PC MLAs vote down effort to create youth advocate, says NDP

Nova Scotia’s opposition NDP says the government is dragging its feet when it comes to appointing a child and youth advocate.

The party says in a release that the Progressive Conservatives voted down a New Democratic Party motion to take action to create the long-promised child and youth advocate at this week’s community services committee.

Opportunities and Social Development critic Lina Hamid says one third of food bank users in the province are children, and the auditor general has raised serious concerns about the child welfare program.

Hamid says a spokesperson is needed to protect the needs of children and youth.

“The NDP have been calling for this advocate since 2018, and the Houston government and Liberal government before them have failed to deliver,” said Hamid. “Children are among our most vulnerable citizens, and they deserve the same protection and oversight that children have in other provinces in Canada.”

Nova Scotia is one of only two provinces without a child and youth advocate.

Children at risk in Nova Scotia

Vulnerable children are receiving inadequate care because of weak oversight within the province’s youth home and temporary care network, says the province’s auditor general in 2024.

Kim Adair said the most concerning finding from her report is the lack of regular contact between children and social workers, which she said impacts the staff’s ability to produce proper care plans.

“In almost half of our samples, social workers did not meet the contact standards for meeting with children in child and youth care homes or in the temporary emergency arrangements,” the auditor general told reporters. “In one instance, a child was not contacted for over three months.”

Adair’s report also says some children’s needs are not being met because their care plans are outdated or missing. As well, it criticized the agreements between the Department of Community Services and care providers, saying they lack mechanisms to hold people accountable.

It also highlighted that there were 1,900 “critical incidents or serious occurrences” between 2021 and 2023 that could have impacted the health and safety of children in child and youth care homes, but no analysis was done into the causes or severity of these events. Adair declined to give an example of a critical incident but noted that one government-run home accounted for about 37 per cent of serious occurrences over the two-year audit period.