Judge slams Quebec youth protection after Inuk teen placed in 64 different foster homes

A Quebec court judge has issued a scathing decision identifying major long-standing problems in youth protection services for Inuit children in Quebec's North, in a case where a teenage girl was sent to 64 different foster homes in less than 10 years.

For most of that time, the teen was placed in foster homes and rehabilitation centres in the South because of a shortage of services in the North.

In a decision April 24, Quebec Court Judge Peggy Warolin ruled the teen — who can't be identified due to youth protection laws — "was thus deprived of her right to the preservation of her cultural identity."

"The child had been so cut off from her culture that she found herself in a very advanced process of assimilation," Warolin said.

It's one of two decisions recently issued by Warolin that she insisted be forwarded directly to the provincial ministers responsible for social services and relations with First Nations and Inuit.

Warolin noted that the circumstances in this case were not unique — and are in fact common for Inuit teens in youth protection.

"No other group of adolescents in need of rehabilitation services must submit to placement so far from their original environment," Warolin said in the decision, concluding that such practices amount to systemic discrimination.

According to the decision the teenager, now 16, has been in youth protection since she was five. Her family life is unstable, and she's been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and post-traumautic stress disorder.

Initially she was placed in foster families within her community, but then was relocated to dozens of different foster families and rehab centres in the South.

The girl was doing better after being placed at a rehab centre in Montreal in 2021 where all the children housed there spoke Inuktitut.

But after five months she was transferred, against the wishes of her doctors, to another rehab centre with no connections to her culture.

Warolin's ruling says that never should have happened, and that distancing the girl from her culture contributed to her distress.

Warolin attributed the girls' situation in part to territorial battles between the provincial Department of Youth Protection and local health authorities in Nunavik, the region encompassing Quebec's Far North.

Her decision urges a clarification of the roles of both parties.