Monday, February 11, 2008

Playing for a few pennies in cold winds of Fredericton!!!!


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Originally uploaded by Oldmaison
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

IT COULD BE WORSE!!!!!!!
THE GOVERNMENT OF NEW BRUNSWICK WANTS
!!!!!!YOUR LITTLE ASS!!!!!!!

FREDERICTON - The revelations are shocking, yet they should come as no surprise. Those bureaucrats who stonewalled Bernard Richard and cowered behind child privacy issues had barely been protecting the province's most vulnerable and troubled youths at all.

New Brunswick's Child and Youth Advocate tabled a horribly depressing document on Monday that details just how badly the government's programs work for those lost young souls who need it most. In many cases, they are mistreated rather than treated for mental illness; they are chained and shackled and sexually abused, they are subjected to shock therapy and strip searches, they are shipped back and forth between agencies as unwilling to help them as they are unaccountable.

Hopefully, a new day has dawned with the unveiling of the Ombudsman's harsh report on youth at risk and the services available to them. It's a nightmare, really, worse than any Grade-B movie you can imagine, a product of the culture of secrecy and ineptitude that for too long has been allowed to prevail.

No wonder it took Richard more than a year to get co-operation from Family Services: the department had so many skeletons in its closet it's hard to imagine there was room for many more.

"We have tried hard to identify the shortcomings in New Brunswick,'' Richard said Monday in Fredericton during his first public presentation of the document. "There are many, I can assure you."

Richard makes 48 recommendations to government in his report, which he pledges to table in the legislature.

"That is unprecedented, and I hope it means that MLAs will take notice and that the measures that will be taken will be unprecedented as well,'' Richard said. "This is much more than a parental responsibility. It is a department responsibility and a societal responsibility, and we are going to be advocating much harder than we are now.

"At the end of the day, whatever is done will be a political decision, and we will see what happens. But I will not allow these recommendations to be forgotten.

"If the government doesn't adopt them, they will just keep taking bad situations and making them worse, and we will pay through the nose."

More than two years in the making, Richard's report details a broken system in severe need of a makeover, a scary place where 16- to 19-year-olds suddenly fall through the cracks, where mentally challenged children and teenagers go for years without education, where departments don't co-operate or share information with one another and try to pawn off the cost of programs on somebody else, where facilities and expertise are so lacking that patients are farmed out to a rehab centre in Maine at the expense of $500,000 each per year.

In his report, Richard tells the story of seven different youths and how they were victimized by a system that is supposed to be helping them. Many of the details, and indignities suffered, are too horrifying to even mention here.

What is obvious is that something needs to be done to address the needs of our struggling youths, and to end an era of bureaucratic butt-covering.

Money and resources should not be an object - whether it is having enough qualified social workers to oversee caseloads or to have the treatment centres in New Brunswick that we need.

"It can happen with the will of the government, and the signs I have been given have been encouraging so far'' Richard said. "What is important is to have quick changes, and show a willingness to act.

"There are things that can be done right now."

So New Brunswick should do them, and put the shame of the past behind.

"Many of the details, and indignities suffered, are too horrifying to even mention here."

NEW BRUNSWICK,SETS NEW HIGH,ON DENIGRATION.
AFTER KINGSCLEAR,WE PROMISE TO DO WORSE.

Anonymous said...

If he had a job he wouldnt be freezing and have to beg for pennies.

-- maurice the homeless guy --

Anonymous said...

If he had a house he wouldn't be freezing either.