Tina Fontaine asked for help before she died: children’s advocate

A report into the death of a Manitoba Indigenous teenager says she asked for help in the weeks before she was found dead in the Red River, but social agencies told her there were no beds available.

The report by Manitoba children’s advocate says that essentially left Tina Fontaine homeless and at risk for sexual exploitation.

“Tina had acute mental health needs following her father’s death but she was never provided with a single counselling session or other cultural healing, despite ongoing assessments and recommendations that this was a critical need in her life,” reads the report from Daphne Penrose.

“Further, Tina developed acute addictions in her final months of life and used many different drugs and alcohol but was unable to find the help she needed that would support her to address her underlying pain.”

Social workers and others ignored multiple signs that Tina was spiralling downward and in danger according to the report.

Penrose said following the death of Tina’s father, victim services did not follow through with the child to provide counselling support, “despite her right to this services and the obligation of victim services to provide it during the two and a half years in which they were involved with Tina’s family.”

The child advocate’s report also looked into the sexual exploitation of the province’s youth — something Penrose said Manitoba has a “shameful reputation for.”

Tina, who was 15, left her home on the Sagkeeng First Nation to reconnect with her birth mother in Winnipeg in June 2014. Her body was found wrapped in a duvet cover and weighed down by rocks that August.

The highly-anticipated report was released on Tina’s home reserve.

Recommendations from the children’s advocate

Penrose makes five recommendations, which she said need to be acted on quickly because children and youth are still facing the same risks and getting the same responses as Tina.

The first is for Manitoba Education and Training to reevaluate the use of suspensions and expulsions in public schools. Penrose pointed to the recently-formed Commission on Kindergarten to Grade 12 Education, which carefully examines the uses of those punishments so they can be limited, reduced, and phased out.

The second recommendation is for Manitoba Health, Seniors, and Active Living, which 10 months after the province handed down a mental health and addiction strategy, has yet to reveal implementation plans.

Penrose has also recommended for Manitoba Justice – Victim Services to “address the quality control measures that were lacking” in their interactions with Tina and her family. “While this system was involved for a number of years, barriers to access the service were plenty and overall, the service was not delivered to Tina in child-centred ways.”

The next is aimed at Child and Family Services and its responsibility to kids in need of protection.

“What Tina might have benefited from was access to the full continuum of services for children at imminent danger, and this continuum includes safe and secure treatment facilities that are therapeutic, culturally-informed, and effective — or, as Tina described to her CFS agency, a place where it feels like home,” Penrose’s report said.

And lastly, Penrose points at Manitoba Families to create a new protocol with individually-tailored response plans for missing kids. “Access to time-sensitive safety and care information about children who are missing might mean the difference between life and death for some youth.”

The report said response plans specific to each case are imperative because of a strong correlation between missing persons, sexual exploitation, and “other harms that can place young people at immediate risk of injury and death.”