B.C. is set to become the first province to settle a class-action lawsuit over birth alerts — the practice of child welfare workers contacting pregnant people’s medical practitioners, frequently resulting in apprehending babies shortly after birth, interrupting the mother’s care and bonding.
The practice officially ended in B.C. in 2019. Most other Canadian jurisdictions have also ended them.
In the final 20 months that B.C. issued official birth alerts, 58 per cent of the people involved were Indigenous. Indigenous people make up about 5.7 per cent of B.C.’s population.
The proposed settlement is valued at $66 million and while the total number of class members is not known, the province has a list of about 2,842 people it has identified as potentially being the subject of a birth alert.
The settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing. But it includes a provision for a senior B.C. government official to make a public statement acknowledging the impact of birth alerts and for the province to facilitate roundtable discussions with class members.
B.C. is not the only province being taken to court over birth alerts: Separate class actions have been filed in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. But B.C. is the only province to indicate an intention to settle.
In Ontario, a court certified the province as a defendant but not children’s aid societies, which plaintiffs argued issued birth alerts, leading to two duelling appeals: one by the plaintiffs trying to get children’s aid societies certified and one by the province seeking to overturn its own certification.
Meanwhile, Manitoba has sought to have the class action in that province struck, arguing the representative plaintiff’s birth alert happened too long ago — an argument her lawyers reject in part because, they say, the province concealed the birth alert from her at the time.
Saskatchewan has sought to bar the use of a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission report as evidence in that province’s class action case, arguing they constitute hearsay and are insufficiently reliable.
Spokespeople for the Manitoba and Saskatchewan governments declined to comment because the matter is before the courts.
Tina Yang, a lawyer representing plaintiffs in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, would like those provinces to follow B.C.’s lead but, at the very least, she would like them to debate their class actions on their merits, especially addressing the Charter right to equal treatment.
The B.C. settlement is significant, says the plaintiffs’ lawyer Michelle Segal, not only because it provides meaningful compensation.
“It’s a small piece of a much bigger project, which is advocacy around the child welfare system in B.C., specifically, but also in Canada,” she said.
“This resolution is the most responsible decision to close this chapter and avoid lengthy and costly litigation,” a spokesperson for the B.C. government wrote in an email.
Adrianna Zeleniski plans to celebrate by sinking her feet in the sand near her home in Armstrong.
Thirteen years after a security guard stood outside her hospital room while she was in labour, Zeleniski, the representative plaintiff in the B.C. case, welcomed the settlement.
“Everybody here in this class action is going to have something that they can acknowledge, that they can say out loud.”
This story was also published in the Vancouver Sun.
