TORONTO

Ninety children known to Ontario's child welfare system died in 2007, according to the latest report from the Chief Coroner's office - a number the province's new child advocate says is shocking and should trouble us all.

Equally disturbing, says Irwin Elman in his first annual report to the Legislature today, is the government's refusal to share detailed information on these deaths with his office.

"These are obviously very critical documents for the understanding of the events leading to the death of the child or youth, and entirely necessary for the work the Advocacy Office," Elman writes in the report entitled 90 Deaths: Ninety Voices Silenced. "The matter of access to information is one that we will pursue vigorously."

In an interview, Elman, who has worked with youth in the care of Children's Aid Societies in Toronto for more than 20 years, said he had "no idea" so many of these vulnerable children, who were either open cases of the CAS or had died within a year of their files being closed, could perish in a single year in Ontario. Nor did he know that the number of children who have died has been constant since the late 1990s when the Coroner's office began tracking their deaths.

Elman notes the 90 deaths represent less than a quarter of all children who died in the province in 2007 and are a fraction of the 26,260 open cases of Children's Aid Societies. But the number of deaths is "too high by any standard."

"These are children that we, as a province, have determined are in some peril and should be receiving the best of what we, as their parents, have to offer," he said. "So how could 90 of them die?"

Gaining more access to information about children and youth involved in the child welfare and youth criminal justice systems and broadening his office's legal right to the Coroner's files on deaths are key goals this year, he said.

The 90 deaths in 2007 are recorded as part of the chief coroner's annual Pediatric Death Review Committee report released last June. They include children and youth in foster care, whose families had open files with a Children's Aid Society or had died within a year of their files being closed. Most of the deaths were preventable, the Coroner's committee concluded.

Sixteen were accidental; nine were listed as suicides; four were homicides; eight died from natural causes and could probably not have been prevented; 22 were considered undetermined, which means there was no evidence for any specific classification or that they fit within more than one classification; 17 are still to be classified; and 14 were not considered appropriate by the Coroner for investigation because their deaths were expected due to fragile health.

Of the 76 classified deaths, 34 were babies younger than one year old and 24 were youth between the ages of 12 and 18.

Although the report provides broad geographical information about where in the province the children died, there is no information about ethnicity, family income, community resources, or if the child was in foster care or living with parents. (In an interview, a spokesperson for the Coroner's office said 14 of the classified deaths in 2007 were children in foster care.)

Prevention strategies suggested in the Coroner's report include safer sleeping arrangements for babies; co-ordinated mental health services for youth; better supervision; educating caregivers early in a baby's life to be more mindful; and paying more attention to children's medical needs.

The advocate's office receives about 3,000 phone calls for help every year from among more than 20,0000 children and youth in contact with Children's Aid.

The child advocate's annual budget, when the office existed as part of the provincial ministry of children and youth services, was $1.8 million. But it will top $3.9 million this year as an independent office. Still, Elman notes that with a staff of just 21, including 13 advocates, Ontario has the smallest per capita staff and budget of any provincial children and youth advocate's office and may need more resources in the future to fulfil its mandate.

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