HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN BEING LOST TO DRUGS, SEX TRADE

Your 15-year-old daughter goes missing. A man calls, and tells you she's
been murdered. The RCMP can't find her. You wait. Three weeks go by, and a
reporter finds her, living in the squatters' camp outside the old Woodwards
store, in one of Canada's most dangerous, even deadly, neighborhoods.

You're delighted she's found. Police take her to a ministry of children and
families office. They talk to her. She refuses help. And she walks away,
back to the same streets. That's exactly the way it happened for Danielle
Petit and her family this week. Nothing we can do, says Children's Minister
Gordon Hogg.

There's no law in B.C. that lets you hold a child against her will. But
there was. The New Democrats passed one in 2000, a seriously flawed
version, but at least an effort.

The Liberals have chosen not to put it into effect. And they have broken
their promise to provide a better alternative. That won't happen until
2004-5, says Hogg.

I don't know Danielle Petit. Most 15-year-old girls are dealing with the
challenges of Grade 10, maybe looking forward to being old enough to drive.
Maybe she's able to make the decision to live on the streets.

But hundreds of children are being lost to drugs, or to the fringes of the
sex trade, and their parents are powerless to help them because there is no
legal way to hold them for treatment or counselling.

Your 12-year-old son could be using heroin and living with a gang of petty
thieves; your 13-year-old daughter could move in with a pimp. And if you
drag them away, you are breaking the law. Outrageous, right?

Premier Gordon Campbell and the Liberals used to think so too. They
repeatedly demanded the NDP enact a secure care law, one that would allow
children at risk to be plucked from danger. It was urgent, they said, and
children's lives were being destroyed because the New Democrats weren't
making their rescue a priority.

Here's Campbell, a year before the election, in the legislature.

"This is a problem that has been identified for years in this province," he
said then. "We know that there are countless families in the province of
British Columbia who understand the urgency and the necessity for providing
secure care for our children and youth in this province. Again my question
to the minister is: what is the holdup? Why is the minister stalling on
this matter, which has been so clearly identified as a matter of true risk
to the children in the province?"

The children are still at risk. Campbell has the power to provide the
protection he once considered so important. And he's choosing not to help
them. It's not even that tough an issue. Any law has to balance the right
of children and youth to make decisions about their lives against our
interest in protecting them from serious harm. But the Liberals already
have the blueprint, in the form of a 1998 report that set out a plan to
allow children to be held for 72 hours, with appropriate safeguards. It
could be in place within months - if Campbell meant what he said about the
urgency of protecting children. Instead, action keeps getting delayed. The
Liberals promised action last year. Then Hogg said by 2004. Now it may be
2005. Why?

It's hard to get a straight answer. But money is part of the problem.
There's no point in apprehending children if you don't have the resources
needed to help them, the rehab spaces or counselling. And B.C. doesn't, and
the Liberals have not put them in place. "What is the holdup?" Campbell
asked the former government. "Why is the minister stalling on this matter,
which has been so clearly identified as a matter of true risk to the
children in the province?" Why indeed.