Sentenced by the courts, Larry and Carline VandenElsen have received the following punishment:
- They lost their 5 month old baby girl
- The State has been unaccountable for the abduction of their baby girl
- Public character assassination
- Public shame for standing against the powers that be (let it teach us all a lesson, eh?)
4.5 years for Larry Finck and 3.5 years for Carline VandenElsen. Both were credited double time for time served, contrary to the abusive 1.5 time the Crown wanted to force on them. Larry will then serve 4.5 years less 26.5 months and Carline will serve 3.5 years less 200 days.
One thing this trial has not succeeded at doing is examine the reasons why Larry and Carline refused to hand over their baby. Why the RCMP tried to ram down their door in the middle of the night. The many irregularities CAS and the legal system have been responsible for, from the first court order while Mona-Clare was still in the womb, to the use of the RCMP anti-terrorist unit in the middle of the night, to the abuse of mental health assessments which the CAS sparkles families with like poisoned candies at Christmas.
What this trial has succeeded to do is throw discredit on the institution of "justice" in that province, and has helped bring out to the light the issue of the CAS and Family Court who, by their very self-preservation, continue to break up families using "mental health" as their weapon of choice.
How do we let an agency that has both a governmental and private status, use its own psychiatrists and lawyers to build up their own defense to support the fabricated removal of children in otherwise regular families? Who has never had any harm done to them in a family? Who can predict that a child placed in a foster home will NEVER have any harm done to them? The OPPOSITE is actually truer.
At this point, scores of people from around Halifax and elsewhere, in Ontario as well, are coming out with their own horror stories of how their child has been methodically removed by the CAS and placed in a foster home or given in adoption. To ignore them is no longer possible. We cannot refuse to consider the future of this "mental health" angle as being the weapon of choice being use nowadays to forcibly take away from parents their children who suffer from mental health.
A public inquiry is the only way we will finally expose the inefficiency of the system they use, and expose the numerous abuses that will shock people. There is a systemic blindness to the real tragedies unecessarily created by employees of a system who rely solely on the letter of the law to accomplish a task: provide candidates to a system that processes children.
Cynical? Far from it. It is a grim and undisputable reality.
Larry, Carline and Mona-Clare Finck have been victims of this confused system. The standoff stemmed from their refusal to abide by the CAS comedic claims to their infant. And now that the LAW has succeeded in forcing itself on those victims, we need to stand and denounce such atrocities against Canadian families. The deep shame that stigmatizes families who lose their children for reasons that are beyond them, the powerlessness before a system that maintains that rules have to be blindly applied, even if those rules clearly violate the very mandate they boast about: protecting children and keeping families together. It is clear that we assist at a social fraud.
The CAS has turned into a monstruous machine, and the longer we leave it to itself, unaccountable, the worst it will become. In that particular province, the obligatory annual review of the CAS and Child Protection Services has not been done since 1999. It is time we start asking questions. There's a big buiding being constructed in Stratford, ON for the CAS... WHY do they need a new million-dollar building?
Regards,
Andre Lefebvre
519-271-5880
