Among the bloodcurdling news, this one, which fell last week: an 18-month-old child who was spending his day at daycare was so seriously injured that he later succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Investigators from the personal crimes section of the Sûreté du Québec were seized of the sordid affair, which occurred in L’Assomption, in Lanaudière. In the days following the baby’s death, police arrested the manager of the family daycare where the child was located. He was charged with second-degree murder at the Joliette courthouse, where he was scheduled to appear again on December 14.
“Day care” and “murder” are two words we wish we never had to marry. Although the tragedy that struck this L’Assomption family is exceptional, it offers the opportunity to still ask crucial questions about child protection in the services and institutions to which parents entrust the apple of their eye. Is Quebec doing enough to ensure that educators, teachers and daycare providers are trustworthy people who would never dream of putting the safety and integrity of children at risk? ?
If we are to believe the parliamentary soap opera of the last week of session, the answer is no. On December 7, the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, tabled Bill 46 in the National Assembly. Its objective is precisely to provide robustness where protection mechanisms linked to services are lacking. educational childcare. The bill will be studied next year, but it follows a series of excellent and appalling reports produced in 2022 by the Quebecor Bureau of Investigation and highlighting all the failures of this sieve system providing access, for example, to people with questionable criminal records to the management of a home daycare service.
Since 2018, the law has required any person responsible for a childcare service to obtain a “certificate of absence of impediment” – a criminal background check, in short – from a police force, regardless of she is the holder of a daycare service permit or a person living in the residence where the service is offered. Obviously, this filter is not perfect, but it theoretically makes it possible to slow down the entry of profiles potentially harmful to the safety of children. In their investigations, Quebecor reporters actually demonstrated the ineffectiveness of this filter, in the sense that it lets aberrations through: a trafficker close to the Hells Angels, sentenced to prison terms for drug trafficking and gangsterism , thus obtained the lifting of the impediment against him by the Ministry of Family, and his wife was able to run a daycare service in their residence.
Right on time, the government has decided to sharpen its protection mechanisms! Bill 46 promises new obstacles and more responsiveness in the event of a problem. All that remains is to take a leap of faith. It is not because the laws and regulations are in place that in their application everything works like clockwork. Common sense must be used when applying the law.
In a related area, the Ministry of Education recently made every effort to carry out a diagnosis of the management of sexual misconduct and inappropriate practices at school. The result, which has been discussed at length, is overwhelming. In short, he concludes that the cracks in the school net allow sexual attackers to slip through. Oh scandal, they sometimes seem better protected than their victims and can flit from one establishment to another without their deviations being relayed to the future employer. Minister Bernard Drainville has promised to follow through, but his detractors are impatient. They believe that the time has come to adopt a framework law on sexual violence as exists in CEGEPs and universities. They are absolutely right.
Unfortunately, it will be too little too late for this 4-year-old child from Longueuil who was allegedly sexually assaulted in his elementary school linked to the Marie-Victorin school service center by an adult in authority. This terrible news, reported by Radio-Canada this week, features an alleged aggressor in a position of responsibility with a child from kindergarten in the 4-year-old group. The adult was removed from the school environment while the police completed their investigation. But how could such a thing be — again! – possible ? We cannot emphasize enough the urgency of strengthening all legal and regulatory mechanisms, all employee recruitment and supervision processes, all routes for denouncing possible aggressors, all with one and only goal: to protect children from attacks threatening their integrity, within the supposedly safe walls of our daycares and our schools.