Squalor and neglect

That's the state the Indigenous-run group home was in when a 17-year-old native resident killed himself two years ago.  The back story of how these group homes came into being is that the natives wanted their own kinship program to look after Indigenous kids who had to be taken from their care givers.  They didn't want "white men" to take care of their children.  They demanded kith and kin take over.  They knew better.

Well, that didn't work out too well for Traevon Deslarlais-Chalifoux, who had been removed from his mother's "care" for his own safety and well-being, did it.  "Conditions in B.C.'s Indigenous group homes are being allowed to deteriorate.  Without a shadow of a doubt, the situation is getting more severe and more acute," said provincial children's representative Jennifer Charlesworth.  

According to an investigation by 'The Globe and Mail', care workers in the home were verbally and physically abusive, neglectful and sometimes withheld food and locked residents outside for hours -- no matter the weather.  Traevon was also left alone in his tiny room for days and weeks at a time with no care whatsoever.  So he hanged himself.  To add insult to injury, no one in the home found him for four days.  Where was he?  Hanging in his own closet in his room at the home.

How can this have been allowed to have happened?!

"We need to know who is responsible for his death," said Kukpi7 Judy Wilson, of the union of BC Indian Chiefs.  "The ministry was negligent.  That child should have been taken out and placed somewhere else right away."  Well, duh!  Obviously, it was those running the home!  But you can bet it'll be the provincial government that'll be fingered.  In fact, they are now demanding the province enact urgent measures to ensure youth are being safely cared for in BC group homes.  But wasn't that what your much-touted kinship care program was going to do?  Isn't that still your responsibility, the one you insisted on shouldering?

That ball was dropped.  Hard.  In the case of this particular "care" home, audits have shown that in 89% of all cases, no plan for children in care had been developed and only three percent of all residents actually saw a social worker once a month, as mandated by the province.  Some didn't see a worker at all in the three-year audit period.  The audits also found that little children were being housed with much older kids in co-ed facilities with perpetrators of sexual abuse housed with their victims!

That's insane and criminal.  "The first question is:  Who failed Traevon?" asked MLA Sonia Furstenau, whose Cowichan riding has one of the highest rates of children in care in the province.  Well, when it comes to who failed, I'd start with the mother, but, of course, that won't happen.  In such cases, the parents are never to blame.  Why that is is beyond me!?  Must be "inter-generational residential school trauma" or "Colonialism", the go-to buzz blame for anything-and-everything native.

Here are a few never-mentioned facts about who's in care:

• 49% of children in care in B.C. are native, even though they make up only 7% of all children;
  
• One in six native kids is in care; and
• There are 11 times more native kids in care than all others. 

You can bet that when an inquiry is completed for this mess, it'll be the province that'll end up holding the bag.  The remedy?  More money in that bag for kinship care homes.

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And speaking of inquiries, can you believe the RCMP decided not to charge Trudeau for his four breaches of the ethnics rules when he took a boondogle freebie trip to the Aga Kahn's private island!  The reason they gave was that it would be worse for a sitting prime minister to be charged, than for just Joe Blow.  Brenda Lucki at her finest again!  Different laws for this PM for sure.