Children’s Aid Societies not always making abuse checks, auditor finds

TORONTO – Ontario’s Children’s Aid Societies are not always checking for a history of abuse or assessing children’s protection needs on time, putting kids at risk, the province’s auditor general said Wednesday.

Bonnie Lysyk’s office visited seven of Ontario’s 47 Children’s Aid Societies and in the files they reviewed, not a single child protection investigation was completed within the required 30 days of being notified of concerns.

On average, those investigations were completed more than seven months later, Lysyk said. In one case, no investigation was ever completed.

In more than half of the cases the auditor general reviewed where a child had suffered abuse or there was an allegation of abuse, the CASs did not conduct a check of the child abuse register to see if there was a record of any history of abuse with the child or within the family, the auditor reported.

“Failure to conduct such crucial checks for the presence of domestic violence or child abuse at the time the child protection concern is reported, not only increases the risk that children are left in the care of individuals with such history, but also impacts the societies’ ability to properly assess the risk to children,” Lysyk said.

That is what happened in the case of Jeffrey Baldwin, a five-year-old boy who starved to death at the hands of his grandparents. The Catholic Children’s Aid Society placed Jeffrey and his siblings in the care of their grandparents, unaware that records of child-abuse convictions for each of them were sitting within the society’s own files.

In more than one-third of the investigations the auditor reviewed, the societies either didn’t do an assessment to identify any immediate safety threats to a child, or hadn’t done one within the required response time – between 12 hours and seven days, depending on the case.

The safety assessments in those cases were done an average of nearly 50 days after the referral, Lysyk said.

The Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, in its response to the report, vowed to develop ways to improve compliance with standards, including timely investigations.

Lysyk also highlighted questionable expenses at one society, though she didn’t identify which one. It rented a hotel room in Toronto for two years, at a cost of nearly $90,000, and used it less than 50 per cent of the time in the first year, Lysyk said.

The auditor noted other “excessive costs” incurred by the now-former executive director of that society, who has since agreed to reimburse the society “for costs that were not consistent with the society’s policies.”

The Ministry of Children and Youth Services is responsible for overseeing the Children’s Aid Societies, but Lysyk said it lacks sufficient information on the quality of care to allow it effective oversight.

It is not verifying that Children’s Aid Societies are actually implementing recommendations from coroners’ investigations into the deaths of children in care, Lysyk said. The ministry said it will establish a system to track recommendations that have been implemented or are in progress.

One recommendation from the coroner’s inquest into Jeffrey Baldwin’s death recommended in February 2014 that the Child Protection Information Network – which will allow Ontario’s CASs to share information – be fully implemented within two years.

Aside from a connecting IT system, the remaining children’s aid societies are not interconnected and can’t electronically share case information.

The Child Protection Information Network was originally supposed to be implemented by 2014-15, it is only operational at five of the 47 CASs and now isn’t slated to be fully rolled out until 2020. That delay has seen the cost balloon from $150 million to $200 million, Lysyk said.