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The Christmas Day deaths of two young girls in Oak Bay underscore how frayed this province’s social safety net has become and the dangers caused by the lack of family legal aid.

Their 43-year-old father, Andrew Robert Douglas Berry, has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in what appears to have been a preventable tragedy.

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Four-year-old Aubrey and six-year-old Chloe were found in Berry’s apartment after their mother Sarah reported he had failed to bring them home.

The authorities were completely aware of this family’s distress so why did no one intervene earlier and help a man embroiled in a nasty divorce that revealed his increasing dysfunction?

In her decision only six months before the murders, veteran B.C. Supreme Court Justice Victoria Gray was overly optimistic in her interpretation of the disturbing and worrying situation.

She gave Berry the benefit of the doubt even though he had threatened to “blow up the house,” had repeatedly scared his wife, was sleeping with his daughters and had been accused of inappropriately touching the younger one.