Three Thunder Bay foster homes — closed by the province in 2017 after the death of a First Nations youth — had feces- and blood-stained floors, no working stove or food in the fridge, and were staffed by workers ill-equipped to handle the complex needs of youth in their care.

The shocking conditions are included in an investigative report by the office of Ontario’s Advocate for Children and Youth, which closed Tuesday as part of the Ford government’s “restoring trust, transparency and accountability” law. The office’s investigative role moves to the provincial ombudsman’s office May 1.

The advocate’s report examined three Thunder Bay homes operated by Johnson Children’s Services Inc., a company headquartered in Vaughan. The homes opened in March 2016 and were closed in May 2017, shortly after 17-year-old Tammy Keeash disappeared from one of the homes and was found dead in a waterway.

The advocate’s office was alerted to alarming conditions in the homes by a whistle-blowing employee who contacted them in June 2016. What investigators eventually found were appalling living conditions, allegations of some staff working while high on cocaine, and a Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services providing little licensing oversight.

The report makes clear that the troubling findings are not unique to the Thunder Bay homes. They reflect a child protection system widely criticized as warehousing its most vulnerable and high-needs children in group homes and company-operated foster homes with no quality of care standards, and no minimum qualifications for caregivers.

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“Could a similar situation happen again? Yes,” the report says bluntly.

“There are still no standards of care for kids. Still no standards for who works there. And still no method of allowing service providers to share information. All of this puts kids at risk,” said Irwin Elman, who was the province’s child advocate when the report was produced.

In an interview, Elman noted that a coroner’s report in September 2018, on the deaths of 12 youths in residential care found the same problems. And he challenged minister Lisa MacLeod to act.

“What is completely frustrating to me is that this new government has had the coroner’s report on their desk for eight months and our report on their desk for months. And nothing has changed,” he said. “This minister has said the buck stops with her. Well, it’s been eight months. Something has to change.”

In a statement to the Star, MacLeod blamed the previous Liberal government for the “clear lack of oversight and relaxed regulation” described in the advocate’s report.

“It is why we took immediate action to strengthen the investigative powers of Ontario’s ombudsman to include the child welfare system,” MacLeod said. “We will be holding Ontario’s children’s aid societies and other service providers to higher standards to keep our kids safe.”

Diana Cooke, director of investigations for the advocate’s office, noted in an interview that the ministry also hasn’t defined the services that should be provided by foster homes, like those in Thunder Bay that describe themselves as “treatment” facilities.

“If there is no objective criteria, how will the ministry or placing agencies determine whether ‘treatment’ is actually being provided, whether it meets the needs of the young people being cared for, and whether the cost is appropriate for the service being provided?” said Cooke, who will head the new child and youth unit in the ombudsman’s office. “If the ministry fails to develop objective criteria, the system will remain as it is, which is ‘buyer beware.’”

The children in the Thunder Bay homes struggled with complex needs and mental health challenges, including “self-harm, depression, acute suicidal ideation, sexual assault trauma and substance abuse,” the report notes. And staff were untrained to deal with them. Some had not even completed their post-secondary education.

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The report describes a youth buying the book Borderline Personality Disorder for Dummies “to provide to staff to help them better understand her diagnosis.” Staff orientation and training amounted to reviewing, on their own, a PowerPoint presentation “unconnected to the service” the homes provided, the report says.

The lack of training extended to the administering of medications. “One youth was provided an entire month’s worth of medication all at once,” the report says.

In another instance, a staff member did not want to wake a child to administer medicine because “there was not enough food in the residence for a young person to take any medication that was required to be taken with food.” A youth once told a ministry licensing official that staff left “pills and knives out on the counter.”

Two employees of the homes told the advocate’s investigators that “other employees used cocaine and may have been under the influence of drugs while in the home.”

“Even the basic needs of young people who were placed in the (Johnson) homes in Thunder Bay were not met,” the report says.

One of the homes “did not have a working stove or oven for meal preparation,” the report notes. A youth at the home said “she had to use her own personal money to purchase meals” — a fact confirmed by staff at the home. The young resident had also offered to give staff gas money.

Employees and residents described unwashed and bloodied clothes being left in garbage bags and “causing an ‘unbearable’ smell.” The home had no petty cash to buy tokens for the washing machine. Files from children’s aid quoted a young resident complaining that younger girls in the home did “not know how to take care of their menstrual mess, and there is blood all over the bathroom as a result.”

One staff member noted that the day she was hired, the home’s kitchen floor had not been mopped and “fecal matter had leaked around the toilet.”

In a written response to the investigation, Johnson Children’s Services said it accepts the report’s findings. By opening the Thunder Bay homes, the foster care agency says it was trying to respond to “an alarming lack of appropriate services” for Indigenous youth in care in northern Ontario, and that many residential care providers struggle to find experienced staff.

Despite the scathing findings, Johnson Children’s Services said it regrets the closing of the advocate’s office.

“The office has a strong track record of extracting valuable learnings from unfortunate situations,” it said. “Children in our care have often remarked on the importance of the office and their good treatment in contact with the office. Service providers are losing a valuable service.”

The report lays much of the blame squarely on the ministry.

Johnson services operated as a “foster care agency,” which means its homes had no more than four children. It received a licence from the ministry that allowed it to open as many homes as it wanted. The report notes it could open new homes without notifying the ministry. The ministry only conducts randomized annual reviews of 10 per cent of its homes. Group homes, on the other hand, typically serve eight or more children and each home set up must receive a ministry licence.

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.