This is horrifying and so very sad. Another long one.

Blatchford: Betrayal within family blindsides dead boy's mom

Jeffrey Baldwin's mother sat shell-shocked Tuesday as she learned the lurid details of her parents' monstrous dysfunction and the staggering incompetence of the Catholic Children's Aid Society of Toronto.

It was the lethal confluence of those two things - human cruelty and institutional failure - that directly led to her little boy's death on Nov. 30, 2002.

Yvonne Kidman is testifying at the Ontario coroner's inquest into Jeffrey's death at the age of five at the hands of his grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman - Yvonne's parents.

The little boy died, a broken shell of a child, of pneumonia and septic shock, but the underlying cause was chronic starvation.

Yvonne was being questioned by Freya Kristjanson, lawyer for Jeffrey's three surviving siblings. Rat-tat-tat, Kristjanson fired questions at Yvonne that she couldn't answer, because for her, they weren't questions, but revelations.

"I don't know anything about this," she repeated many times, shaking her head. "I don't know anything about it."

For instance, asked by Kristjanson if she knew that in June 1978, when she was just a year old, the Catholic Children's Aid had apprehended two of her half-siblings from the Hospital for Sick Children because they had been so severely beaten by Norman Kidman, her father, Yvonne replied with a question of her own.

"If it was that bad," she asked, quite reasonably, "why weren't we (she and her sisters) removed?" "I think that's one of the questions we all have," Kristjanson said, with restraint magnificent in the circumstances.

Astonishingly, while the agency apprehended those two half-siblings - Bottineau's children by another man, they were eventually made Crown wards - it left the youngest and most vulnerable, Yvonne and her two sisters, with their parents, albeit under what's called a "supervision order."

Child-welfare agencies use supervision orders when they have concerns about a child's safety; the orders force families to co-operate with agency workers and at least in theory allow for closer monitoring.

The supervision order ended in November 1981, at which point Yvonne was about four, her sisters Tammy and Yvette respectively five and three.

Yet just five years later, the agency anointed Bottineau "a day foster mom" and put other vulnerable youngsters in her charge.

Kristjanson asked if Yvonne remembered the house being filled with foster kids when she was about nine.

"Yes," she replied, and said the children often stayed overnight.

The significance of this particular revelation is that it means that the CCAS not only failed to check its own aged files - it had been involved with Bottineau's extended family for decades - but also its then contemporaneous records.

On another occasion, the lawyer asked Yvonne if she knew that in 1984, someone had reported to the CCAS that her mother had beaten her with a stick "after an allegation of improper touching."

Yvonne, flushing, replied, "No."

A few minutes later, as Kristjanson kept going, Yvonne said furiously, "If I would have known, my kids would not have gone there (to her parents').


"I'm sorry," she said, "it's very sickening.

"If I'd known all this about my parents," she said, shaking her head but unable to complete the sentence.

It was a devastating day for the 36-year-old woman.

Virtually all of her knowledge about her son's death and her parents' criminal behaviour came from media coverage of what she called "the murder trial."

After a judge-alone trial in 2005, Bottineau and Kidman were convicted in 2006 of second-degree murder in Jeffrey's death and of forcible confinement for their regular lockingup of him and his sister in an unheated, barren bedroom.

The two children - branded by the grandparents as "the pigs" of the family - were forced to live in their own waste.

By the summer of 1998, the grandparents had secured custody in family court of all four of Yvonne's children with her husband Richard Baldwin - Jeffrey, two sisters and their baby brother.

Yvonne and Baldwin were inept teenage parents, totally unaware that they had legal rights and could have fought to keep their kids, and so unsophisticated they might as well have worn bull's eyes on their foreheads.

They didn't know it then - indeed, Yvonne didn't realize the breadth of her mother's betrayal until Tuesday - but they were up against her own parents in the undeclared battle for the support of the CCAS.

They managed to hang onto none of their children for very long.

They lost the oldest, a girl, to Bottineau and Kidman when she was about a year after a complaint from a neighbour.

It was then Bottineau got involved in working behind her daughter's back with agency social workers, expressing her various "concerns" about Yvonne's ability to be a good mother.

They lost the second daughter - the one the grandparents ultimately locked up with Jeffrey - when she was two, and Jeffrey just a year old. Bottineau by then was routinely feeding misinformation about the young parents to CCAS workers.

The next child, a boy, was apprehended from Yvonne at birth, while she was in hospital.

The young parents, usually unrepresented by a lawyer, were repeatedly told by Bottineau and the CCAS workers that they had only two choices: give up their children to foster care and never see them again, or consent to Bottineau's custody applications in court, and be able to visit.

Unsurprisingly, they always chose the latter course, trusting that even Yvonne's controlling mother would raise their youngsters kindly.

In the result, their visits to their own children were tightly controlled and limited.

All Bottineau had ever told her by way of background was that her first baby, a girl, had died of "crib death" - in fact, Bottineau was implicated in the baby's death after the infant was discovered at autopsy to have suffered multiple untreated fractures - and that Yvonne's older halfsiblings had been taken by the CCAS because of her ex's behaviour.

But, in fact, it was Yvonne's beloved father, Bottineau's second husband, who had beaten them. He was convicted in December 1978 of two counts of assault causing bodily harm.

As Kristjanson revealed more and more details in her questions - Yvonne's half-siblings were discovered to have been horribly abused; Bottineau was diagnosed in the "mental defective borderline range" but with "a tenacious ability to satisfy her needs" - Yvonne appeared stunned.

"I have a hard time listening to this," she said once. "She (Bottineau) seemed so smart."

Asked about Jeffrey, Yvonne said simply, "He was a good kid. I miss him." Then she burst into tears.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/co ... story.html

I didn't understand this article at all. What is child's services called in Ontario? Why were Catholic Charities involved?

Once the grandparents had two of their children removed from them due to beatings by grandpa, wouldn't the remaining kids be closely monitored? Wouldn't this prohibit them from being foster parents?

How did they possibly get custody of their daughter's four children?

I think incompetence by social services got little Jeffrey killed. Poor baby.