I was pleased recently to second the introduction of legislation in the province that would help to protect children in care as well as support foster families who open their hearts and their homes to children in need.
The legislation, which was introduced by my colleague Bonnie Mitchelson, would make a number of common sense changes to how children in care and foster families in Manitoba are treated. It would positively impact the hundreds of foster parents in southeastern Manitoba and better protect the children they care for.
Currently in Manitoba, when a Child and Family Services agency wants to remove a child from the home of a foster family and move them to another place, the foster family is entitled to very little in the way of information. That has resulted in attempts to remove foster children from good foster family homes where they are well supported and cared for with little warning and very little understanding of the new situation the children are entering.
It is little wonder that foster families report this can be traumatizing both to the children and to the foster family.
The proposed legislation would put into law some of the recommendations that have not yet been acted upon by the NDP government from the report into the tragic death of Gage Guimond. Gage was a two year old boy who died six weeks after being removed from a foster family’s home and placed into the home of a distant relative.
The legislation would require that, where there are no allegations of abuse, no child could be removed from a foster family without written reasons for the removal and a written plan of where the child is to be placed and how the placement is going to take place. This would ensure that there is a well thought out reason for moving a child from a foster home as well as a well thought out plan as to how a potential move would occur. Moving a child from one home to another is too unsettling without it being done for proper and documented reasons.
It is just common sense to have these procedures in place both for the safety of the child and for the support of the foster family. Fostering is an extremely important but extremely difficult thing to do. We are losing too many quality foster families because they lack the financial support and because they are not given the information and input they deserve after having invested so much into children.
The death of any child in care is a tragedy that cannot be undone. But learning from those tragedies and making changes that reduce the chance of another death help to honour the memory of that child. I sincerely hope for the sake of all children in care in Manitoba and all foster parents that the NDP government moves quickly to adopt these and other needed changes to the family services system in the province.
