N.S. child welfare system 'incredibly broken,' say experts after guilty plea in toddler death

The case of a child who was killed by his mother shortly after being returned from foster care has shed a rare and needed spotlight on the child welfare system, say experts in the field.

Isaiha Surette was 17 months old when he died in 2020 after his mother threw him from a bed onto a hardwood floor. The impact caused swelling and bleeding in his brain, and he died in hospital three days after the incident.

His mother, April Wendy Marie Surette, 32, pleaded guilty this week to manslaughter in Yarmouth provincial court. She is scheduled to be sentenced in March, when the Crown and defence will seek a six-year prison term.

Isaiha had been in foster care in the months beforehand, and had been returned to the family home just two weeks before the incident that led to his death.

“When we hear about the most tragic ending to a child's life, it sparks lots of questions about how are our systems performing,” says Alec Stratford, the registrar of the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers.

The college regulates the profession, including social workers who help make decisions about whether a child is removed from a family home or returned after foster care.

Stratford says social workers have high caseloads that prevent them from building the relationships they need with parents to ensure they are supported and safe.

“Right now it feels like you're just running from fire to fire to fire without the opportunity to connect, to understand more and to put forward meaningful case plans that are going to make a substantial difference in folks’ lives.”

He added that social workers experience a lot of “moral distress” on the job that contributes to a high turnover rate, resulting in newer, inexperienced workers taking on difficult child welfare cases.

“They are in people's homes experiencing the failures of our broader systems and feel helpless to be able to change that,” Stratford says.

“They are doing what they can with the tools that they are given, with the time that they have to try and make meaningful changes in peoples lives, but often don't feel like the system is there to support them in doing that.”

Stratford says the college is considering investigating whether the social work standards were met in the case of Isaiha and April Surette.

Brooke Richardson is a professor in the child and youth studies department at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax who researches child welfare systems.

She says it is easy for people to solely blame the mother in cases such as Surette’s, “as this is the easiest place to pin down the harm.”