The report is devastating.
If we arrived at these conclusions, it is that the CDPDJ carefully analyzed 140 children’s adoption files between 2021 and 2023 by evaluating whether the rules had been respected, among others by looking at if we had first sought with the extended family, a compulsory step before turning to other options.
She was often omitted.
The minister responsible for social services, Lionel Carmant, commented the report on Radio-Canada Mauricie on Friday and for him, there is no doubt, the problem is circumscribed. “A defensive practice had settled in Mauricie and Center-du-Québec. […] I think the speakers were doing their job, but the senior management did not have good practices or good directives and that is why they have been replaced. ”
However, in its report, the CDPDJ tells us that the speakers were rather left to themselves, that their decisions were rarely questioned.
“In 80 % of the files analyzed, no clinical tool was used to support the decisions taken by the stakeholders to ensure that these decisions are objective.”
In two thirds of the cases, a parent who had dealt with the DPJ somewhere in his life lost his automatic child. “In 66 % of the files where one puts forward that the child, one of the parents or another child of the family received youth protection services in the past, is the only criterion that has been considered. Even when the information related to these services received is no longer topical or there has been a change in the family situation, no other criterion provided for in the LPJ (Youth Protection Act) has been analyzed to justify the decision that there is compromise. “
In half of the files analyzed, the facts on which the decisions were based has never been verified.
Still in this same interview, Mr. Carmant assures that everything is beautiful elsewhere. He tells us that he asked the national director of the DPJ, Lesley Hill, to give him the right time. “I asked her to go around, she told me that it doesn’t seem to be the case elsewhere.”
Really?
A report by the CDPDJ mentions that the speakers were rather left to their own devices, that their decisions were rarely questioned, to the DPJ of Mauricie-et-Center in Quebec. (François Gervais/Archives Le Nouvelliste)
Suppose that the Commission would have put its nose in 140 adoption files from another region, say the Laurentians, and that it had made the same observations. And that the minister had asked Ms. Hill to go around. Would the director of Mauricie said to her “well yes, with us too, we bother the rights of children and do we don’t care about the rules”?
She would have said that everything is fine, when we know it’s not going.
There are other places where it’s not going well.
The only way to ensure that there is no “defensive culture” elsewhere is to mandate the commission to do the same exercise in the other DPJs, take the time to analyze files, to verify on which bases was made each of the adoptions. Without this background investigation, we would never have had the real portrait of Mauricie.
It is all the more essential since there is another institutional culture at the DPJ, that of unheeding.
Do you remember the first reaction of the director of the DPJ of Estrie in the aftermath of the death of the Granby girl? Alain Trudel had called people to “do not make amalgams”, not to launch the stone too quickly.
The survey will then have shown that the system had failed throughout the line.
What was the first reaction of the interim director of the DPJ of Mauricie, Sonia Mailloux, at the CDPDJ report? That it was not their fault. “Adoption is not a speaker who decides this in his office. These are elements that are subject to the court in recommendation. ” Precisely the opposite of what the Commission noted, namely that the DPJ managed to give the court the elements that made its business.
Sonia Mailloux’s first reaction was to minimize the findings of the CDPDJ. (Ciusss de la Mauricie-et-du-Center-du-Québec)
Ms. Mailloux maintained that “in the audits we have made, it was not reported, situations where we would have falsified information”.
Maybe you should review the way to do the audits.
As a result, we end up with dozens of children who have been removed from their family at the end of a sloppy process, who could always be there, but who will never return, the time having done his work. Minister Carmant promises that parents “will be accompanied”, that they will have “psychosocial follow -up as soon as possible.”
We tell them, we might not have had to give your baby by adoption, but that’s how it is.
The echoes that I have indicated to me that there would be in Mauricie a significant decrease in the number of requests for provisional withdrawals, it is a step in the right direction.
Mr. Carmant calculates that it will take “a few years to bring best practices”. A year, in the time of the child, it’s long.
This is why the CDPDJ, beyond this enlightening systemic investigation, should intervene long before when it is challenged in files where the rights of a child are shift. She must do this same meticulous investigation and intervene with the powers she has without waiting for them to be in her rear view mirror.
When it is too late.
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