagnosis spectrum but they are not major mental disorders. They have served different levels of disorders.
MR. PYE: So can you define to me an individual who would continue to be out of the province that you would not provide the kind of treatment for and what kind of treatment that would be so that I have a better understanding?
MS. WOOD: Yes. There would be a few. That's not to say that we won't develop programs for them but we don't have them now. One would be children who have been sexually abused and as they have matured, their way of expressing that is to sexually abuse other children or be sexually violent. That is a very specific kind of treatment and we have accessed some programs for that.
Another kind of profile of a young person who might be out of province, as I was saying, who has some kind of a dual disorder, that means one laid on top of the other. If you have someone with a disability - like child welfare is like any other parent. We can have kids in our care who have a whole range of issues. If you have someone who has a mental handicap and can't speak because of their level of functioning but, as a young person starting to get older, just like it happens tragically to a certain number of adolescents at home, start to develop a major mental disorder so you have somebody who you lay onto that a mood disorder or some kind of psychotic issue, lay that on top of the fact that they are developmentally delayed and they are not verbal, that's a very complex thing to know how to assist them and treat them.
Also, you might have young people who have organic brain syndrome, some kind of organically-based matter - like the young person I was talking about previously - and very violent behaviour that goes along with that. That kind of a profile, we tend to use the Robert Smart Centre in Ontario. That is very specialized and one thing that I think people don't understand is that all provinces in Canada actually use some of those programs, not just Nova Scotia. B.C. sends kids to the Robert Smart Centre for that kind of a treatment because you don't usually have enough that you don't repeat those in every province. It's not different than a liver transplant or something where we might send a young person to one of the Ontario hospitals.
MR. PYE: This is my last question and then I will stop and then maybe I will get an opportunity to come back. This last question is, let me use an example on you. I'm a parent who has a child with a severe emotional problem. The child is so abusive that they are beating up on me and my wife and so on and so forth and I'm contacting the Department of Community Services to get this child referred. How long does it take the Department of Community Services to have my son or daughter referred and what's the process to have my son or daughter referred and then how long does it take, assuming that that child is then sent off to the Wood Street Centre? Can you tell me how long that process takes and what's involved?
[10:30 a.m.]
MS. WOOD: The child welfare system is based on receiving reports, assessing level of risk and having response times that reflect the risk. So for some kinds of situations, the response time has to be within one hour. If you hear that a young child is unattended, that's a danger to life or danger of severe injury, that sort of thing, that's a response time of an hour. Those response times go from one hour to 24 hours to 48 hours - these are the categories - to 7 days, to 21 days. Conflict between parents and adolescents would not be a high priority response. We have to do that based on we're receiving reports all the time and threat to the child and age of the child and vulnerability to the child and severity of the threat to the child, is what we attend to first. So parent/adolescent situations would very likely, unless there was an issue of physical or sexual abuse, something like that, just straight conflict would tend to be somewhere between 7 days and 21 days.
But I will say to you - and you may not like this answer - a child assaulting you is not a reason for the Minister of Community Services to become involved. Everything we do is governed by the Children and Family Services Act and we become involved based on legislation. So the child has to be in need of protection from you. If the child is assaulting you - I am assuming you're speaking hypothetically - then that would be a matter (Laugher) I don't mean for that to be funny.
MR. PYE: Well, I think it's really very serious to be honest. It is a very serious issue . . .
MS. WOOD: Yes, it is.
MR. PYE: . . . whether it's the parent or the child, there is an environment there that shouldn't exist.
MS. WOOD: Exactly, that's why I said I didn't mean for it to be funny. It's not funny and that does happen, but it's not our legislation, that would be under the Youth Criminal Justice Act legislation.
MR. PYE: So you're saying - excuse me for interjecting - that the parent has to charge the child in order for the child to get through the system for you to help the child?
MS. WOOD: They wouldn't come to our system. It is not our system . . .
MR. PYE: I understand what you're saying. It's another process.
MS. WOOD: What may assist you is a table that we've distributed and the table goes through the secure care, the mental health and then the youth justice. There are different entrance criteria or eligibility but this all goes back to legislation. It's not that there's not an
intervention, I can tell you what I know about interventions being developed under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, but I can't speak to you with authority about it.
Again, they include the new Youth Criminal Justice Act - if I had that here - also which is trying to address this piece of the continuum, which is not that you necessarily incarcerate a young person but that you provide intensive community support. They're developing programs that would work with the parent in a family situation like you're describing. Yes, the child would need to be charged and held accountable for their behaviour but the intervention may be at the home and not in locking them up.
The description of some of those, in a very brief way, are in this table and we developed this table with mental health and with youth justice because we know that all three things being announced and coming on line had a lot of profile in the last two years and it's often that people confuse the three.
MR. PYE: The reason for my bringing that to your attention is because I have had a number of single parents who have actually called me and said that their only choice was to call the police, to lock their child in the room and hope that the room is not smashed to hell by the time the police get there. The police pick up the child and take the child to a hotel and hold them there until the processing has taken place. That, to me, seems to be a very archaic way of doing things in the year 2003.
MS. WOOD: I can't speak to the youth justice system, I am sorry.
MR. PYE: But it's part of your secure process.
MS. WOOD: No, it's a different department altogether.
MR. PYE: I know it's a different department, but if in fact they're there, then they come to the secure treatment centre for treatment.
MS. WOOD: No.
MR. PYE: They don't?
MS. WOOD: No, we have legislative limits on who we can admit to that program.
Being charged under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, there is no linkage at all between that and secure care. We have an entirely different piece of legislation and different entrance requirements. I think that may be a common misunderstanding but there is no linkage between breaking the law and coming to secure care.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: If the members don't mind, I have one quick follow-up question on the topic that Jerry raised. So what happens to the youth under the care of the Minister of Community Services who has been recommended for admission to the facility but doesn't meet all the criteria, what options does your department have to serve the youth in extreme need?
MS. WOOD: Who would you mean by is recommended to come, by whom?
MADAM CHAIRMAN: There is an admission process, so I'm assuming that sometimes people are not admitted who are recommended.
MS. WOOD: So you mean recommended by child welfare?
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MS. WOOD: The initial process.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Within your department or some of those care option agencies.
MS. WOOD: If they are a child in care and they are not in secure care, then they would be in one of these programs here. We have approximately 700 foster homes, we have what's called a treatment foster system, which we are referring to as parent/counsellor homes and sometimes children who need a tremendous amount of intensive support and need to be in care but don't need to be locked up, that would be a good option for them because what that is, is a cluster of foster homes where the parents are actually trained to give sort of 24-hour, 7-day-a-week care to them, they're clustered in groups of six with support staff attached to those programs. So, for instance, Children's Aid in Halifax has one. They have a social worker, a clinical therapist, youth worker, working with two clusters of six foster treatment homes, so that they have 12. We have one of those in each region as well.
The higher intensity type of situation would probably come also under these residential centres, which have a higher staff ratio and deal with more disturbed type of behaviour than a group home. Also Community Services has the Children's Response Program at the IWK, that's very intensive and it's for children up to the age of 12. It is a very high staff ratio and intensive. So we have other treatment options if they don't meet the test to be confined.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: You're not expecting youth who have been recommended for secure treatment to fail that admission test?
MS. WOOD: Yes, I would say.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Then they would probably go back to the situation that they might already be in?
MS. CONNOLLY: When I talked to you earlier, I looked at the three criteria, then I told you that at the bottom of the slide, we're looking at when we talk to the agency social worker, tell us a bit about what's already been tried and hasn't worked, because we need to be clear before the child is admitted that there is not another program available in the province that's less restrictive than secure care, that the child could go there.
I guess we're fortunate at secure care that our Chief of Clinical Services, Margaret Aucoin, has actually worked with the Children's Aid Society in Truro for about 18 years and both of our social workers have experience in the child welfare system. In fact, Tanya Broome, our other social worker, actually worked at the local Children's Aid Society also. So they're aware of what's available in this province. So in that discussion they're asking what's been tried, what's worked, what hasn't worked, so that they have a good understanding of, oh, okay, well, here is an option that wasn't looked at, then we may need to try something like that as opposed to simply saying the child should come right away to secure care.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: What's plan B, for example, if it is a high demand time of the year and your rooms are already full to capacity? Will there be a waiting list developed?
MS. CONNOLLY: What we're looking at is doing a triage list and that means that daily Margaret will go through - we have a checklist that we go through and Margaret will look at where each child is and she will need to check in with the agency social worker each day. Then when the bed becomes available, we will take the child with the highest need.
MS. WOOD: We have put in place two other things to deal with that as well. One is we recently had a regulation folded into the regulations for the Children and Family Services Act, that has been available in other provinces but it has not previously been available in Nova Scotia, which is the authority to be able to designate a place of safety for a child. So what we're going to be able to do - I again refer to it as wraparound services - you have the child and you put all the staff around them wherever they are. We're developing the policies around that but that means that they're not left sitting during that crisis but it may be a foster home or a residential program, we can designate it a place of safety and bring the staff around. Which is why I was saying that use of hotels, this is the kind of thing when we were initially faced with that dilemma, what the heck do we do? That's what we do now, is we just wrap the services around the child wherever they are.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Leo.
MR. LEO GLAVINE: Thank you very much for coming in today and giving us an overview here of the secure treatment facility. Taking a little bit of a different tack here in terms of the number, coming out of an education background, I realize there will always be children that will leave the province for very unique and specialized treatments in clinics across Canada and the United States. However, do you anticipate this average number coming down significantly with the addition of this particular facility?
MS. WOOD: Very much so.
MR. GLAVINE: Would it be available to the other Atlantic Provinces? There may very well, I look at it a little differently than Marilyn, there may be times, in fact, when there will only be 15, for example, in the facility. Has that overture been made at this stage?
MS. WOOD: We can't really admit anyone except under the criteria laid out in the legislation. At first response, I would say that I don't see how they would meet the test under our own legislation. There are situations, we have an interprovincial protocol on child welfare. If there is a child in the care of a minister across Canada and for whatever reason they are located in another province, we have a reciprocal agreement where the original province maintains the custody and responsibility for the child but that we supervise on their behalf.
We do have children in Nova Scotia who normally reside here and our agencies are part of that interprovincial protocol. One of those children, that could be possible. But they would already be under the umbrella of a child welfare agency. If that's the case, we might be able to proceed that way. I would have to check that out. It couldn't just be like an open referral. If you were a foster parent and you moved to Ontario, we wouldn't want to break up the family, we would keep our children with you, just as normal parents, it's that kind of a situation.
MR. GLAVINE: I'm very much aware also, of the mental health continuum and the IWK services that they offer. Will the secure treatment be working, if you wish, in collaboration with some of those, again, specialized people, specialists there or will it be a stand-alone facility in Truro?
MS. CONNOLLY: No, right now, what we're looking at is working with the local mental health clinic in Truro to have access to psychiatry and psychology. We've also had discussions at the Department of Health level with regard to the IWK and we've been back and forth in discussions, they actually came up and did some of the training with us on short-term crisis stabilization assessment models. So, we've had quite a bit of back and forth with them. If a child needed mental health services, however, we would go through the local district health authority and the local mental health clinic. Then they would assist us and we would access mental health at the IWK.
We've also been in discussions with the local district health authority with regard to addiction services, because we're looking at if they are going to be able to assist us in providing some individualized counselling. So, we have looked at that in a larger range to try to get some specialized service consultants in.
[10:45 a.m.]
MR. GLAVINE: Just one last, I was wondering if this is a model, because I like the holistic approach as one of the things that certainly appeals to me very strongly, but I was also wondering if this is more of a European model, is it something out of the 1980s, the 1990s, where does this model kind of fit in, I guess, is what I am asking here?
MS. WOOD: It is a very interesting question, because you're right, the legislation was actually passed in 1991 and I think there has been a change in thinking across Canada, actually internationally, both in terms of treatment of children and also how one approaches this kind of a program. One of the pieces of, I think, evolution has been that in using the term treatment, people sometimes think long term and may have originally, when it was introduced, imagined that we would just have kids live there. We started to refer to it as secure care in 1999 as opposed to secure treatment because it is one component in the treatment plan and actually other programs in Canada have sort of followed Nova Scotia on that and are hoping to amend their own legislation to follow that as well. So we benefited from being a little bit late in terms of a start up, it has allowed us to be more holistic in our approach and to focus more on the stabilization rather than send them away. That, as Jeanette was saying, doesn't work for children. They may do well in that kind of a program but as soon as they leave, it all falls apart. So this is based on their real life in the community and the focus of our work has to be very focused on helping them cope there rather than come here. So, we call it secure care because it is just one of the in care options of the minister.
MS. CONNOLLY: I think that's why I was saying that for us it is so important not to see ourselves as a silo, but who are we working with and where we are able to, because there may be times when the family is not involved, for whatever reason as to why the child was brought into care. For us, we want to focus on the child but we're also aware of the supports that are available there and that we're never to replace that, we're to connect with them and see how we support the child, because we are aware, I guess, much like adults, sometimes we need to make changes in our lives and even though we put our best foot forward to do it, we fall backwards. So, we need to know that the people that are around us will support us. So, for us, that's why it's so important for us to connect in with that and make sure that when the child is not with us - because we would hope that the child would only come for a time but we are aware that there will be readmissions - that the child is surrounded by those people who are aware of what the needs are and how they best can be met, not only when the child was at secure care but when the child leaves and goes back, whether it is home, in a group home or with a foster family, how does that happen. So, for us, that's our major focus.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Before I open it up for the second round of questions, is there any member who wants to ask a question for the first time? Diana.
MS. DIANA WHALEN: I have just a couple of questions if I could. On the question of the number of beds being 25 at one point, I noticed in some of the media reports originally, there was discussion about having the facility in the Nova Scotia Residential Centre, and that was a 25-bed facility, but that was prior to the decision to build a new centre. So I think that may be where it's coming from. For a bit of clarification.
I'm interested in the total cost of this facility. I can see that it is state-of-the-art and very well designed for your needs. What was the total cost of construction?
MS. CONNOLLY: It was at least $3.4 million.
MS. WHALEN: That sounds like it came in under budget. Would that be fair to say? The media reports are quoting $4 million as an estimated cost of the facility.
MS. WOOD: Well, we certainly did come in a bit under budget, I wouldn't say that we had ever set $4 million as the target. They may have misunderstood that. I think we were thinking $3.5 million.
MS. WHALEN: I'm checking the media things that were given to us in our package, one of them says $5 million. So I just thought, well, that's good, $3.4 million sounds . . .
MS. WOOD: We came in slightly under (Interruption)
MS. WHALEN: So the contract when it was awarded, they must have had a particular cost associated with it. That's good. Can you give me an idea of what the annual operating costs will be for the facility?
MS. CONNOLLY: It was approved at $2.7 million.
MS. WHALEN: This year I know our budget showed that some money was cut from that because it wasn't needed, it was shown up in these recent rounds of looking for extra money to cover the shortfall in the budget. What I'm wondering is, how many months earlier were you expected to open, because this year's budget for 2003-04 has a lot more money in it than was needed? Do you know what the budget would have estimated your opening time at?
MS. WOOD: We were wanting to open in the Spring, that's what we were saying, and just based on the things that needed to be in place in order to hire some people who would then participate in hiring the others, we would have gone ahead and opened in early
June, but because of the other kinds of delays that we had from a construction point of view, that's what then held it up. So that had been our hope.
MS. WHALEN: Now the opening was announced about mid-November but you have just taken children, is that right? They have just begun to arrive now after all the training and the kinks have been worked out of the building?
MS. WOOD: Yes.
MS. WHALEN: Okay, that's very good. Again in these reports, I think actually it's on the Web site. There are some questions and answers and it said that the average cost for a child outside the province is $70,000 for treatment. I am wondering if you could give me an idea of the average stay that that might equate to.
MS. WOOD: I will say this, that if one were to stay in a residential program, either in Nova Scotia or out of Nova Scotia, it's approximately $100,000. That's a rough figure because it is approximately $300 a day. That would reflect the coming and going of a number of children. It's possible that some of the children out of province would have been in a fairly highly intensive program but then gone into something much more like foster care which would be much cheaper. So the benchmark that I would offer you would be that it is approximately $100,000 in or out of Nova Scotia for one year of treatment for a child in a residential program.
MS. WHALEN: Really the secure centre is not a residential program. You made that point that it's part of a continuum. You want to move these children back into other levels.
MS. WOOD: It's residential because it's residential treatment but it's not a placement. This isn't where they live. It's not residential placement but it is residential treatment.
MS. WHALEN: Now some of the earlier reports, again when the centre was being discussed and just announced and so on, criticized it for being only 90 days.
MS. WOOD: Yes.
MS. WHALEN: Can you comment on whether or not there is a gap there for treatment in terms of . . .
MS. WOOD: I think that is based on an idea that we send people somewhere else and they get treated and then they come home and they are better. That may have been, I wasn't around to know what people were thinking in 1991 who crafted the legislation but I was in residential care, myself, at that time and felt, even at that time that we could have hung in with kids if we could just get through those periods of crisis. So I think that where the
confusion lies is with emotional behavioural disturbances versus something that is much more long term and intensive and may require long term but then you don't need to confine someone to give them highly intensive programs. They are not necessarily confined.
The children at the Children's Response Program that we developed at the IWK, some of them are there for several years and it is very high staff ratio and it is very intense but we can't justify locking the door. There is no need of locking the door.
MS. WHALEN: Exactly, yes.
MS. WOOD: That's the difference between acuity and length of stay. Those things often sort of come together. I can see people in the media or whatnot may have misunderstood but for people who are working in the field, we wanted the ability to contain a crisis and stabilize, not send them away.
MS. WHALEN: Exactly, not confine them for a long period of time.
MS. WOOD: Yes, unless it's a different presenting problem. If there is different kind of presenting problem, long term is needed.
MS. WHALEN: There is one article here from 1998 which actually quotes you, Vicki.
MS. WOOD: Oh dear.
MS. WHALEN: You were Executive Director of Children's Aid at the time.
MS. WOOD: I hope I'm not going to eat my words here.
MS. WHALEN: No, I don't think so. I'm not trying to catch you. What it does say is that you had said at the time that a facility like this shouldn't stand alone. You said - and it's a good analogy - that it's like having an emergency room in a hospital and nothing else.
MS. WOOD: That's right.
MS. WHALEN: So what I'm wondering is, if you feel, and I know you have shown us the continuum with the mental health side of the picture and Community Services, do you feel that in the intervening five years we've been able to put in place the other necessary components? Are you satisfied that they are new and they are additional and they are making this possible?
MS. WOOD: I'm not satisfied in the sense that I think there's still a lot of room for improvement, but I think we've done some fantastic things and I would love to tell you about them.
MS. WHALEN: Yes, you could highlight the ones that are new, things that have come in . . .
MS. WOOD: As well, as I was saying, we introduced standards for our residential programs, for a year and a half, we have provided very intensive, wonderful clinical training to all of our residential programs that exist out there. The same specialists who helped us design the secure care program we brought them in, in the intervening time, while we were going off and building it now once the program was designed, to do training. So we did 10 two-day modules with all of our residential facilities to enhance their clinical ability.
On the foster care side, there is a recognition and I think it reflects - I don't know how to say this in a nice way - but legislation has, over the last two decades in child welfare, it went through a period where it became very family rights oriented and every attempt is to leave the child in the home if at all possible and you put all the services there, and that's fantastic for a lot of children. There are some children who are perhaps not as well served by that because it leaves them for quite a long period of time in a very difficult situation. When they come into care, the social workers say and foster parents say that they feel that the children who actually come into care have more scars, more difficulties. Because of that, we have had to catch up in foster care, it's no longer just being a home, helping them with the homework, and loving and nurturing them in the same way - which they also do - that you would do with your own children, but they actually also have to be trained in terms of interventions and behavioural interventions.
The kids, even at very tiny ages, are showing some pretty disturbing things, so we have introduced a whole training program for foster families called PRIDE and it's fantastic. It's a series of very specific modules and all foster families receive a whole integrated program in terms of clinical training and we can go off in two levels, one is an advanced level of training which we have just implemented now, and we have another whole stream called specialized, where we are going to try to develop a care continuum for children with very specific kinds of issues. For instance, some of the situations that I was describing where children would require very special treatment, we are going to try to develop little clusters of foster parents who can respond to that, like if a child has a fatal disease.
MS. WHALEN: So they are much better prepared for the kinds of problems children have when they come.
MS. WOOD: Yes. So while we have been building secure care, we have been trying to build the rest of our system.
MS. WHALEN: That sounds great. I just wondered if we had made some huge strides or not.
MS. WOOD: Well we did, actually, I will say when I said that at CS of Halifax, we also only had at the time one or two foster parent counsellor programs and we have introduced several more of those since then, too.
MS. WHALEN: That's good to hear, I'm happy with that, thanks.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: I think I'm going to interject here. We are running into a bit of a time squeeze. I just want to check with the members to find out their wishes. Do you want to accept one quick question from Michele and Russell, who are the two remaining people on the question list, and then we have perhaps two minutes of wrap-up, in terms of committee business before we leave. Would that be acceptable?
MR. PYE: Madam Chairman, I just wanted to have an opportunity to ask another question as well. I didn't know we were restricted for time when we sat on these committees when they were only two hours long or whatever. I thought that if we wanted to ask more questions that we could.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: We have an option to extend it perhaps to quarter after, it's certainly up to the members.
MS. RAYMOND: I think Diana's questions took care of a lot of mine.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Okay, it sounds as though a few people have other commitments. Michele, you don't have a question, Russell do you want to ask a quick question?
MR. MACKINNON: Quickly, I find in government things are usually done either to save money or spend money. How much does the department expect to save with the realization of this particular facility? That's obviously not the main scope or intent but at the end of the day there is accountability. Is the department expecting to spend more money or save money?
MS. WOOD: I would say that the goal of this is to provide better services, it's not to save money. The cost of, as I was saying earlier, out-of-province care is almost exactly comparable, it is very similar across Canada. So the improvement is that we're providing care for these children in their home community but it is not cheaper to operate in Nova Scotia, I would say it's quite similar.
[11:00 a.m.]
MR. MACKINNON: So, no more, no less.
MS. WOOD: I'm not Mr. Hudson, our Executive Director of Finance, I may not be the best qualified to answer that question but from my perspective it's . . .
MR. MACKINNON: We can take that on notice, if you would undertake to provide an answer from your department?
MS. WOOD: Yes.
MR. MACKINNON: Would that be okay, Madam Chairman? Is that agreeable?
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MR. MACKINNON: Thank you.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Jerry has a quick question and then we will give you an opportunity, if there is just one last thing you would like to add to this morning's discussion, then we will just finish off with some committee decisions.
MR. PYE: Thank you, Madam Chairman, and I do appreciate, colleagues, the opportunity. I want to go back so that I can get a better understanding. I used an analogy that was referred to as a youth justice issue where, in fact, I had indicated that the child was beating on the parents and so on and causing an abusive relationship with the parents and destroying the home internally and you said that that was a youth justice issue. I am surprised that when we look at secure treatment and we recognize that this is a severe behavioural problem that we don't when we look at this holistic issue that youth justice isn't involved when in fact the children that you're attempting to provide the services for the secure treatment are children between the ages of 9, I believe, and 17, was your request. If, in fact, as a result of the action that's caused by the child in the home environment, because of a severe emotional problem, why would that not come to your desk?
MS. WOOD: When I say it's a justice issue, I mean assault and property destruction are against the law. Those would be matters that would be heard by the youth justice system. If a child is beating up their parents or destroying property, that's when I'm saying it is a youth justice matter, it's against the law for them to do that. That doesn't mean that the youth justice system would not try to get at whether or not there is an underlying emotional behavioural disorder that's contributing to that. That then gets into the sentencing or what the judge does about that. But the intake into that process is, you have broken the law, assault is against the law. If our children assault somebody, they also have broken the law and may end up as part of the youth justice system.
However, if there is an underlying disorder contributing to that crime, then the Department of Health works very closely with the setting in Waterville. Waterville has fantastic assessment and treatment capacity there. So it's not that the young person may not receive some kind of clinical intervention, it's just that they've broken the law and they're not in need of protection from their parents. That's not the presenting issue. But if underlying youth justice is a psychiatric issue then they would be eligible for psychiatric care.
One of the things, and I am not sure if I name it correctly on here, but under Youth Justice, yes, on the first page, they talk about, the last three lines there, "These services include Probation, Intensive Support & Supervision, temporary detention, custodial dispositions and conditional supervision." The intensive support and supervision is actually a clinical program that mental health has worked with Justice to develop for children who've committed crimes but whose underlying issues are required treatment. So, that's actually a formal program that they've been developing.
MR. PYE: I guess it is difficult for families to recognize that therein lies a problem because many of the families that I have talked to felt that their children shouldn't have to be picked up by the police, go through the youth justice system, that, in fact, there is a severe behavioural problem and it should be addressed as such. That's the concern that I have.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: I think we'll have to finish, otherwise we're going to continue to lose members and we have some committee business to finalize. I want to thank you both, Vicki and Jeanette, for coming today and for the other department representatives. It was extremely informative and we want to congratulate the department. I mean, obviously, this is an important addition to your continuum of services for children in care and thank you very, very much. Is there one last thing that you would like to add?
MS. WOOD: I would, I feel as though I answered one of your questions poorly and I'm feeling badly about it, when you were asking about have we a number of the children who might need the service, you were asking about numbers and I said, well, we know our children and they go up and down. I'm feeling that that wasn't a very good answer for you. I just wanted to give you a practical example to explain the challenge of that.
A week and a half ago I received a call from one of the facility directors who had a young fellow who had been in the Children's Response Program for six years and had, because he was 13, moved to their residential program in August, was doing beautifully - this was a move to the community for him - and he started school. He was doing beautifully and he was holding together very nicely and, all of a sudden, I don't know what his precipitating crisis was but he just fragmented and he turned that facility on its head for about three or four days and it became very overwhelming. He was actually charged and held overnight and he was going back and she was saying, I really, really, don't want to lose his placement, he was doing so well. I said, great, we have the place for him, why don't you get in line for secure
care the day it opens, because we wanted to be able to maintain that placement that he had invested in since August.
The irony of all that, I kept sort of bugging Jeanette saying, have they called yet? Because I feel that this poor little fellow is in a hospital-based program and he's finally made it to the community, his transition is suddenly in jeopardy. The thing that amazes me is that they've not called. They went through the whole background route but he's settled down. So that's the difficulty but that's not to say that Christmas might not precipitate all kinds of loss and hurt and upset and he doesn't have his family and he won't go through another crisis and join them. But in that period of time, it has settled. So, that's the difficulty of giving a number, it's because they're just very fluid situations.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Right. Thank you for that.
Our committee business will only take a couple of minutes, so if you don't mind just waiting and perhaps people may have some individual questions, they could approach you after the official meeting is over.
MS. WOOD: We will put some pamphlets on the program for people who want to pick them up as well.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Okay, thank you again for coming.
I just want to mention to the members, you will see on your agenda that we have tentatively scheduled the next meeting of this committee for the third Thursday in January, just because January 1st is a Thursday. So that will be a change. That's our optional day in case the weather caused a cancellation on the second day. So just to alert you to that.
It is a tentative meeting. The topic will be parent groups and community groups who are concerned or have an interest in the secure treatment facility. Two groups have been approached about the possibility of coming in and it includes foster parents and Residential Services. Now, a couple of other groups were suggested here today or came up during the discussion and that was KIN, Jerry?
MR. PYE: Kids in Need. I don't know if it is still an advocacy organization or not.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Do you have a contact name?
MR. PYE: It was established in the Sackville area, as a matter of fact, in the metro area.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Well, if you have even a former contact name, perhaps you could give it to Mora and she can track it down.
MR. PYE: I certainly will.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: The other possibility that came up would be the Children's Aid Society, I'm not sure, there's one in Halifax I know but there are comparable groups throughout Nova Scotia. Do members have other suggestions? Usually, we have perhaps three witnesses. Do you want Mora to pursue those as possibilities?
MR. MACKINNON: Sure.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: It may be that the department has some recommendations of groups that you have worked with in the past or currently who advocate on behalf of children or families in crisis.
MS. TRACEY WILLIAMS: Can you leave that with us and we will get in touch with Mora?
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Sure, that would be great. So, is everyone satisfied with the possibility of meeting again on January 15th?
Is it agreed?
It is agreed.
Any other business that anyone wants to bring up?
MR. HINES: I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Yes, exactly, all the best over the holiday season.
The meeting is adjourned.
[The committee adjourned at 11:11 a.m.]
