Ontario, Don't Terminate Parental Rights Because of One Drug Test
For years, too many Ontario parents lost their children because of one company's botched drug testing. After losing custody of her child when tests showed alcohol abuse, one woman told The Star she hopes to start a class action suit, now that the truth about the flawed testing is out.
Perhaps the most egregious error involved in this flawed testing is that it was done using hair samples, which can often be unreliable. But even worse, Ontario’s child protection system seemed to insist on relying solely on Motherisk’s results, without either calling for confirmation testing or allowing other tests results on the record.
Yvonne Marchand, who is suing Motherrisk, told Star that after Motherisk’s results came in, she got an “independent test from an accredited lab, which concluded she was negative for alcohol abuse,” However, says Marchand, the judge at her court proceeding “refused to admit the independent test because the author of the test wasn’t present.”
Thanks to a Star investigation exposing Motherisk’s sub-standard testing procedures, poor record-keeping and other problems, an independent review of old cases is now underway. However, what assurance do parents have that this won’t happen again unless something changes in the way the child protection agencies and courts handle this kind of evidence?
Sign this petition to insist that Ontario Children's Aid Societies require corroboration by a separate, independent lab of any test that would result in the devastating loss of custody of a child!
To Ontario’s Children’s Aid Societies and Child Custody Courts:
The reports of the substandard and inappropriate testing methods used in Ontario to implicate parents as unfit to have custody of their children is an outrage to any society that values human rights.
As a United States, Nevada, Supreme Court decision in 2002 noted, “The bond between parent and child is a fundamental societal relationship, “ and that
“Termination of a parent’s parental rights is viewed as the equivalent of a civil death penalty.”
When a decision with such grave consequences as these is based solely on one test, this has to be a violation of basic human rights, even in Ontario.
While it is commendable that a commission will now “review potentially thousands of Ontario child-protection cases that depended on flawed hair test results from the Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory,» according to a Star report, this does not in any way make up for the irreparable damage done to the families victimized by this system’s egregious violations of parents’ and children’s rights.
As one of Marchand’s attorneys told the Star, “The disruption and removal of children from parents is unfathomable…and has a dramatic effect that no amount of money will be able to make these families whole again.”
There must be guarantees that this kind of atrocity will never occur again. Termination of parental rights is far too grave a consequence to rely solely on one test result as evidence of parental drug abuse.
Therefore, we the undersigned, insist that Ontario amend its procedures and policies to require at least a second, if not more, corroborative tests before deciding to terminate a parent’s rights.
Thanks for your time.
By signing, you accept Care2's Terms of Service.
You can unsub at any time here.
Having problems signing this? Let us know.