Indigenous Mother Wins Landmark Case Before BC Human Rights Tribunal

The BC Human Rights Tribunal just ruled that an indigenous mother whose children were taken away to foster homes by the Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services Society was unlawfully discriminated against on the basis of race and mental disability and awarded an eye-popping $150’000 in damages for injury to dignity and self-respect.

The judge ordered a publication ban on the identities of most persons of interest to the case, starting with the claimant who only goes by the initials RR in the proceedings.

As in many such cases, RR was a low income indigenous mother of four children experiencing multiple challenges in raising a family, starting with a disability related to addiction and mental health, such as alcoholism and trauma as a residential school survivor. And as the government does best, its intervention did far more harm than good, by taking children from their environment based on racial prejudice and placing them in notoriously worse environments instead of trying to resolve the situation with compassion and dialogue.

The case was extraordinarily long and complicated by the norms of the Tribunal, the hearings lasting 21 days and spanning over 17 months. Many witnesses were called forward, the vast majority of whom were deemed credible, with one notable exception, called the Practice Manager for the purpose of these proceedings. The Tribunal determined that the Practice Manager’s testimony was tainted with inaccuracies ranging from exaggeration to outright fabrication rooted in deep prejudice toward the claiming pertaining to her racial background and mental health challenges. Interestingly, the dishonesty of a single government worker seems to have sufficed in derailing the entire process without any checks and balances correcting the situation, even though several presumably honest workers were involved in the decisions, which shows the ease at which the said process can be subverted by a trusted element within the system.

Multiple factors proved to be prejudicial to RR, starting with the natural death of her firstborn son, which was initially treated as suspicious. Her successful Person With Disability application also gave the unfair impression that she was unfit to take care of her children, even though the physician who completed it explicitly stated otherwise in a letter. Likewise, some warning signs turned out to have benign explanations, such as a burn mark caused by a cigarette that proved to be purely accidental, and a birth mark being confused with another such burn mark. Multiple allegations of neglect and abuse against the mother turned out to be unfounded, uncorroborated, or exaggerated.

The VACFSS’ intervention proved exceedingly toxic following RR’s 8-year-old daughter attempting suicide in a foster home, rapidly culminating in denying the mother access to her children in retaliation after she threatened to publicly denounce the government society’s policies. Unsurprisingly, strings of incidents in which the children exhibited extremely unruly behaviour toward the staff, culminating in self-harm, were blamed squarely on the mother instead of being reflected upon by government workers with a healthy dose of introspection and self-criticism, leading to predictable, indefinite escalation. Bafflingly, the government’s stance would only harden as the children suffered repeated and graphic abuse under its care, such as being forced into restraints, and as the mother’s complaints mounted, underlining a stark parallel with her own ordeal through the residential school system.

Although the mother feels vindicated at long last, nothing can return the three years she spent away from her children, nor repair the additional trauma inflicted upon them by an uncaring bureaucracy struggling with pernicious biases against the very clients it is supposed to help, and it definitely won’t prevent additional tragedies; in this respect, even the tribunal’s ruling and exorbitant compensation looks futile, as it fails to address deeply rooted prejudice and xenophobia, pervasive throughout public works. In this respect, the residential school system never truly ended.