Court judgment was issued in relation to Leah Sampson.
A.S. (Re), 2014 ABPC 300:
http://canlii.ca/t/gfwpkIn the Provincial Court of Alberta
Citation: A.S. (Re), 2014 ABPC 300
Date: 20141219
Docket: 130265002W1
Registry: Calgary
In the Matter of The Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act,
R.S.A. (2000) Chap. C-12
And in the Matter of: A.S., Born December, 2009....
Decision of the Honourable Judge E.R.R. Carruthers
INTRODUCTION
[1] The subject of this Hearing is an application for a Permanent Guardianship Order (“PGO”) by the Crown pursuant to the Child Youth and Family Enhancement Act (“the Act”) in respect to a medically fragile young boy who has just turned five years of age (hereinafter referred to as “the child”). The child has been in the care of the Director on two occasions. He was first apprehended November 30, 2011 (Apprehension 1), and was the subject of a Temporary Guardianship Order (“TGO”) from March 3, 2012, until he was returned into the care of his mother on September 7, 2012, under a Supervision Order (“SO”), following a Parenting Assessment by Mr. Dave MacLeod, see Exhibit 1, Tab H. The assessment period was March 30 to May 24, 2012 (Parenting Assessment 1). The child was apprehended a second time January 18, 2013 (Apprehension 2), due to apparent concerns that
his mother had begun to identify strongly with her aboriginal roots and had declared herself a member of a sovereignty group and as such, no longer subject to the law. At the same time, she was advocating alternative medical procedures and the Director’s delegates had concerns that this might compromise the medical treatment of the child. Mr. MacLeod was then commissioned to do a second Parenting Assessment (Assessment 2), which was undertaken through the period October 8, 2013 through January 30, 2014. The child has been in care of the Director since Apprehension 2, well in excess of the statutory maximum time in care contemplated in Section 33 of the Act.
[2] The mother’s insistence in alternative medical treatments, her demands that a firm diagnosis be made and her termination of the child’s primary treating physician resulted in an application for a Treatment Order, which was granted on February 22, 2013. The application for the Treatment Order and the transcript of the Hearing is found in Exhibit 1, Tab C.
[3] The father of the child is a man of Jamaican ancestry, whom the mother met while on vacation in that country. She later returned to Jamaica, apparently with the intention of becoming pregnant by him. That occurred, the father applied to enter Canada and arrived in 2009, the day before the birth of the child. The father consented to the PGO on the first day of the Hearing.
[4] The
relationship of the mother and father was apparently characterized by domestic violence, which resulted ultimately in the mother making a complaint to the RCMP in 2011 with respect to incidents that occurred in 2010. The father was charged with seven counts, including sexual assault and threats to the mother and her older son. The father was arrested and detained in custody for over two months before he was able to arrange bail, which was apparently posted by the mother’s sister and her husband. The first count went to trial on August 3, 2012, with the father being acquitted and the other six counts being withdrawn. Father has maintained his innocence of these charges throughout.
[5] The Hearing commenced on April 4, 2014 and concluded on October 31, 2014, occupying some or all of 13 days. There were a number of reasons for the truncation, including the availability of witnesses, the availability of court time, the mother’s loss of counsel and delay in finding new counsel, the length of the mother’s evidence, availability of the Court, a snow event and mother indicating that she wished to have an independent Parenting Assessment.
EVIDENCE OF THE CROWN
Courtney Roma
[6] The Crown called four witnesses. The first witness was Ms. Courtney Roma, the caseworker who had been the caseworker for the bulk of the time the child has been in care of the Director. She introduced various exhibits, including a two-volume trial binder, Exhibit 1, excluding material under Tabs E and F. The Court had directed that material to be excluded, as it was of the view they were not relevant and any probative value was outweighed by their prejudicial effect given that mother had apparently abandoned the sovereignty position being articulated thereunder. The material in these tabs were later entered as Exhibit 14 for the purpose of cross-examination. Ms. Roma specifically identified various assessment reports and other documents from the Director’s files found at Tab G of Exhibit 1, most of which she had prepared and the rest of which she had reviewed and adopted. She particularly noted documents under Tab M where
the mother had made certain Facebook posts which reflected that the mother had apparently recorded telephone conversations and meetings with Ms. Roma and posted her transcriptions of those conversations on Facebook, including a photograph of Ms. Roma. All of these were posted under the name of Standing White Buffalo, a native name, which the mother asserted she was entitled to use. The caseworker described the Director’s involvement since 2010 basically as outlined in her documents contained under Tab G of Exhibit 1. The concerns of the Director have developed over the period of involvement, but essentially revolve around the mother’s mental health and her capacity to care for a medically fragile child. Her mental health has manifested itself in an aggressive, belligerent and confrontational attitude, which has soured relations with the caseworker and Child and Family Services (“CFS”), as well as the medical team charged with the care of the child. She testified that for most of 2013, the mother had not engaged with Ms. Roma and frequently refused to speak with her....
[12] Mr. MacLeod described
the involvement of the mother with Ms. Blackshear throughout and quoted extensively from a number of the documents filed. These documents were part of Tabs E and F of Exhibit 1 (Exhibit 14).
[13]
The quoted documents did not appear to make any sense, using the kind of pseudo legal language described in the so-called Freeman cases (for example see the comments of Rooke, ACJ in Mead v. Mead, 2012 ABQB 571 (CanLII)). The claim filed by Ms. Blackshear was dismissed by the federal court on May 31, 2013: Blackshear v. Canada 2013 FC 590 (CanLII). The Court said, at Paragraph 4, the allegations are, for the most part, unintelligible and consequently difficult to summarize.
[14] The mother later maintained that she had disassociated herself with Ms. Blackshear, although that did not appear to happen until Ms. Blackshear was deported.
....Mr. MacLeod notes at the top of Page 24 of Assessment 2 as follows:
[The mother] has apparently remained involved to some degree with a psychiatrist, and in the two psychiatric consultation notes available in the context of this assessment, Dr. Cameron has indicated that he does not see active symptoms of psychosis and does not consider there to be any need for psychotropic medication. It is not within the scope of expertise of this assessment to offer comment about medication specifically, although it is within the scope of the assessment to comment on the nature of [the mother’s] delusional thinking and, in that regard, it could be said that her delusions are more a product of personality than a textbook psychosis. Conventional wisdom suggests that it is possible to medicate mood and energy, and to medicate the structure of thinking, but it is not possible to medicate the content of thoughts.
[The mother’s] proneness to delusions is born not so much of a free standing psychosis, but more of a personality that seeks to create or, better yet, to endorse a prescribed identity for herself. It is therefore not necessarily surprising that a psychiatric opinion would reject the use of medication, especially because there is no apparent urgent element of risk and her symptoms are not so invasive as to seriously destabilize her day-to-day life....
[33] The child also developed portal hypertension with varices which results in upper intestinal bleed. Therefore a surveillance endoscopy was necessary in order to see what was occurring. These endoscopies were initially every three months and later every six months. At the time Dr. Martin gave evidence, he had had ten procedures, the last one being in September 2013. They were also monitoring the child’s response to dietary interventions and wanted him on a consistently high caloric intake....
[35] Dr. Martin said that he had been the child’s treating physician except for a brief period in 2013 when he had been removed from his care. The removal was as a result of
an email sent by the mother on February 4, 2013 to the provincial and federal heads of political parties, the head of Alberta Health Services, the head of the Calgary Health Authority, the Alberta Children’s Foundation and ACH
accusing the medical team, in general and himself in particular, of negligence, verbal abuse, emotional trauma, wrongdoing, medical misconduct, apartheid and genocide, together with documentation of the benefits of urine therapy. She asked that he be removed from the case....
The Court heard it was in this period that the mother was heavily engaged with the Turtle Island Federation with Ms. Blackshear, and that she was involved with pursuing a case in the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), using this case as a basis for that action.....
[45] Her observation of the mother over the past year is that she is calmer, making better decisions in regards to who she picks as her support people, and is being more thoughtful and more insightful. She noted that she thought previously some of her support people were inappropriate and noted
Ms. Blackshear in particular. Ms. Dreyer felt that at that time, mother was desperate to get her child back, so she latched onto this woman hoping that through using the ICC, she could get the child back into her care. The mother then stated to Ms. Dreyer that she had come to the realization that this was not working and then she came in and started to make better decisions, such as fostering healthy, culturally appropriate connections with Elders within the Métis Society and Aboriginal Services. Ms. Dreyer believes that is when she reconnected to the mental health services.
[46] I have noted some inconsistency here: in Mr. MacLeod’s evidence,
the mother said that she had always known that Ms. Blackshear was a fraud. Whereas Ms. Dreyer indicated that she had this insight when she reconnected with Mental Health Services in April 2013. Yet Ms. Singh’s evidence indicates the mother continued to live with Ms. Blackshear full-time until August, and even thereafter had Ms. Blackshear coming to court to represent her.
[47] Ms. Dreyer said that
Dr. Cameron had given her a diagnosis of PTSD and Borderline Personality traits and that was the diagnosis they were working on in their therapy. She had little contact with the mother until recently when they reconnected through Facebook. She had observed the mother and child once and noted that the child appeared comfortable with the mother....
[70] ...she was also making statements that sounded quite delusional to a casual observer, such as she was looking into drinking her own urine. He said this sounds pretty bizarre, but she had been researching it, and said it was something that Ghandi did daily, thus it was not a delusional thing she came up with of her own accord.
She was also smudging with sage, but for some reason, it appeared as if she was smudging with marijuana and salvia and exposing her baby to those substances, but from what Dr. Cameron could gather in talking to her, this was not the case.
....The Mother
[99] The mother testified over four days. She testified following all of the witnesses, except Ms. Ganchar and Ms. Moore’s cross-examination. In spite of taking extensive notes, I
found her to be a poor historian, inconsistent, evasive and self-serving in her responses. In fact I noted that the mother’s presentation and demeanour were largely congruent with Mr. MacLeod’s findings in Assessment 2, in that she would say different things at different times, had an answer for everything and tended to blame others rather than taking personal responsibility for the outcomes of her behaviour. There was a sense of superiority about her.
[100] By way of example, in describing her involvement with Ms. Blackshear, in Mr. MacLeod’s Assessment 1, she spoke of Ms. Blackshear with reverence, whereas in Assessment 2, she told Mr. MacLeod that she had known all along that Ms. Blackshear was delusional and a fraud.
[101] In her evidence, the mother said that she was using Ms. Blackshear in an attempt to get the child’s case before the ICC. She said in effect that “I was using her and she was using me.”
[102] Ms. Singh’s evidence was that
the mother had been living with Ms. Blackshear full-time from before April 2013 (the mother said March 2013) until at least June 2013, and did not raise any concerns about Ms. Blackshear to Ms. Singh until August 2013. She had introduced Ms. Singh to Ms. Blackshear when Ms. Singh needed a place to live with her two younger children. Ms. Singh lived in the house from April 20, 2013 until October 2013....
[121] While there is no evidence to indicate that the mother is incapable of providing for the day-to-day needs of the child,
it is clear that her personality is such that she is not capable of sustaining relationships with anyone who does not agree with her, has difficulty believing that she is wrong, has a tendency to be hostile when she does not understand situations and does not have the educational platform or the background to be able to sort fact from fiction in acquiring information from the internet. It is well known that there is as much fiction as fact in material to be found on the internet....
[129] Finally, (c) given the evidence of the difficulty in treating personality based disorders, combined with the length of time that this child has already been in care, the Court is required to make the finding that
the child cannot be returned to the custody of the mother within a reasonable time.
[130] A Permanent Guardianship Order is therefore made.[131] With respect to access, there may be access to both the mother and the father in the discretion of the Director including the discretion as to whether there should be access, whether that access should be supervised or unsupervised, and with respect to any conditions or other requirements that might be made with respect to such access. That access will terminate upon the child being placed in an adoptive or potentially adoptive home.
Permanent guardianship by the state was ordered. .
