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The law was changed because of that series, to allow these victims to be named. Serenity died shortly after the new rule was proclaimed.

And yet, on Monday, Human Services Minister Irfan Sabir actually told the legislature: “In all cases, we make sure we protect the identity of the family, the child and their loved ones. There is no exception to that.”

The prescription for dying in obscurity, it seems, hasn’t really changed at all.

A vivid detail in the child advocate’s report — almost the only one — noted that Serenity was beaten because she “stole food.”

Yes, a four-year-old, dying for want of food, brutalized because she took food.

But Del Graff, Alberta’s child and youth advocate, couldn’t say much, because of the legal constraints the legislature imposes on him.

He called the child Marie, not Serenity, her real name. He almost apologized for the possibility that her true name might slip out.

The police asked the medical examiner’s office not to release its report, or even a cause of death, because there’s an investigation (now more than two years old, with no charges we know of.)

It was therefore improper for the child advocate to put details in his report. What use is that?

Now we learn the autopsy wasn’t completed until September this year, and turned over to police a week later, almost exactly two years after the girl’s death. How is a delay like that even possible? Was there ever an investigation at all?

It was left to Simons to reveal not just the girl’s first name, but photos of her and actual medical records from an emergency ward and the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton.