Youth advocate blasts ministry for squandering millions but doing no good

VICTORIA – B.C.’s children’s watchdog says it’s time for the government to stop spending millions of dollars on questionable initiatives and start taking action to help aboriginal kids and youth.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond says in her report that the Children’s Ministry has spent $66 million in the last dozen years on discussions and projects but there’s no evidence that a single aboriginal child or family has received better service as a result.

Turpel-Lafond says endless meetings and blue-sky projects were neither clearly articulated nor properly scrutinized and that the ministry’s senior leadership structure should be reviewed.

She says that between 2002 and 2009, more than $34 million was spent on the Regional Aboriginal Authorities initiative to transfer child welfare services to the community level but no change was ever made.

Turpel-Lafond says an initiative designed to transfer the authority over child welfare services to individual First Nations communities changed names midstream, lacked policy and has ended up being a series of ad hoc contracts.

She says the complex and uneven nature of funding for aboriginal child welfare hampers the effective and equitable delivery of services and that the ministry has failed to engage the federal government on the needs of First Nations children.