Most people would be a tad upset if the government took one of their children away. Try to imagine how you would feel if they took away nine of your children – the nine youngest of 13! That is what happened to friends of mine in Ottawa. The incident resulted from a report given to the Ottawa-Carleton branch of Ontario’s Children’s Aid Society by Severn Avenue Public School, where my friends have sent their children since the mid-1980s. So much for schools building trust with parents.
Actually, the school was probably simply complying with Ontario’s new tyrannical legislation, Bill 6, that came into effect on March 31 and which strengthens the power of the Children’s Aid Society. It expands the reasons for finding a child in need of protection and strengthens the requirement of third parties to report suspected child abuse. Some years ago a serviceman working at the Mielkes’s house on a school day reported them to CAS because two of their children were at home. The children were being home-schooled.
In recent years, aggressive behaviour by Children’s Aid from B.C. to Nova Scotia has exposed them as strident ideologues, brainwashed by today’s “children’s rights” agenda. In the past year, the Home School Legal Defence Association has reported in their newsletter on two successful attempts at confronting aggressive law-violating CAS workers who were harassing home schooling families.
David and Ruby Mielke have been married for more than 20 years, have lived in their current Ottawa home for 15 years and have been attending their church, the Ottawa Reformed Presbyterian Church, for more than five years. Mr. Mielke is blind and he works for Nortel as a senior software designer, having been there for 22 years. Their children range in age from two to 21 years and tend to be on the quiet side, but are polite and seem to be well trained.
When the CAS agents arrived at the Mielke house on July 13, Ruby refused to let them in until David and the police arrived. The police had been called by the CAS workers due to Ruby’s failure to cooperate. In an attempt to demonstrate that everything was in order in their home, the Mielkes allowed the officials to enter.
CAS now became more concerned with the condition of their home. Nobody is disputing that their house is in a pretty disastrous condition. Not even David. At any rate, whatever the condition of their home the CAS has no proof that the home is a risk to the children’s well-being. David says he “gave them an open invitation to check with our doctor, as well as with all of the various hospitals, in order to verify that … we have had very few health or physical problems.”
The CAS wasn’t interested in checking out this information before hauling the children away. Now the nine youngest children have been taken and divided up between five different foster parents.
The CAS refuses to discuss the details of particular cases with other people, so not surprisingly, when I called them, I was not able to get their side of the story. Media spokesman, Denis Boivin, though, said they are “regulated by very rigid standards,” and insisted that their “paramount objective is to ensure the well-being of children.”
In the court papers filed by the CAS, David says they made an issue about the children being dirty and hungry the day the agents took them away. He notes that “they were not clean because they had been playing outside all morning, and were still doing so when CAS arrived. They were hungry because CAS arrived just after noon, before lunch was ready.” David said that when he raised this dishonesty with his CAS agent and her supervisor, their remarkable response was: “That’s why you have a lawyer to refute our claims.”
David was also told that the CAS intended to portray him as an abusive father, but judging by the first court hearing, they seem to have dropped that line of attack. Still, they will be looking for signs of abuse as they watch the parents interact with their children during supervised access times.
They have agreed to give David and Ruby supervised access, but no time has been set for returning the children to their own home. The children were rounded up by the CAS agents and brought to their church on Sunday where they visited for the whole day; this is supposed to become a regular occurrence while the children are under foster care. CAS “claimed that it would take several months of carefully arranged and supervised visits between ourselves and our children in order to rebuild our family,” David says. In the meantime, he noted in his first visit with the children that some of his work in training his children is already being undone in terms of the lack of discipline evidenced by a couple of them.
The next court hearing for the Mielkes is on August 17.
