The Alberta government is pledging to set up an arm’s-length agency with the power to review the deaths of any children in provincial care.
The proposed Child and Family Services Council for Quality Assurance is going to get $1.5 million from the ministry over the next three years.
The council is one of 11 recommendations the Minister of Children and Youth Services Yvonne Fritz has accepted from an outside panel she appointed last year.
The panel was appointed to review the system, specifically looking at the case of a 14-month-old Calgary girl, Elizabeth Velasquez, who died in May 2010.
The young girl was not in provincial care, but Children’s Services had been informed about her through a complaint from her grandparents, who were worried about her well-being.
The girl suffered four broken bones over the course of her young life and her death is now considered a homicide. Children’s Services workers in Calgary had multiple visits with Velasquez’s mother leading up to her death.
John Tuckwell, a spokesperson for the ministry, said Fritz felt this case warranted an outside look to find ways the system could have responded better.
“In terms of our quality assurance process and ensuring we are continuously improving the work we do, she felt this external independent panel could provide us with an objective kind of view.”
The independent panel had five members including a former police officer and several medical and legal professionals.
In addition to recommending the council, the panel recommended Children’s Services come up with protocols and teams specifically designed to respond to children.
NDP critic Rachel Notley said she was unimpressed with the report and the 11 commitments the minister made Thursday are vague and hard to measure.
“There is really nothing there. This is a big distraction,” she said. “I defy you to tell me what almost any of it means or show me how you would measure the effectiveness of any of it.”
Notley said the new council does not have enough distance from the minister’s office and should be set up as an officer of the legislature who would report directly to the legislature.
She said that, like the Health Quality Council of Alberta, which the government has assigned to investigate allegations of queue jumping and doctor intimidation, this council will not have the powers to deal with issues around children.
“It is appointed by the minister, it reports through the minister and most of the information it considers remains unavailable to the public.”
Tuckwell said how the council will report its findings and who will appoint its members is still being determined.
Alberta has an Office of the Child and Youth Advocate, which Tuckwell said the minister did not want to task with investigating the death of children in care. He said that would cloud the advocate’s original purpose and the functions it already has.
“A real strength of our advocate in Alberta, which is unique, is that the focus of their work is the individual rights of children and youth in the province’s care,” he said. “The minister sees the importance of that role in representing those individuals and would not want to distract them from that key responsibility.”
Tuckwell said a full framework on the new council should be available later this fall.
