HagenVille
As we mentioned yesterday, British Columbia's current Minister of Child and Family Development Stan Hagen (there have been many more BC Liberals before him) has been feeling put upon because some in the media have been calling him on his smear of a gagged Nicholas Simons.
Simons, a former social worker who was heading up the Sherry Charlie review before he was elected as a rookie NDP MLA last year, has been bound and gagged by a confidentiality agreement with Mr. Hagen's Ministry.
Which didn't stop Mr. Hagen from dragging Mr. Simons through the mud when he was feeling a little heat after the completion of the Coroner's Inquest and the Morley (non-)Report.
Sure, this all sounds like 'inside baseball', but it does speak to how little is actually being done vs. how much time and effort is instead being spent on the spin and the smear.
Well, that and the fact an avalanche of leaked documents from, one can only guess social workers, from inside the Ministry has allowed NDP critic Adrian Dix to go on the attack once again. As reported by Sean Holman in 24 hrs:
The B.C. Liberal government tolerated high risks for vulnerable children by leaving child protection reports incomplete for too long, an NDP critic says.
NDP Children and Family Development critic Adrian Dix said internal government documents show thousands of reports were not finished in an acceptable timeframe.
"The established standard timeframe for Child Protection Reports is 30 days," Dix said. "Ministry statistics now show that thousands remain incomplete for more than 90 days."
Dix said between October 2003 and October 2005, statistics in the government's own database show a 53 per cent increase in reports being left open for greater than 30 days.
"These delays are hampering the government's ability to monitor children in care ... the government is putting these children at risk," Dix said.
Children and family development minister Stan Hagen wasn't available to respond to Dix but a ministry spokesman agreed files were being left open for too long, although he added it was simply a matter of filling out the requisite paperwork to close them.
The spokesman also said the number of open case files has remained constant over the years.
And Jeff Davies on CBC radio this morning reported that a whole bunch of the reviews have gone on for more than one year.
Could it be that Minister Hagen couldn't speak because he was too busy trying to plug all the leaks? Perhaps he could stop them tomorrow by offering up SUV exemptions.
Oh, wait, maybe social workers can't (or won't) give hundreds of thousands of dollars to BC Liberal campaigns for no (greater) good reason at all.
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Update: Mr. Holman is now reporting that the so-far silent Mr. Simons wants the gag removed so that he can defend himself from the smear.
Btw: Why does it seem like it's almost 'All Holman, All The Time' these days? Because, almost invariably, he is first to the story. And even when he's not (ie. he was not first out of the gate on the Hagen smear of Simons - something about birthday celebrations are some darn thing), he seems to go hardest on the follow-up. As we said last week, the no longer really young man appears to be lapping the field.
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