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Stephen Kimber - Ongoing Media Support
First of all we want to thank Stephen Kimber for his ongoing media support concerning some of the issues we have with CAS/ CFS and the government Agency that apprehends children and unjustly destroys innocent families.
More importantly, I am thankful that Mr Kimber is able to see and understand the bigger issues behind these stories - All our families are at risk and we must speak up - we must take a stand. The system is corrupt and we must expose this corruption, if there is any hope of fixing it.
Read this informative 2005 article, Columnist turns activist , on Kimber himself.
When we first started our advocacy work, we got all kinds of excuses from the media for not writing stories criticizing the government concerning Children Services. They ranged from:
“I tried to write a story on these issues before but my editor won’t let me”,
“I wrote a similar story before but I got my knuckles rapped and I won’t do this again”,
“We don‘t have the financial resources to properly research these stories“,
“If the government comes after us we don’t have the financial resources to defend ourselves.“ and
“The government has threatened us that they will take us to court if we publish this.”
Kimber's Articles: (listed in chronological order)
1. Shirley Street Stand-Off May 30, 2004
2. Unanswered questions from the Shirley Street Standoff Aug 15, 2004
3. The crime of being a pain September 19, 2004
4. The taking of Mona Clare... Again September 26, 2004
5. Best interests of the child or Children’s Aid? February 27, 2005
6. Why we need a public inquiry into the taking of Mona Clare May 29, 2005
7. Open Letter to Justice Minister Michael Baker June 07, 2005
8. Potholes litter path to public inquiry July 4th, 2005
9. Justice Minister should know better when it comes to Children's Aid Sunday, July 10, 2005
10. Committee? Check. - Justice? Maybe no Sunday, December 18, 2005
11. Will the province learn Judge Nunn’s lessons? Dec 10, 2006
12. Committee? What committee? : Revisiting the (non) review committee ( web name ) Mar 25, 2007 / Children's Act needs work (newspaper name) March 27/2007
13. Wright and Wrong: Wright the wrong man for the job (web name) / Wrong member on review body : Community Services shows contempt for its own processes (newspaper name) July 5, 2007
14. Police review of standoff: Police learn nothing from standoff (web name) / Little revealed in standoff review (paper name) Aug 2, 2007
15. Shirley Street standoff report revisited : Blacked-out bits raise questions (web name ) / Beneath the black marker: Curiosity uncovers a secret in the Shirley Street standoff review (newspaper name ) Aug 9, 2007
Kimber's Articles: (Listed in legal order - Most recent 1st)
Square brackets[ ] are added notes and comments.
15. Shirley Street standoff report revisited : Blacked-out bits raise questions / Curiosity uncovers a secret in the Shirley Street standoff review
Aug 9, 2007
By Stephen Kimber
“Satiable curiosity,” as Kipling called it, is one of the peculiar traits of the journalist. I have spent more hours than I can count — or should admit to — trying to decipher the usually meaningless upside-down writing on the desks of people I am interviewing. Or listening in on banal conversations to which I am not a party.
Which may explain how I came to be hunched over a spotlight last week, squinting, trying to make out what was hidden beneath the black felt-markered-out sections of the copy of the Halifax Regional Police Operational Review of the Shirley Street standoff.
Last week, I wrote about what was in the publicly released portion of that much delayed report I had received through a Freedom of Information request. It focused on the police department’s role in a controversial May 2004 incident in which heavily armed police used a battering ram to smash their way into a Halifax home in the middle of the night to execute a Children’s Aid apprehension order for an infant.
This week, I want to talk about the parts I wasn’t supposed to see.
To be fair, the police only blacked out three small sections of the 16-page report. In his cover letter to me, Deputy Chief Tony Burbridge cited two sections of the Protection of Privacy and Freedom of Information Act to justify what he described as the “severed parts of the record.” The first was that disclosing the information “would be reasonably be expected to harm law enforcement and harm the effectiveness of investigative techniques or procedures…” The second was that the information “would be an unreasonable invasion of a third party’s personal privacy.”
So, of course, I peeked. And peered. And stared. And held the documents up to the light to see what, if anything, they might reveal.
I was unable to decipher anything from two of the excisions, which were among a catalogue of what the report described as “numerous tactics… utilized in attempting to reach a successful resolution of the incident.”
But the third blacked-out section — about an incident before the stand-off when the police were still trying to find out where Carline VandenElsen had disappeared to with her baby daughter — turned out to be at least partially readable.
And intriguing.
In the chronology, the incident occurs sometime between Feb. 23, when a Det/Cst. Webber contacted a Children’s Aid official to update her on the progress of the investigation, and Feb, 26, 2004, just three days later, when Larry Finck, the father of the little girl and husband of Carline, came to police headquarters asking to lay a complaint against Children’s Aid “for conspiracy in the abduction of his child.”
Which means that the subject of this blacked-out section occurred more than a month after police first unsuccessfully tried to enforce the apprehension order and almost two full months before police attempts to seize the child touched off a three-day SWAT team siege at the Finck home.
Here’s what I can read: “Det/Cst. Webber met with Senior Crown Attorney Frank Hoskins to discuss proceeding with —“ which is followed by a few words I can’t read — “He advised that there were insufficient grounds at this time to support prosecution. Barbara MacPherson of Children’s Aid was advised of this decision.”
Which raises an interesting question.
How does this information match up with the department’s stated explanations for refusing to disclose this particular section to me?
Surely, consulting with a Senior Crown on whether there are grounds to lay charges is commonplace police procedure, hardly the sort of top-secret investigative technique the Act is supposed to allow police to keep confidential.
As for violating the privacy rights of a third party, the fact is that both the cop and Barbara MacPherson, a CAS case worker, are already identified in several sections of the report released to me. And Frank Hoskins is a public official acting in a public capacity.
So which of the stated exemptions applies in this case?
If neither do — and it appears they don’t — then why did the police decide to try to keep this small section of the report from my prying eyes?
Could it be that they simply didn’t want to publicly admit there were no grounds to lay charges against anyone in this case until police officers banged on the door in the middle of the night of May 19 and turned a family matter into a criminal case that changed the lives of all of those involved?
And what does that say about the police department’s commitment to openness and transparency?
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. In 2004, he was a member of an ad hoc citizen’s group that campaigned unsuccessfully for a public inquiry into this case. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
14. Police learn nothing from standoff
Aug 2, 2007 By Stephen Kimber
The Halifax Regional Police learned nothing from 2004’s costly three-day Shirley Street standoff — because there was nothing for them to learn. They did everything right.
That, at least, is the pre-determined conclusion of the department’s self-serving, butt-covering, two-years-in-the-making, 16-page internal review of “Incident Number 04-21470.”
That is the blandly bureaucratic designation for the infamous case in which police bungled efforts to execute a Children’s Aid Society apprehension order to seize the infant daughter of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen. That quickly escalated into a 67-hour siege, complete with barricaded suspects, a shot fired, deployment of a heavily-armed SWAT team, the evacuation of a Halifax neighbourhood, the natural-causes death of Finck’s mother [The grandmother, Mona Finck, died of a heart attack. Since when is a heart attack a "natural cause"?] who was inside the house at the time, prison terms for both VandenElsen and Finck and the end of any hope their infant daughter might have had for a normal family life.
One hopes the reason the police didn’t release the report’s findings publicly themselves — I had to get my only slightly blacked-out copy through a Freedom of Information application — is because they’re embarrassed by it.
One hopes…
Though the report deals with, or, more accurately, dismisses questions about the entire chain of events — from the department’s initial attempt on Jan. 15, 2004 to execute a court order to take the infant into protective custody to the moment the child was finally grabbed on May 21, 2004 — let’s look today only at the critical decisions police officers made on the night of May 19. Those were the ones that turned what should have been a routine custody matter into a matter of life and death.
Having heard rumours that VandenElsen — who’d disappeared with her daughter around the time of the initial court order — had been spotted back in Halifax in the company of Finck in the criminal act of “pushing a baby stroller in the area of Vernon and Shirley Street,” the police immediately mounted a full-scale, drug-style surveillance operation.
Early that evening, they followed the couple to a Wal-Mart and watched as they clandestinely “purchased baby supplies.” After shadowing the dangerous duo back to their Shirley Street address with their fresh-bought diapers, one of the officers peeked in a window and saw Finck with “an infant he assumed” to be their daughter.
One assumes, though the report doesn’t say so, that the infant did not appear to be in mortal danger from her father at the time.
At that point — after 10:30 at night — police officers made the fateful decision to snatch the child immediately rather than wait for morning, or for the couple — who seemed blissfully unaware police were on to them — to leave the house again.
Why not wait? There is no evidence the child — supposedly the reason for all of this — was in immediate danger.
Was it a budgetary decision? Did police gamble a swift snatch-and-grab would be cheaper than the hard slog of continuing surveillance and safe apprehension? If so, they blew it badly.
The report never really addresses those questions, though it does attempt to justify the fact senior officers dispatched three uniformed police to pound on the door at 12:34 a.m.
Finck and VandenElsen, the report says, “were known to be violent towards police.”
While that makes an even more compelling argument for caution, we need to ask on what basis the police determined this. The report offers no backup for its assertion.
VandenElsen, it’s true, had been charged with abducting her children from a previous marriage, but a jury had acquitted her in that case. An appeals court had ordered a new trial, but it hadn’t yet taken place. There’s no evidence I’ve seen she was ever violent toward police.
As for Finck, he’d served two years for kidnapping a daughter from a previous relationship and was certainly well known to challenge authority. [The mother of this child was dead and was in the custody of an Uncle whom Larry believed was assaulting his daughter] Did he have a history of actual violence against police? Not that I’m aware of.
The reality, as police know all too well, is that custody cases are emotional and volatile. That’s why prudent decision-making is vital to prevent an incident from escalating out of control.
The report claims police officers “do not have discretion” in enforcing apprehension orders, which is, of course, ludicrous. While they may not have a choice in whether to enforce an order, they have lots of leeway in how to do it.
Police decisions in this case led to an expensive, disruptive standoff, criminal convictions for two people who wanted nothing more than to raise their child and the total destruction, beyond repair, of a family — and yet the report claims there are no lessons to be learned.
Perhaps we will only begin to learn those lessons after a police officer — or a baby — is dead.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. In 2004, he was a member of an ad hoc citizen’s group that campaigned unsuccessfully for a public inquiry into this case. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
13. Wright the wrong man for the job
July 5, 2007
By Stephen Kimber
If you want to begin to understand the utter disdain Nova Scotia’s department of community services has for its own legislation — and for the people it is supposed to serve — consider its recent appointment of Robert Wright to the committee that is supposed to review the province’s Children and Family Services Act.
Wright is a senior community services bureaucrat, a former director of Cumberland County family and children’s services and executive director of the department’s recently announced youth strategy and services.
Incredibly, however, Wright has been named to the review committee as one of two persons “whose children have been, are or may be in need of protective services...” (italics very definitely mine).
When the Nova Scotia Family and Children’s Services Act was introduced in 1990, it was hailed as a progressive piece of legislation, but even its framers understood the act would need to be reviewed regularly to make sure it was still working to — in the words of the act — “protect children from harm, promote the integrity of the family and assure the best interests of children.”
Which is why the legislation required the minister to “establish an advisory committee whose function is to review annually the provisions of this act and the services relating thereto and to report annually to the minister concerning the operation of the act and whether the principles and purpose of the act are being achieved.”
The 10-member committee was supposed to represent all the key players in the child protection system, including not only agency representatives, legal aid workers and other insiders but also — specifically — two people whose experience was from the receiving end of child protective services.
Wright, whatever his many other sterling qualities, should not be a “parent” representative on this committee. (A government spokesperson says she can’t say what Wright’s specific qualifications are for the post “as it would be a breach of confidentiality,” noting only that the legislature’s toothless human resources committee appointed Mr. Wright.)
Regardless, the fact is he is an insider. He can’t help but represent — and be seen to be representing — the government’s vested interest in the review process. A government spokesperson claims the department sought “legal advice” before it appointed him; I’d love to see the verbal gymnastics involved in justifying that leap of lizardly legal logic!
The unhappy truth is that Wright’s appointment merely continues the pattern of cavalier contempt the department has shown for its own process.
[This contempt was also evident when Linda Youngson and Marilyn Dey took the Minister to court to force the Minister to appoint this committee as specified in section 88 of the Act itself. The sole arguement the government brought to the court was that "The Crown only owed it's duty to the Crown" and that individual citizens like Youngson and Dey did not have the right to bring the government to court to obey its own laws ! - Thank goodness, the Justice did not agree! ]
Between 1999 and 2005 [correction: 1996-2005] , this government didn’t even bother to appoint a review committee. It only reluctantly did so after two determined women [Youngson and Dey] — who’d had their own unhappy experiences with the system — took the minister to court two years ago.
After Supreme Court Justice Hilary Nathanson ordered the department to belatedly live up to its legal obligations, the then-minister, David Morse [Minister of Community Services], did his best to sabotage the ruling’s intent.
The legislation calls for the appointment of “two persons drawn from the cultural, racial or linguistic minority communities” in order to bring other perspectives to the table. Morse instead appointed two Children’s Aid Society staff members who, only incidentally, happened to come from those communities.
Morse named a personal friend as the first parent member on the committee. (The government, of course, wouldn’t even consider applications from the two women [Youngson and Dey] who’d taken the government to court and won; they clearly were too interested in the system’s workings. The department claims it’s still looking to fill the other parent vacancy on its committee.)
And now, thanks largely to the government’s ongoing efforts of hobble its work — delaying appointing new members to replace those who have resigned or whose terms have expired, naming people like Wright who clearly don’t belong — the committee is in a shambles. It still hasn’t even filed its last annual report, which would have been only the first since the courts ordered it to act.
None of this is intended as a knock on Robert Wright’s qualifications to serve as executive director of the new youth strategy the government has set up in response to the Nunn Commission report. Or even to suggest he could not represent the minister’s interests on the review committee; there are slots for that too.
But he cannot — and should not pretend to — represent the interests of those on the receiving end of the system.
If the minister doesn’t revoke his appointment, Wright should do the honourable thing and resign himself.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
12. Children's Act needs work (web title) / Committee? What committee? Revisiting the (non) review committee (newspaper titile) (Mar 25, 2007)
By Stephen Kimber The Daily News
Release Date: March 27/2007 ?
If my e-mail inbox is any indication, there are plenty of Nova Scotians who have serious concerns with this province's Children's and Family Services Act.
Back in 2004, there was a dramatic three-day standoff between a Halifax police SWAT team and parents Carline VandenElsen and Larry Finck over the Children's Aid Society's decision to seize their infant daughter.
Troubled by what I believed were too many questions about that incident, I joined an ad hoc group that lobbied, unsuccessfully, for a public inquiry into what led up to the siege.
Probably because of that, I still frequently get letters and e-mails from people who believe they and their children, or their grandchildren, have been ill-used by the system, especially provisions of the act that allow social workers to seize children they believe need protection.
Some of their stories are heart-wrenching, and frustrating, too, because there often seems little anyone can do to challenge what's happened.
They're not the only ones with concerns about this province's child-services system.
Last fall, a Halifax judge publicly threatened to haul Community Services Minister Judy Streatch into court to explain what her department was doing to help a troubled 16-year old girl in provincial care. The judge backed off, but the problem hasn't gone away.
Competing interests
There are no easy answers when you're trying to find the appropriate balance among the act's three, sometimes competing, purposes: "protect children from harm, promote the integrity of the family and assure the best interests of children."
For every tale of the seemingly arbitrary snatching of a child - like the Finck-VandenElsen case - there are equally troubling stories of children who should have been taken from their parents, and weren't.
And then, too, there are the horror stories of children abused in the very foster care that was supposed to protect them.
Which is one reason our Children's and Family Services Act includes a specific provision requiring the minister to appoint an advisory committee of people actually involved in the system - including "two persons whose children have been, are, or may be in need of, protective services" - to review the act each year, recommend changes and report back to the minister.
Everything you need to know about this government's lack of interest in child welfare is in the unhappy history of this committee.
There wasn't even a ["annual'] committee - let alone an annual review of the department's most important piece of legislation - between 1999 [correction 1993] and 2005.
That only finally, sort of, changed after Marilyn Dey and Linda Youngson - two women with unhappy personal experiences of the system - took the government to court in June 2005 to embarrass it into doing what its own legislation says it must do.
Unfortunately, this government doesn't embarrass easily.
Supreme Court Justice Hilary Nathanson finally ordered the department to appoint the committee in December 2005.
The department then did its best to sabotage the process. It appointed Children's Aid Society staff members to community positions reserved for francophone and minority groups, and named a friend of the then-minister to fill one of the parent positions. (Dey and Youngson applied; the government ignored them.)
The committee didn't get working until April last year.
Though it held hearings last fall, during which more than 30 groups [and individuals] made presentations, the committee eventually collapsed [?] when three of its seven designated members resigned or reached the end of their terms, and were not replaced. (One of the problems with the act is that committee members are only appointed for one-year terms.)
The committee had to cancel one scheduled meeting in January and was forced to turn its February session into an informal discussion because only two advisory committee members were present.
[This was a concern to two women, Linda Youngson and Thelma Gilespie who were scheduled to make presentations that day - They demanded and got a re-presentation date (they were rescheduled for June 2007) . However on this rescheduled date, they were still not given the respect of a quorum - in part because THERE HAS NOT BEEN A LEGAL COMMITTEE SINCE DECEMBER 2006 because all the members specified in the CFS Act that must be appointed to have a legal committee have NOT been on this committee since this date ]
"Am I frustrated?" asks Cheryl Harawitz, the veteran social worker and child-welfare advocate who chairs the advisory committee. "I guess I'm so used to working with bureaucracies that I don't let myself get frustrated."
This week, she finally got word from the minister that two of the committee vacancies are being filled, enough to allow the committee to at least meet. "We'll get things rolling again," Harawitz says.
October report?
So when will the committee report? Well, of course, it will take time for the new members to get up to speed and digest the reports and presentations already made.
By the end of October, Harawitz hopes.
And that, of course, is for the report that was supposed to be filed by the end of last year.
And so it goes.
[When Linda Youngson and Thelma Gilespie made their re-presentations in June, they heard excuses from several members of the committee for why they were NOT obligated to submit a public report as this committee did in 1993 and 1996. This was totally contrary to the information they were given by the 2 member committee they met with in February ! After their original presentations (Youngson had brought this very concern up in her presentation0 to this meger committee) they were assured that there would a public report.]
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of
King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel,
Reparations.
11. Will the province learn Judge Nunn’s lessons?
Dec 10, 2006
By Stephen Kimber
To his credit, Justice Minister Murray Scott got it right. "I can't go back," he conceded in his first response to the release last week of Merlin Nunn’s report into the death of Theresa McAvoy. "I can only go ahead." But, he added with apparent sincerity, “we want to learn from this.”
His boss, on the other hand, clearly hadn't read -- or at least didn’t bother to think about -- the broader implications of the retired Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge’s comprehensive and far-reaching investigation.
"When you take a look at the issues that the Conservative government in Ottawa have been putting forward,” Premier Rodney MacDonald explained to reporters in his usual obscure way, “they've been very much in support of being stronger in that regard, so I applaud them." He kept his focus pinpoint-narrow on the Stephen-Harper, get-tough-on-crime, right-wing-agenda aspects of Judge Nunn’s report and blithely ignored a more important reality that was equally well-documented in the judge's exhaustive 381-page report and its 34 separate recommendations. The best — perhaps only — way to avoid future tragedies like Theresa McEvoy’s death is to deal with the root causes of youth crime before more young people "spiral out of control" like Archie Billard.
I don't mean to suggest here that those recommendations in the judge’s report that deal directly with protecting the public from dangerous young people are not important, or necessary. As Nunn makes clear, Ottawa needs to change the Youth Criminal Justice Act to broaden the definition of violent offenses and find ways to keep comparatively few, but potentially lethal young offenders off the streets while they await trial. And we need to streamline the legal process to make it much more efficient and effective in order to prevent exactly the kind of calamitous bureaucratic and technological breakdowns that blotted this case.
Nova Scotians, as Premier McDonald rightly pointed out, "want to know that the youth that are causing problems in our society... are being dealt with effectively, and that our judges and others have the powers necessary to deal with these issues."
That’s the easy part.
If, however, that is the only message the government takes from Justice Nunn's report, all his broader efforts — 23 volumes’ worth — will have been for nothing.
It is clear from Nunn’s report that Archie Billard’s life had spiraled out of control long before October 14, 2004, the day he got stoned, stole a Chrysler LeBaron and smashed it head-on into a car driven by McAvoy. The 52-year-old teacher’s aide and mother of three boys was killed instantly.
The province’s swift, knee-jerk decision to that tragedy — appoint Judge Nunn to conduct an inquiry — seemed, at first blush, little more than the political game of pin-the-blame-on-someone. There was widespread community outrage that Billard -- who was already facing numerous charges in connection with earlier joyriding incidents -- was not in jail at the time of the crash. So someone must pay.
To his credit, Nunn refused to take that easy route. And, instead of starting his inquiry at the point where Archie Billard first smacked up against the youth criminal justice system, Nunn unraveled that particularly messy ball of string backwards to show how and why Billard had ended up in trouble in the first place. His report clearly demonstrates that what happened in this case was “a system failure” that goes far beyond naming names and will require us, as a society, to accept collective responsibility for changing the conditions that create Archie Billards.
Nunn’s most important larger-picture recommendations, in fact, have to do with creating a comprehensive provincial strategy — managed by senior officials from community services, health, education and justice — to find ways to help youth at risk before the risk becomes criminal reality.
It won’t be easy. And success won’t come cheap. As regional school board spokesperson Doug Hadley pointed out, the judge’s recommendation that schools establish facilities for in-school suspensions, to take just one example, will mean not only finding physical space, hiring more bodies and creating new programs but also finding a way to balance those new demands with “the needs of the entire school population.”
Implementing all of Judge Nunn’s 34 recommendations will be a daunting and expensive but critically important task, and one that won’t be made easier when our premier — the person who should be showing leadership on the issue — doesn’t appear to even understand what the issues are.
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King’s College, is the author of five nonfiction books and one novel.
10. Committee? Check. Justice? Maybe no
By Stephen Kimber
The Daily News Sunday, December 18, 2005
Graham Steele was frustrated. One of his constituents, a woman named Marilyn Dey, had come to him almost two years before, to ask for his help with a child custody case. But she'd buried the NDP MLA under the weight of so many documents and so much information - not just about her own case, but the cases of others she knew who were experiencing similar problems with the province's child welfare services - Steele was overwhelmed.
To complicate matters, she'd not only drawn connections among all those cases, but also tied them together with the intricate strands of any number of conspiracy theories to explain the why of the what.
Steele had tried to tell her he wasn't an investigator or a policeman, that neither he nor his colleagues had the resources or the authority to do the kind of investigations she wanted.
Which was why he was relieved earlier this year when Dey mentioned in passing that she'd discovered [Actually it was Linda Youngson] that an independent committee the government was supposed to appoint each year - to review how the child welfare act was working - had not been operational for at least three years.
"Now that," he said, "I can help you with."
Supreme Court
Trading in his MLA's podium for his lawyer's briefs, Steele filed an application [as lawyer for his clients Linda Youngson and Marilyn Dey] with the courts to force the minister of community services, David Morse, to appoint the review committee.
Last week, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Hilroy Nathanson wasted little time in dismissing the government's dissembling justifications for inaction and ordered the minister to do it by the end of this month.
The fact is that the government - perhaps recognizing the ridiculousness of its own arguments - had already finally, belatedly, reluctantly begun naming people to serve on the 10-person committee."
When we filed the court papers June 27," Steel says, "they had appointed zero members."
By the time court convened at 11 a.m. on Dec. 13, nine of the 10 members of the review committee were in place, the last two named just two hours before the hearing.
While Steele says he personally knows some of those appointed to the committee "and they'll be fine," he noted that the appointment process itself "left a great deal to be desired."
By law, the committee's membership is supposed to include one representative each of the minister and a child welfare agency, a legal aid lawyer, two members from the province's "cultural, racial or linguistic minority communities" and - most importantly - "two persons whose children have been, are or may be in need of protective services."
The government pointedly dismissed applications from Dey and another woman, Linda Youngson, the second complainant in Steele's application, who wanted to serve as parent representatives.
And it ignored other individuals who'd volunteered to serve after reading about Steele's court application.
At the same time, the government courted others to come forward, even doing the paperwork for a least one nominee.
Society employees
The two names they initially put forward as minority representatives, in fact, turned out to be employees of the Children's Aid Society, the agency whose actions are most likely to be criticized. Talk about stacking the deck!
But the key appointees remain those two parent representatives. "The aim of the people who set this up," says Steele, was that those on the "receiving end of the system" be strongly represented on the committee.
So who has Morse named?
The man chosen to fill one of those two positions is Timothy Van Zoost, who ran provincially for the Conservatives a few elections ago. His qualification is that one of his children was in care before he adopted her. While that technically fits the criteria, it sure as hell doesn't give Van Zoost experience with having his child taken away from him, or with trying to get her back.
There is still one vacancy for a parent representative on the committee, one last chance for David Morse to get it right. Based on his track record, don't hold your breath.
Even after it is finally in place, however, it's worth asking what the committee can actually do. Can it look into the dozens of complaints from people like Dey about how [this was missing in printer article]
Can it go back to the spring of 2004 and finally conduct a real review of the controversial CAS seizure of Larry Finck's and Carline VandenElsen's infant daughter?
Steele says it can."It's supposed to be an independent committee," he explains. "The question is whether it will be willing to ask the tough questions. "
He pauses. "The fact is there is no other forum for these discussions. The committee is the only hope for those people who want answers to their questions."All of us should be watching to see what happens.
Stephen Kimber is a member of the MCF Inquiry Committee, a community group pushing for a public inquiry into the seizure of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen's baby.
9. Justice Minister should know better when it comes to Children's Aid
By Stephen Kimber
The Daily News Sunday, July 10, 2005
Justice Minister Michael Baker is no stranger to controversies over child protection in Nova Scotia.
Which may explain his reluctance to call a public inquiry into last year's Family Court decision to order the Halifax Children's Aid Society to seize the daughter of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen, despite a lack of evidence the infant was at risk.
Baker, a South Shore lawyer before becoming an MLA, served a good-works apprenticeship in the decade or so before he was first elected to the legislature in 1998.
He was vice-chairman of the Lunenburg County Regional Housing Authority, president of the Lunenburg Academy Foundation and - from 1992 to 1995 - a member of the board of Family and Children's Services of Lunenburg County (FCS), "a non-profit child-welfare agency dedicated to the protection of children from abuse and neglect."
In 1994, the Liberal government of the day appointed two Ontario social workers to conduct an independent review of the operations of that same Lunenburg FCS - the equivalent of Halifax's Children's Aid Society - following two shocking incidents in which FCS officials appeared to be the ones perpetrating the abuse and neglect.
In the first case, a five-week-old baby was shaken to death in 1993, three weeks after child-protection workers had received warnings the baby was being abused.
In the second the [Debra Stevens case] , workers at the agency had ignored complaints that children, in what the agency proudly described as a "very good" foster home, were being sexually abused. FCS actually continued to place children - 20 in all - with the family, even after learning of the allegations. It wasn't until five years after the first complaints that the foster father was finally found guilty - no thanks to FCS - of sexually abusing four youngsters in his care.
In truth, the review of the Lunenburg FCS only happened - three years after the guilty verdict - because Debra Stevens refused to go away. [see a synopsis of this case of this case at this hyperlink]
A single mother who'd been talked into turning her two sons over to children's services in 1985, Stevens became suspicious about the foster home into which her two sons had been adopted, and refused to stop asking questions.
The Family and Children's Services Agency initially ignored her complaints, or dismissed her as a "nuisance" - remind you of anyone, Mr. Minister? - and described her as a "social climber (who) went into a song and dance about being a single parent." The first social worker she dealt with reported that "Hopefully, (Stevens) got the message, as it was obvious that she appeared guilty."
Guilty of what? Caring about her children?
The outside reviewers the province finally appointed to look into what had gone wrong in that and the shaken-baby case concluded - in the words of a simple but telling precis offered by then-community services minister Jim Smith - "the system failed Debra and her family."
Incredibly, when Stevens tried to regain custody of her youngest son after the sexual-abuse charges were laid, FCS opposed the move, dispatching its own lawyers and four witnesses to the hearing to fight to keep the child with the wife of the man who'd abused her children (who was then out on bail).
Supreme Court Justice Walter Goodfellow not only awarded custody back to Stevens, but he also demolished the FCS's claim the woman [the foster mother] hadn't known the children were being abused by her husband: "If in fact she did not know, ignorance of such conduct could only be by willful blindness or negligence."
What does all of this have to do with Michael Baker now?
To be fair to Baker, he only joined the board after the courts had convicted the foster father, but that was still a full three years before the province - not the FCS - launched its review.
Knowing what he knows about what went on in Lunenburg, Baker should realize just how fallible children's services can be.
The Finck-VandenElsen case, of course, represents the flip side of what happened in Lunenburg. Instead of under-reacting to allegations of real abuse, the Halifax Children's Aid Society stands accused of over-reacting to vague concerns from Ontario Children's Aid and erroneous information from a not-disinterested ex-husband.
While that may put into clearer perspective the real-life dilemma child-protection workers face every day in trying to determine when a child is at real risk - something even those of us criticizing Children's Aid need to acknowledge - it also strengthens the argument that we need a public inquiry to find out what went wrong in the Finck-VandenElsen case, and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Let's hope it doesn't take another three years this time.
The Richard Cuthbertson article alluded to below appears next.
The Daily News (Halifax)
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Who are they?
By Richard Cuthbertson
A small bouquet of flowers wrapped in plastic lay on the doorstep of the lime green house at 6161 Shirley St. last week. Only days earlier, the house was the scene of a sensational three-day standoff involving Carline VandenElsen, her husband Larry Finck, their infant daughter and swarms of heavily armed police officers.
Police had arrived in the middle of night with a Children's Aid Society apprehension order in hand, but were turned away when the door to the home was barricaded and shots allegedly fired from inside.
Finck and VandenElsen face a myriad of charges in relation to the standoff, and their infant daughter has been taken by Children's Aid.
Meanwhile, it appears that someone placed those flowers at the house in memory of Finck's mother, Mona, who died in the house during the standoff.
We now know that Mona Finck lived on the street for more than three decades, and longtime residents like Mary Deyoung, said she was a familiar and well-liked face in the neighbourhood.
The circumstances surrounding her death date back years.
Larry Finck and VandenElsen are quickly becoming household names. Some see them as narcissistic, spurred by a sense of martyrdom, people who relish their battles with the justice system. Others see them as heroes in a fight pitting an overbearing, even menacing, state against the lawful rights of parents.
It seems odd (although some would say it's destiny) that two people whose lives have taken such remarkably similar tangents should meet, fall in love, marry and have a child together. But that's exactly what happened when they wed a year ago. Now, the couple is embroiled in a legal and custody battle that's become a low point in years of legal accusations, custody battles, and kidnapping trials.
Larry Finck's story began when his first daughter was born in Ontario in 1995. The mother died a year later, leaving custody of the child with her brother.
But Finck felt the girl should be with him and began a legal battle to gain guardianship.
As a younger man, Finck was no saint, said an old friend, Ron VandenBussche, who met Finck 20 years ago while organizing a senior league hockey team in London, Ont.
"He was a party boy, there's no doubt about it," said VandenBussche this week. Among other things, Finck was once reportedly busted by police for running an after-hours bootlegging club in London.
"He was just a character," said VandenBussche. "He'd been around the hockey wars and had a lot of good stories to tell. He was a streetwise guy."
But Finck, who became a master plumber, wanted to straighten out, said VandenBussche, and was preparing to bring up his young daughter in an old farmhouse he was renovating. At the time, Finck only had access to his daughter, including a two-week period during August 1999, when she visited him.
According to court records, Finck was due to return his daughter at the end of the month to her home on the Thames First Nation Reserve, where she was living with her uncle. Instead, he whisked her off to Halifax. Halifax Regional Police and arrested him a month later, returning Finck and his daughter to Ontario. Although offered legal aid, Finck defended himself against charges of kidnapping. According to court documents, he introduced 15 witnesses, attempting to justify his actions by demonstrating his daughter was in danger under the care of her uncle. But the judge in the case dismissed the claim that the girl was being mistreated and found Finck guilty, a ruling that was upheld on appeal. In the appeal decision, Justice Robert Armstrong wrote that far from being in danger, Finck's daughter was in good hands.
"There was no evidence that (Finck's daughter) was ever at risk physically, emotionally or psychologically," wrote Armstrong.
"The five physicians called to testify by (Finck) each described (Finck's daughter) as happy and in good health. The Children's Aid and Child and Family Service workers expressed no concern about her welfare. The two childcare workers described (Finck's daughter) as a happy, normally developing child."
The conviction landed Finck a two-year prison sentence. Judges have described Finck as confrontational, and even friends said the man isn't always easy to deal with.
"He's a smart guy and knows his way around the Criminal Code better than most lawyers," said London barrister William Dewar, who's known Finck for 25 years.
"And he's fearless. He'll stand up to the judges, even appeal court judges, tell them what the law is, look them in the eye. That's his problem: he's too smart by half."
But in a written decision obtained by The Daily News discussing Finck's application for parole in November 2001, the National Parole Board went further, suggesting that Finck's actions bordered on delusional.
"Your current obsessive type behaviour regarding the legal challenges you are making to the courts appears at times to be a departure from the generally shared perception of reality."
That doesn't make sense to VandenBussche, who said he's never thought twice about trusting his own 14-year-old daughter with Finck and VandenElsen.
He said he first met VandenElsen and her triplets by a previous marriage when they were his guests last summer at his home at Turkey Point on Lake Erie.
"She spent three days with us," said VandenBussche. "I thought she was a good mother. She disciplined the kids when they needed it, and was good to them when they needed it. They took my daughter and their kids down to the play-park, just like an ordinary family."
VandenElsen's story hit headlines in 2000 when she took off with her triplets, going on the run out of fear she would lose all custody to her ex- husband. The incident sparked an international search, while the woman spent three months zigzagging across the continent with her children, briefly spending time in Halifax. Her face was plastered on America's Most Wanted, a U.S. television program that profiles accused criminals on the lam. Authorities caught up to VandenElsen and the triplets in Acapulco, Mexico. The children were returned to their father, and VandenElsen faced three charges of kidnapping. But she beat the rap after a sympathetic jury was convinced that the kidnapping was justified because the children would have suffered emotional harm without access to their mother.
Despite the ruling, VandenElsen lost custody of her children in November. In a written decision of her appeal in the case, Justice Grant Campbell wrote: "It has become patently obvious to any person with any healthy sense of balance that these three children have become the vehicle by which Ms. VandenElsen has chosen to perpetuate her fixation with her own perceived victimization."
About a month later, VandenElsen gave birth to Finck's daughter in Halifax. According to Dewar, who's been in contact with Finck, the couple believed the Children's Aid Society wanted to take the child soon after she was born.
"Somebody recognized Carline in the hospital (in Halifax) and blew the whistle, and it wasn't long before the CAS down there got in the picture," said Dewar.
In the end, the child was taken after the 67-hour standoff, which ended when VandenElsen and Finck emerged from the Shirley Street house with their infant daughter, carrying a stretcher bearing the body of Mona Finck.
Mona Finck's funeral was a simple affair at St. Thomas Aquinas Church on Oxford Street, where she once worshiped. There was no eulogy, only prayers and quiet hymns -- belying, perhaps, the circumstances of her death.
rcuthbertson@hfxnews.ca
8. Potholes litter path to public inquiry
By Stephen Kimber
The Daily News, July 4th, 2005
It’s been an interesting week on the other side of the media trenches. I’ve recently become a member of a community group pushing for a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the seizure of the infant child of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen. I usually steer clear of joining such groups, partly because I already have a pulpit for my views, partly because I want to maintain my independence and partly — if I am to be honest — because I hate meetings.
But I’d become frustrated only writing about this particular case. Since the May 2004 highly publicized 67-hour standoff between Finck and VandenElsen and a heavily armed police swat team, I’ve written a half-dozen columns outlining my concerns about the role the Children’s Aid Society and Family Court played in taking this child from its parents, and about the massive use of police force to do it.
Each column generated e-mails, letters and phone calls, many from ordinary readers with no direct connection to the case or personal histories with Children’s Aid, most supporting my call for a public inquiry and many asking what they could do to help make an inquiry happen.
My only suggestion — that they write their MLA — seemed lame and unlikely to have much effect without an organized campaign behind it.
So when I got a call a few weeks ago from author Heather Laskey, a resident of the neighbourhood where the standoff took place [and fellow journalist], inviting me to a meeting she and some others were holding to discuss what they could do to right what they too saw as a wrong, I quickly agreed.
Last week, we — now known as the MCF Inquiry Committee (MCF is how the infant is described in court documents) — called a news conference to explain why a public inquiry is needed and to announce the committee’s plans to insert an advertisement in the next day’s Halifax Chronicle-Herald. The ad would outline the case for a public inquiry and encourage readers to write Justice Minister Michael Baker demanding one.
Just before the news conference, however, a Herald official called to say the paper wouldn’t run our ad without editorial changes (reasonable ones, in fact, to which we quickly agreed), and unless — as well as paying upfront for the ad — each member of the committee signed a letter to “indemnify and hold harmless The Halifax Herald Ltd., its officers and individuals acting on its behalf from any claims or causes of action” that might result from the ad.
That unusual request — when was the last time any newspaper asked Sobeys officials to sign a waiver absolving the paper of legal responsibility for the contents of their ads? — isn’t really so unusual in this very unusual case.
Ever since the standoff, in fact, media outlets have been grappling with a difficult dilemma: what can they legally publish or broadcast?
On the one hand, this is a child-custody case, and there are very clear rules in place that prohibit publishing any information that might reveal the identities of children involved in such cases.
On the other hand, the standoff — shotgun fired, police emergency response teams, snipers on roofs, neighbourhood evacuated — was a major news event that could not be understood without writing about the custody issue that triggered it all.
To complicate matters, the story raised a number of important questions of legitimate public interest. Were Children’s Aid and Family Court really acting in “the best interests of the child” when they took the five-month-old from her parents, or were they vindictively punishing two admittedly difficult parents for challenging their arbitrary authority? Did the police act appropriately, or did the massive deployment of police power actually create the crisis that followed?
How do you ask those questions without writing about the custody issue?
Even now, no one seems quite sure how to juggle these competing pressures. It took CBC Radio, for example, more than five hours and eight local newscasts’ worth of internal discussion last week to finally decide to run a story about our committee’s call for a public inquiry.
And the Herald, which had published its own first-rate, four-day series on the background to the case last week — the first real attempt to put the issues and personalities in context since Richard Cuthbertson’s excellent story on Larry Finck’s personal history appeared in The Daily News immediately after the standoff — decided not to post its own series on its website on the advice of its lawyers.
(Having raised the issue of how other media outlets have dealt with the story, I should note — gratefully — that my editors have not censored or substantively altered any of the columns I’ve written about the case.)
But this media conundrum — like the standoff circus and the courtroom craziness — is ultimately beside the point.
We are still left with questions:
- Why did authorities take the child in the first place?
- Who authorized the use of massive force to seize the child?
- Why does the child not have her own independent legal representation in court?
- What external checks and balances are in place to make sure that Children’s Aid, Family Court and the Community Services Department act in the interest of the child?
— that can only be answered by a full, independent and public inquiry.
If you agree, I encourage you to write (5151 Terminal Rd., Halifax, N.S. B3J 2L6), call (902-424-4044) or e-mail the justice minister http://www.blogger.com/bakermg@gov.ns.ca or michaelbakermla@ns.sympatico.ca demanding he appoints such an inquiry.
It won’t happen otherwise.
7. Open Letter to Justice Minister Michael Baker
by Stephen Kimber Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Dear Mr. Baker,
You said last week it is “inappropriate” for you to comment on calls for a public inquiry into the May 2004 seizure of then five-month-old Mona Clare Finck by the Children’s Aid Society, both because her parents are awaiting sentencing on their criminal convictions in the matter and because the issue of the now-toddler’s permanent custody is still before the courts.
That’s strange, Mr. Baker.
When does the inappropriate become appropriate for you?
On Nov. 10, 2004, for example, you announced, with much fanfare, that there will be “a full, independent and public inquiry” into the circumstances surrounding the death of Theresa McEvoy. You made this announcement less than a month after a teenager was charged with causing her death during a joyride in a stolen car. You announced this inquiry before the courts had dealt with those charges and a full seven months, in fact, before the boy’s sentencing hearing — which only begins this week — had taken place.
Appropriate?
This wasn’t even the first, or only, time you’d decided it was “appropriate” for you to talk [about] this particular case in public while it was before the courts. On Nov. 1, you criticized your own officials’ handling of the case and said it was “extremely unfortunate” the boy hadn’t been kept in jail while awaiting trial on other charges. On Nov. 4, you publicly expressed “sympathies” to the McEvoy family and promised you would “carefully review and consider” their request for a judicial inquiry. You even announced you would be going to Ottawa to lobby for legal changes to make it easier to keep young offenders behind bars.
Was that inappropriate?
You tell me.
In the Finck-VandenElsen case, you say that, “based on the information we have at the present time, the Department of Justice does not feel that a public inquiry is warranted.” Unless there is new information, you said, there would be no inquiry.
I have no new information, Mr. Baker, but I do have some old questions. Perhaps, since you feel the public knows everything we need to know about how this case was handled, you’d like to answer them for me:
1) What was the legal basis for seizing the baby from her parents? Which of the 14 criteria specified in the Family and Children’s Services Act justified this action? Did the court consider, as the Act requires, “the best interest of the child” and “the importance for the child’s development of a positive relationship with a parent or guardian and a secure place as a member of a family,” or was it swayed by irrelevant arguments about the personal behaviour and attitudes of the parents that were unrelated to their capabilities as parents?
2) What witnesses were called and what evidence was presented at the January 2004 hearing when the initial apprehension order was granted in order to satisfy the court there were “reasonable and probable grounds to believe that the child may be in need of protective services”? Did the proceedings demonstrate, as the Act requires, “a real danger [to the child] that is apparent on the evidence”?
3) Was the doctor who delivered the baby and met with the parents before and after the baby’s birth called to testify at this hearing? Was the judge informed that the Children’s Aid Society had interviewed the doctor the week before the hearing to ask if she had any concerns about “either parent, re: mental health,” and that she’d answered: “No, no concerns” ? Were the doctor’s notes — “Both parents appropriate with baby, caring, loving” — introduced as evidence? Were those notes considered by the judge before making her decision?
4) Has your department — as it was so quick to do in the McEvoy case — launched an internal review of how this case was handled by your officials? By the Family Court? By Children’s Aid? If so, what was the nature of those inquiries? What were the results?
5) Has your department received a copy of the internal review by the Halifax Regional Police into its handling of this case? Will it be made public? Will there be an independent review to determine how and by whom the decision to use overwhelming force — battering ram, submachine guns — to carry out the apprehension order and whether this level of force was appropriate in this case?
I have other questions as well. About Children’s Aid’s role, more generally, in child custody cases. And about the checks and balances in place, in the law and in practice, to ensure that our Children and Family Services Act lives up to its lofty promise of acting in “the best interests of a child.”
But I’ll wait for your answer to these initial questions before I pose them.
I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely, Stephen Kimber
6. Why we need a public inquiry into the taking of Mona Clare
By Stephen Kimber
May 29, 2005
Forget for a moment the circus that their trial became: their lawyer firings, their seemingly ever-more-paranoid claims of baby-factory conspiracies, their spectator-shocking, judge-trying courtroom outbursts, their richly fertilized and cross-pollinated legal garden of lawsuits, appeals, briefs and petitions that are still growing wild inside Halifax court houses. Forget even Carline VandenElsen’s current “starving-for-the-children” hunger strike that threatens to turn this farce into tragedy.
Focus instead on the single critical — and still unanswered — question that is at the heart of the story of Mona Clare Finck: Did the Nova Scotia Children’s Aid Society have any reasonable legal grounds to seize the infant from her parents in the first place?
Everything else — policemen with battering rams and machine guns showing up at the Finck front door in the middle of one night last May, the single shot fired from inside the house, the 67-hour standoff with a heavily-armed police tactical squad that followed, the death by natural causes [heart attack] of Mona Clare’s grandmother in the middle of it all, the criminal charges, the trial, the application by child protection authorities for permanent custody… All of those events flow from an initial decision by Children’s Aid back in December 2003 to seek an apprehension order for the then still-unborn Mona Clare.
Why did Children’s Aid do that?
Could its decision to take the infant have been made on the basis of nothing more substantial than a relayed phone call to Ontario Children’s Aid from VandenElsen’s far-from-disinterested ex-husband, informing them — wrongly, as it turns out — that VandenElsen had already given birth in Halifax.
We do know VandenElsen and her husband Larry Finck had each been in conflict with child protection authorities in Ontario over the custody of their children from previous marriages. We know Finck served time for abducting his daughter [did not return child to her Uncle whom Mr Finck believed was abusing his daughter- the mother was deceased] , and VandenElsen was charged with kidnapping her triplets. But we also know a jury found her not guilty of those charges, accepting her argument she was acting out of what she considered necessity. We know too that the Crown successfully appealed the verdict, meaning VandenElsen — still not found guilty of anything — was awaiting a new trial at the time of the apprehension order.
Perhaps most importantly, we know now that there is nothing on the public record — other than their ongoing battles with child custody authorities — to indicate that either Finck or VandenElsen was an unfit parent.
So why did Children’s Aid seize Mona Clare?
Should there be — as Carline VandenElsen is demanding — a full public inquiry to answer that question?
Nova Scotia Justice Minister Michael Baker doesn’t think so. Shortly after VandenElsen announced she would stop eating until authorities agreed to such an inquiry, the Justice Minister issued a terse news release: “Based on the information we have at the present time,” he said, “the Department of Justice does not feel that a public inquiry is warranted.”
What information is that, Mr. Baker?
The province’s Children and Family Services Act, which governs child custody issues, is clear that the “purpose of this Act is to protect children from harm, promote the integrity of the family and assure the best interests of children.”
The Act specifically lists 14 different situations in which a child might be “in need of protective services.” Those include everything from actual and potential physical, sexual or emotional abuse, to neglect and abandonment, to the parents’ failure or unwillingness to provide proper medical care.
None of the criteria apply to this case.
Even if you were to stretch the Act’s Section 22.2(g) — which says a child can be taken from its parents if “there is a substantial risk that the child will suffer emotional harm [demonstrated by severe anxiety, depression, withdrawal, or self-destructive or aggressive behaviour]…” — and tried to make the argument that someday perhaps Mona Clare’s parents’ disputes with child protection authorities over custody of children from before she was born might somehow, possibly, conceivably result in some unspecified emotional harm to Mona Clare, well, that is much, much more than just a stretch.
The Act itself is clear about what constitutes “substantial risk” of harm to a child: “a real danger that is apparent on the evidence.”
The evidence in this case, in fact, suggests quite the opposite. The doctor who delivered the child and met with the family before and after her birth reported: “Both parents appropriate with baby, caring, loving.” Neighbours, who saw mother and daughter in the weeks before the police assault, said they saw nothing to indicate the child was in any danger. Doctors and nurses at the IWK, who examined five-month-old Mona Clare after she’d been seized by police, described her as “a well grown and well developed baby with no clinical signs of any illness… doing well… active, playful and feeding well…”
So, Mr. Baker, let me ask you again: What information did your department have at the time that legally justified seizing this child from her parents?
Or does this really have anything to do with the law?
Could it be that Children’s Aid here over-reacted to an over-reaction by child protection officials in Ontario, who didn’t like Finck’s and VandenElsen’s attitude and wanted to punish them for the crime of being difficult? And could it be that judges here okayed this because our Family Court system has become more of a rubber stamp for the child-care bureaucracy than a careful check on the arbitrary powers of those agencies? Could there be other cases as egregious as this one that we don’t yet know about only because no shots were fired. [absolutely !]
The truth, Mr. Baker, is that you already have plenty of information to warrant a public inquiry. It’s past time you called one.
5. Best interests of the child or Children’s Aid?
By Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News, February 27, 2005
What is in the best interest of a child? And what is in the best interest of the agency responsible for protecting that child?
Those were the first questions that jumped into my head last week when I learned that the Children’s Aid Society of Halifax now wants the courts to grant it permanent custody of the daughter of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen.
The Society says it believes it must seek permanent care and custody of the child because — in the 12-and-a-half months since it won its first apprehension order for the then-infant in January 2004 — “the parents have become more enveloped in their own theories of conspiracy and system abuse, and have shown a continued and increasing inability and unwillingness to acknowledge mental health issues, parenting concerns and their own involvement in activities which place the child at risk.”
Whoah.
Rewind.
We need to remind ourselves of how we got to this point in the first place.
Start with Finck and VandenElsen. They do each have a history of conflict with child protection authorities, it is true, but neither has ever been convicted of abusing or neglecting their children.
In the heat of custody disputes with their former spouses, both took off with their kids. In 2000, Finck was convicted and served time in jail. That same year, VandenElsen ran off to Mexico with her triplets because she was afraid she was about to lose all access to them. An Ontario jury later acquitted VandenElsen of child abduction, agreeing with her argument that she believed losing contact with their mother would cause the children irreparable harm. But the Crown has since successfully appealed that verdict and VandenElsen is now awaiting a second trial on those charges.
In the fall of 2003, after VandenElsen became pregnant with their child, she and Finck returned to her new husband’s hometown of Halifax, and moved in with his mother.
The event that apparently triggered the wild legal and emotional rollercoaster that is still rolling over both of them was a phone call to Children’s Aid officials in Ontario on Dec. 18, 2003, informing them that Carline was in Halifax, had had a baby — she didn’t until a week later — and that it could be in danger.
The call came from Craig Merkley, VandenElsen’s ex-husband, the one with whom she’d had the bitter custody dispute. Hardly an unbiased observer.
Based — so far as we know now — on that self-interested call and on the Ontario CAS’s blatantly obvious conclusion that Carline had attempted to “have the children align with her throughout a lengthy custody and acce
