“No other option”: Peterborough-area Children’s Aid Society blames province over job cuts

Peterborough’s local child welfare agency has “no other option” but to cut jobs as it grapples with a budget shortfall caused by inadequate provincial funding, according to a member of the agency’s board of directors.

“We either have to do this or we just won’t make payroll,” said Lynne Buehler, vice chair of the Kawartha Haliburton Children’s Aid Society’s board of directors.

Twenty unionized staff and five management and non-union staff will be laid off by March 2025 as part of a plan to reduce expenditures by $7.6 million over three years, according to the agency.

“The Ministry [of Children, Community and Social Services] has been crystal clear that we have to do this,” Buehler said of the spending cuts.

The union that represents children’s aid society (CAS) staff is warning that the layoffs will put children at “serious risk.”

“We are worried that kids are gonna get hurt and ultimately we’re really concerned that a child’s gonna die,” said Ruby Taylor, a child protection worker and president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 334, which represents staff.

The layoffs will mean bigger workloads for staff and less time to respond to calls, at a time when those calls have grown more complex because of social problems like rising homelessness, mental illness and drug poisonings, according to Taylor.

“When we go out on a file, there’s substance misuse, there’s homelessness, there’s domestic violence, all in the same family,” she said, adding that in some cases children are having to administer Naloxone, a medication that reverses opioid overdose, to their parents.

CAS staff make home visits to vulnerable children and youth – including babies whose parents are struggling to meet their needs – to check on their safety and support them to stay with their families when possible, said Taylor.

“We already feel like we’re pretty strapped to get that work done,” she said. Now with fewer staff “our worry is that we’re going to be making decisions about safety based on a budget and not on clinical assessment of risk.”

Remaining staff will also have less time to seek out family members who can step in to support children whose parents are unable to care for them, which could result in more children being taken into care, Taylor said.

Shortage of foster parents leads to rising costs

The Peterborough-area agency is one of dozens of children’s aid societies in Ontario that are funded by the province to protect children under 18 who face abuse or neglect.

The Kawartha Haliburton CAS posted a deficit of more than $2.6 million for the 2023/2024 fiscal year, which was driven in large part by increasing costs of residential care, according to the agency’s financial statements. Residential care – provided in private group homes and treatment facilities – is more expensive than placing children in foster care, according to Buehler. But the CAS has to put more children in residential care because of a declining number of foster parents in the region.

“One of the things we’re hoping to do is to increase the number of foster parents that we have so that some children may be suitable to go into foster care instead of into a boarding situation,” she said.

Costs are also rising because “the kids that we are seeing have much more complex needs and they’re not able to get those needs met in community services,” said Buehler, a retired Peterborough police officer who was adopted herself.

She said social services are strained because of “underfunding” and it’s forcing some local families to surrender their children into the care of the CAS. The decision is a last resort for parents who cannot access things like mental health treatment and autism services for their children because of long waitlists, she said.

“They can’t get the service in the community and as their child becomes less able to manage the day-to-day rigours of life, then, what do you do in that situation as a parent?” she said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Job cuts come after province told CAS to “aggressively and immediately” cut costs

In a statement, the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services deflected blame for the job cuts, saying that children’s aid societies are independent organizations that are “responsible for their own staffing decisions.”

The ministry also said it recently conducted a review of the Peterborough-area agency’s operations, which resulted in more than 40 recommendations for “improving service delivery.”

Buehler said the recommendations may result in cost savings, but the amount is “difficult to quantify.” And it will require investment up front to implement some of them, including a recommendation to put more resources into recruiting foster parents in order to reduce residential care costs.

The CAS was directed by the province to “aggressively and immediately reduce expenditures,” according to Buehler. But the agency cannot do that without layoffs because the “vast majority” of its budget goes toward staffing and children’s services, she said.

Buehler added that ministry officials suggested staffing reductions “as a step required to return to a position where we can operate within the annual funding allocation,” in a meeting with the CAS board of directors.

The ministry insisted that the Ford government has increased funding for child protection services.

“Our government has invested more than $1.6 billion in 50 child welfare societies, including 13 Indigenous societies, to support children and youth across Ontario. This year we increased funding for child protection services by another $14 million – in addition to last year’s increase of $76.3 million,” the ministry’s statement said.

But child welfare agencies say that funding has not been enough to keep up with rising costs and that their resources are strained to the point that some children in care in the province have been placed in hotels and Airbnbs.

Buehler said CAS staff are doing their best to ensure the cuts do not affect services for children.

“The quality of care that we deliver to children, youth and families cannot be diminished,” said Buehler. “We’re working to ensure that we have all the appropriate frontline staff, and that we continue to provide mandated service to the families and children and youth in our communities.”