After barely five hours of deliberation, the 12 jurors charged with hearing the case of the girl from Granby concluded in the guilt of the mother-in-law, found guilty of second degree murder and forcible confinement. This abnormally short withdrawal for a jury leaves no doubt as to the weight of the evidence amassed against the 38-year-old woman, evidence ginned over eight painful weeks of displaying a life of petty martyrdom literally escaped by society. .
The tragic death of the little girl shook all of Quebec in 2019, giving rise to a special commission on children’s rights and youth protection. The verdict pronounced last Thursday comes to close an important judicial chapter. In the well-chosen words of the Crown prosecutor Jean-Sébastien Bussières, “if this verdict gives this young girl a little dignity, it is already enormous”. But nothing, not even a unanimous guilty verdict, can lessen the horror experienced by the girl, presumably died of suffocation after being wrapped in duct tape from head to toe by her stepmother, like a “mummy”.
In the preamble to her voluminous report calling for the establishment of child protection services on the common base of benevolence, the president of the special commission, Régine Laurent, wrote directly to the little girl, whom she had named Ti – Lilly. “Your death has carved a deep furrow in the heart of our society,” she wrote. As a society, in fact, on what can our certainties rest after a drama of such magnitude has played out before our numb eyes? It is around this question that decision-makers have been busy working since the story of the little girl, who was very well known to child protection services from her early days, horrified Quebec. It must be said: the actions taken to date are encouraging, and testify to a real shock, which will apparently not go unanswered. Let’s hope so.
A national director of the Youth Protection Directorate has been appointed by Quebec. This is Catherine Lemay, who has been in office since March 2021. This request was part of the very first emergency proposals formulated by the special commission to counter the lack of homogeneity and the absence of an overall vision posed on the network. Dismayed by the isolation of the DYPs, where tragedies are breaking out everywhere, not just in Granby, the Commission has called for the end of piecemeal management, without any apparent constant, apart from the inability to diligently carry out a mission. protection of the most vulnerable children.
Additional resources were also announced to strengthen front-line services for children in difficulty. We cannot stress enough the importance of this entry route into the nerve center of prevention. In addition to providing direct tools to those working in the fields of school, daycare and health, this strengthening should reduce one of the phenomena most criticized by the Laurent commission, namely the fact that the DPJ has become the all-and-nothing report trunk, from the tragic to the least serious, without any discernment. By reducing the pressure in this way and by restoring the DYP’s status of “intensive care” for child protection, Quebec hopes to lighten too heavy a burden.
More recently, the Minister for Health and Social Services, Lionel Carmant, tabled Bill 15, intended to refocus the Youth Protection Act around the crucial principle of the primacy of the best interests of the child. . What should have been obvious suffered from some confusion at the time of interpretation. By modifying the wording of the preamble to the Act, we hope to correct some of the mistakes that have made the interests of parents take precedence over those of their child, sometimes with terrible consequences. The bill also corrects another drift by relaxing the rules of confidentiality around the file of a child reported to the DYP, which will facilitate the sharing of information deemed crucial for a complete understanding and an effective intervention.
All this does not, however, remedy one of the biggest problems facing the child protection network, with the exodus and worrying exhaustion of troops active in the field of neglect. More than a shortage of manpower, it is a disaffection of its burnt staff and overwhelmed by the scale of the task – and the clear impression of not being able to meet the immensity of needs – that the minister and the national director of the DPJ must tackle urgently, hoping that the political measures put in place will quickly have a concrete effect on the ground, where everything is played out.