Reliable sources say that some staff in the Ministry of Children and Family Development will not have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Their supervisors and mangers have been told that they must be at work on Tuesday, October 14th, so they can notify staff which jobs are "redundant" in each office.

Of 525 positions slated for this round of elimination, 70% are line level workers, mostly social workers, in the regions. For example, the North Region will eliminate 21 Child Welfare Social Workers; the Fraser Region will eliminate 64.5 social work full time equivalents.

An entire page of promises in the notorious New Era Document was devoted to "A New Era for Children & Families" (page 26). The campaign document said "It's time we put real accountability into the system and devote the resources to the job needed to put the interests of kids first." Since then the interests of kids have been put dead last as a result of failed tax cuts and a government that is ideologically driven to reduce the size of the public sector regardless of the consequences.

On June 25th Minister Gordon Hogg told a staged cabinet meeting that "only" $70 million more would be cut from the Ministry that Gordon Campbell previously supported for whatever it took to protect children - that was when Campbell was in Opposition. Since then, the Sage Report (a consultant to the Ministry) said that regionalization had to be postponed again and budgets had to be "stabilized" so that decentralization didn't become offloading.

Hogg claimed that his massive cuts are supported by "evidence based research". Despite repeated efforts to use Freedom of Information legislation to obtain that research, the Ministry has refused to do a document search and has simply referred the request to the politically appointed media flack who has produced a staffing model. In other words, if one does less work, it follows that fewer staff are needed. That has nothing to do with offloading high risk kids from group homes to standard foster homes, let alone doing fewer investigations while welfare payments are cut and the risk of neglect increases yet those are changes that are being made.

Children are at increased risk in the New Era, and they will be at even greater risk when layoffs are announced the day after Thanksgiving. One very sad indicator of "progress" is the infant mortality rate. After a decade of improvement, it has increased since Campbell took power. His government has removed infant mortality as an indicator from all government service plans and from the overall strategic plan. Health Planning Minister, Sindi Hawkins, defended that change by saying government would continue to measure infant mortality. Vital statistics including infant mortality are usually released on a quarterly basis. As of October 8th, the statistics for January through March, 2003, are still not available! Maybe that is because they fired so many staff that the numbers cannot be tabulated or maybe it is because the numbers indicate something government would like to deny.