Among the many dozens of pages of terrible stories and horrifying details contained in the Motherisk Commission report released this week, one case referred to in passing jumped out at me as exemplifying the problem.

“In one case, the society’s materials described a parent as having excellent parenting skills and reported that she consistently attended for access. Notwithstanding this encouraging evidence, when a positive Motherisk test appeared to show low levels of cocaine and marijuana, the court made the child a Crown ward, without access, after a summary judgment hearing.”

We now know that Motherisk testing was unreliable. A summary judgment means that the decision was made by a judge without a trial.

“Excellent parenting skills.” Yet she had her child taken away from her forever by one faulty test.

“Harmful Impacts” is the title of the commission report written by the Honourable Judith C. Beaman after two years of study. After reading it, “harmful” seems almost to be putting it lightly. The 56 cases the commission examined in which the flawed Motherisk tests, administered by SickKids Hospital between 2005 and 2015, were determined to have a “substantial impact” on the decisions of child protection agencies, led to children being permanently removed from their families.

Lives were ruined. Parents’ lives, and quite possibly children’s lives. Siblings and grandparents and other family members’ lives, too. Irreversibly ruined. And in many cases, it seems this was allowed to happen primarily because people were poor.

It is hard to think of anything more harmful than that.

The Motherisk lab was shut down in 2015 — too long after the problems with it were known, exposed in part due to the reporting of my Star colleague Rachel Mendleson, after far too much damage was done. But reading the report, it becomes clear that shutting down the lab solves only one small part of the problem. The entire system needs to be overhauled.

The problems detailed in the report’s 278 pages are too numerous to go into in detail. They document the many problems with the SickKids lab’s testing and with the child protection system’s overreliance on those results. The hair testing process produced inconsistent and untrustworthy results despite being perceived as carrying the unimpeachable weight of scientific authority. That much we pretty much knew because of earlier reporting, though the detailed breakdown of it and the specific case references make the injustice of it sickeningly vivid.

But much of the report also points to the larger problem that allowed the Motherisk lab to cause so much damage: the system unfairly targets poor families — especially, the report details, Indigenous and racialized families; the legal deck is stacked against those families, denying them due process to a staggering degree; and authorities are too quick to take children from their parents in the absence of evidence of severe abuse or neglect.

Indeed, the Motherisk results — faulty as they were — would not have caused so much damage if children’s aid workers were not relying on evidence of alcohol and drug use, in and of itself, as proof of dangerously incompetent parenting. Millions of parents across this province, and around the world, drink alcohol or use drugs like marijuana socially. If they are not on the radar of Children’s Aid Societies, this is not considered a big problem — not by them, often not by their children, and generally not by their communities.

Yet, “In many of the cases we reviewed, when a Motherisk hair test came back positive, CAS (Children’s Aid Society) workers focused solely on the apparent substance use instead of considering any actual effect on parenting,” Beaman writes. Use was considered proof of addiction, and addiction was considered proof of “an inability to parent.” That, sometimes in the absence of any other meaningful evidence at all, led to children being taken away from their parents.

Removal from the home — permanent removal — is not supposed to be a move taken lightly. The report goes over the legal principles, laying out that it should be a last resort. It is the “capital punishment” of child protection, according to one citation, absolutely devastating to parents, and for children it is “often the beginning of a life sentence.”

Yet in the cases reviewed here, it is imposed, often apparently cavalierly and without even a trial, for reasons that amount to a punishment for being poor. Rich parents who are alcoholics, after all, are not having their children taken from them after a single relapse. Few rich parents, in fact, are having their children taken from them at all.

“The underlying issue in many child protection cases before the court is poverty,” the report says. Much of the time, Beaman writes she heard what families most needed was help with groceries or babysitting, counselling or mental health treatment, help providing safe shelter.

What these parents and children needed, in other words, was help.

What they got instead was the irrevocable breakup of their families. The loss for life of any contact at all with those in the world they loved most, and those who loved them most. They got harm, permanent harm.

There are often no good solutions available or apparent to children’s aid workers and judges in cases where families are struggling. They are charged with looking out for the best interests of the child, but it is often not clear how those interests will be best served. However, as becomes clear reading the Motherisk report, a fear of becoming a case study in the event of a child’s death may have tilted the scales too far in the other direction in some case workers’ minds. After high-profile cases where Children’s Aid workers were blamed by the press after children died in their parents’ care, they may be erring too much on the side of intervention.

It is enraging to reflect on these stories. Enraging to realize that there is no justice available, or even possible, in most of these cases where a child has already been adopted out, based on junk science filtered through a junk legal process.

Justice Beaman provides 32 recommendations for reform that may go a long way to helping prevent such injustices in the future.

“These stories highlight how important it is that everyone who plays a role in the child protection system act extremely cautiously in making decisions to remove children from their parents’ care, away from their families and their communities,” Beaman says in her conclusion.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

It seems to me that is what is most needed in implementing reforms: a fundamental shift in the emphasis of child protection actions toward providing parents and families with the things they need to succeed. Many will say that is already supposed to be the emphasis, but this report shows it hasn’t been, or hasn’t been emphasized enough.

Helping struggling families takes resources, obviously. And it doesn’t come easy. But the alternative, as we see all too clearly, is the systematic ruination of people’s lives.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire

Read more about: