The Ontario government is placing vulnerable children in danger by forcing cuts resulting in 26 child protection workers being laid off at the Brant children’s aid society, the agency’s executive director says.

The job cuts come as the Brantford area faces perhaps the worst opioid addiction epidemic in the province, one that has swelled the number of children served by the child protection agency.

Andrew Koster, executive director of Brant Family and Children’s Services, expressed the risks in stark terms in an open letter to the community last Thursday, the day the workers were notified of the layoffs.

“When governments cut child welfare services (managers, front line staff, and support services), children ultimately die or are allowed by society to live in unbearable, violent and neglectful conditions,” Koster wrote.

“With higher caseloads and tight timelines, workers are forced to move from one crisis to another instead of planning and working proactively with families to prevent future incidents,” he added.

“Despite best efforts, children fall through the cracks and suffer the consequences of insufficient resources.”

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The cri de coeur comes from an executive with almost five decades of experience in Ontario’s child protection system. He says other children’s aid societies are facing similar budgetary pressures and fears the system is at a breaking point.

“We have a system in crisis,” Koster said in an interview Sunday.

Caroline Newton, spokesperson for the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, says all eyes will be on the provincial budget this spring. Finance Minister Vic Fedeli has signalled the government will act to reduce a deficit he places at $13.5 billion.

“We’re watching the coming provincial budget for how communities will be supported to keep vulnerable children and families safe,” Newton said in an interview.

“We have to have the capacity to respond when children are at risk — that’s our mandate,” Newton added. “We’re like the police; we don’t get to say, ‘Sorry, no one is at the station.’”

The Brantford area had the highest rate of emergency ward visits in Ontario due to opioid overdoses — 141 per 100,000 people in 2017, compared to a provincial rate of 54. Some child protection workers bring Naloxone to home visits, in case they find overdose victims that need the life-saving antidote.

The Brant job cuts come after the provincial government eliminated the office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, which investigated the mistreatment and death of children in care.

The government transferred some of the advocate’s responsibilities to the ombudsman’s office. But Irwin Elman, whose role as provincial advocate ends April 1, says the ombudsman’s investigative powers are far more limited than those of his office, particularly when it comes to children who die or are harmed while in care.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Ontario is suffering a great loss with the closing of our Office,” Elman said in a goodbye statement released last week.

The Brant job cuts were imposed by a $1.7-million deficit caused largely by the ministry’s policies, said Koster, whose agency is based in Brantford, hometown of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, west of Hamilton.

For example, the previous Liberal government paid 75 per cent of costs when foster parents committed to giving children a permanent home, either through adoption or caring for them until they’re 18 years old. Last fall, Premier Doug Ford’s government slashed that funding for all children’s aid agencies to 25 per cent of costs, Koster says.

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For the Brant society, that meant a $300,000 annual reduction in provincial funding, he adds.

The government also reduced Brant’s funding by $700,000 because 50 of the agency’s children were to be transferred to a newly formed Indigenous children’s aid society. But the transfer process is slow and many of those children are still with Brant.

Koster fully supports the set up of an Indigenous child welfare agency in the Brantford area. But he’s angered by the government’s refusal to reimburse funding for the children Brant continues to care for due to the slow transfer process.

Brant also spent $400,000 on hiring and training staff to operate a new centralized database called CPIN. The former Liberal government ordered all children’s aid societies to implement the system, which allows societies to better share information.

But Koster said Brant had to revert to using the old data system when the new Indigenous agency had concerns with the data being collected under CPIN and refused to adopt it. The government now refuses to reimburse Brant the $400,000 it spent.

“We’re not in a deficit for anything we’ve done,” Koster says. “It’s because of ministry decisions.”

Koster says his agency, which has about 300 children in foster care, would have run out of money to pay staff by March 22. He says ministry officials played hardball, and were prepared to see the agency shut down until early April, when funding for the new fiscal year would be provided.

“That was the most disturbing thing for me,” he says, adding he implemented the layoffs to avoid the shutdown scenario.

Provincial efforts to identify cost reductions and help Brant stay within its budget began under the previous Liberal government in 2015, Derek Rowland, press secretary to Lisa MacLeod, Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, said in an email to the Star. Yet Brant continues to struggle to stay within budget.

Rowland described the safety of vulnerable children as the provincial government’s “utmost priority.”

“The ministry does not pay off or forgive children’s aid society deficits,” ministry spokesperson Trell Huether said in a separate email to the Star, adding that societies determine their own staffing. By provincial regulation, societies must balance their budgets. Huether said two-thirds of them do so.

The funding formula for societies, Huether added, is based on the socio-economic needs of a community, the number of children in care and the volume of abuse investigations it conducts. In 2018-19, the Brant societies received $23.8 million from the government, a 1.8-per-cent increase from the previous fiscal year, Huether said.

The ministry spends about $1.5 billion annually on a child protection system that serves some 14,000 kids taken from abusive or neglectful parents and placed in foster or group homes. There are 49 children’s aid societies in Ontario, including 11 Indigenous ones, according to the ministry’s website.