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- Title
A MINISTRY FOR CHILDREN: ABANDONING THE INTERVENTIONIST DEBATE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA.
- Authors
Hall, Margaret
- Abstract
Until very recently, a legislative shift towards minimal state ‘intervention’ (endorsed somewhat in the 1995 SCC decision B (R) v Children's Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto¹) seemed to have established a new Canadian norm in child protection. In the province of British Columbia, the apparent ascendancy of that norm, continuing — indeed, self-consciously emulating — the trend in other provinces and countries was interrupted by a very public child death and a subsequent high profile inquiry (the Grove Report). What seems to have followed was the simultaneous embrace by the provincial government of two seemingly contradictory models of ‘reform’ — the newly drafted ‘non-interventionist’ statute and the Grove Report's criticism of family centred practice and call for a ‘child centred’ system. What followed next was a politically damaging child protection crisis; out of that crisis, and with dramatic speed, a new model has emerged which may have abandoned the interventionist debate altogether. The pace, dictated by political crisis, set the dramatic scale of the change agenda. That grand scale — the new Ministry — will, it is hoped, generate a wholly new and child centred culture. Functional integration is not complete, and modifications continue, but the shape of the new Ministry and, crucially, its relationship to the new office of the Children's Commissioner, are acquiring definition.
- Subjects
BRITISH Columbia; CHILD welfare; CHILD death; CHILDREN'S rights; CHILD welfare boards; FAMILY policy; SOCIAL work with children; CANADA. Ministry of Social Services
- Publication
International Journal of Law, Policy & the Family, 1998, Vol 12, Issue 2, p121
- ISSN
1360-9939
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/lawfam/12.2.121