Two advocacy groups have asked a provincial watchdog to investigate a policy that cuts housing allowances for parents whose children have been placed in temporary foster care.
The policy, which can result in a parent's housing allowance being cut from a family rate of $570 a month to a single person's rate of about $375, can result in parents losing their homes and make it difficult or impossible for them to regain custody of their children, the groups say.
The policy also pits two arms of the provincial government against each other, says Lobat Sadrehashemi, a staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society.
"Social workers are charged with returning children safely to their parents as soon as possible," Ms. Sadrehashemi said Wednesday at a news conference at Pivot's Vancouver office. "But the welfare system makes that impossible by taking away the housing that is necessary for the child to return to their parents."
According to the two groups that filed the complaint, that means even if parents have addressed issues - such as alcohol or drug abuse - that resulted in their children being apprehended by the ministry, those parents may not be able to get their children back because they don't have adequate housing.
The complaint, filed to the provincial ombudsperson by Pivot and the West Coast Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, follows several years of correspondence between advocacy groups and provincial authorities on the issue of shelter allowances.
Four other groups that work with women and children are participating in the complaint.
Pivot and LEAF pursued the matter through the ombudsperson's office, rather than taking up an individual's case in court, because the complaint is "systemic" and affects many people in a similar way, Ms. Sadrehashemi said.
There is significant overlap between families who are on social assistance and those whose children have been apprehended. Between 2003 and 2008, 35 per cent of child-protection removal court orders involved families who were receiving income assistance from the province, the complaint says. Many of those families are aboriginal; as of November, 2006, about half of the nearly 10,000 children in care in B.C. were aboriginal.
The B.C. ombudsperson can investigate whether public agencies are being fair to the people they serve.
In recent years, the agency has looked into such issues as the provincial drinking water supply and lottery payouts.
When the agency receives a complaint, it assesses it to determine whether the it is within the agency's jurisdiction and also checks whether complainants have tried to resolve the problem with the authority in question.