Dufferin CAS Annual Meeting

June 15, 2004 permalink

The Dufferin CAS annual meeting at Monora Park was uneventful.

The meeting began with 45 minutes of music, close to the loud, culturally offensive music deemed torture by Amnesty International. The meeting chairman, Tom Murray, called the meeting to order and dealt with just four items of business, approving the minutes of the last annual meeting, approving the auditor's report, appointing the auditor for the coming year, electing four new directors, followed by adjournment.

The four new directors are Allan Bennington, Sandra Card, Michael Craig and Jackie Wilcox.

The meeting was followed by a speech by Dr Dirk Huyer. Among his credentials is a period working at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, including the SCAN clinic. The theme of his somewhat disorganized talk was the case of Farah Khan. Dr Huyer served as an expert witness at the trial of the parents convicted of her murder. In the concluding part of his talk he dealt with child protection generally. His statements showed that the shaken baby syndrome, now beginning to be scientifically discredited, remains alive and well as a diagnostic criterion in Ontario. Dr Huyer also mentioned that child abuse statistics cannot be collected from families or children, but are always gathered from professionals. So when viewed critically, they are nothing more than opinion surveys of social workers.

Following Dr Huyer, Tom Murray lamented the lenient treatment by a judge of a mother who had broken her child's bone. He expressed the hope that a new generation of judges would soon be on the bench showing more sympathy to child protectors. He showed no understanding that Children's Aid has lost the confidence of judges by its excessive intervention in families where no abuse has occurred.