Ted Hughes : Ex-judge urges national strategy on aboriginal child welfare

The “gross disproportion” of aboriginal children in foster care across Canada is a national embarrassment that demands action, says the man who led an overhaul of B.C.’s child welfare system.

In a speech Thursday, Ted Hughes, a former judge and deputy attorney general, called on Canada’s premiers to place the issue on the agenda at their meeting in Charlottetown in August.

In a written copy of his speech that was to be presented at a conference for staff in the office for the BC Representative for Children and Youth, Hughes says there is a dramatic over representation of aboriginal children in care in Canada and the problem needs a national focus.

Hughes conducted a public inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, who died under horrible circumstances in 2006 at the hands of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend in Manitoba.

His report concluded that the province’s child-welfare system did not protect the five-year-old aboriginal child from her parents who were both convicted of first-degree murder. The report prompted a major overhaul of child-welfare in Manitoba.

In 2006, Hughes delivered a report on BC’s stretched system that prompted the Liberal government to create an independent body to oversee and monitor children’s issues, currently held by former Saskatchewan judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.

Agencies/Canadajournal