Hamilton, May 11, 2008 -- Friends and supporters of a boy who has been apprehended by the CAS to receive chemotherapy sign a poster saying "We Love You." for him. They were outside his window at McMaster Children's Hospital, Sunday evening holding a vigil in protest of the boy's treatment by the authorities. Globe and Mail photo by Glenn LowsonGlenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
Often, and for many years, Canadian courts have issued orders saying that Jehovah's Witness parents do not have the right to refuse blood transfusions on behalf of their children, in cases that may be a question of life and death.
Now, two similar disputes have arisen in Ontario, with Mississauga and Iroquois families. The result should be the same as with the Jehovah's Witnesses, however painful that may be to religious or spiritual sensibilities.
Oddly enough, both cases have arisen from a bone-marrow cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, diagnosed in two 11-year-old girls at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, where the doctors believe the girls will die if not treated by chemotherapy.
In the second of the two instances, the mother has reportedly taken her daughter to a holistic centre in Florida, in the belief that chemotherapy is "poison" and that ancestral, traditional healing is what is needed.
In both instances, the hospital asked Brant Family and Children's Services, the children's aid society in the region, to intervene, but the society declined to do so.
When this happened for the second time, the hospital itself applied to the courts to compel the agency to act. This invites the inference that the hospital has – quite reasonably – come to worry about an emerging and worrying trend in First Nations communities to dispense with scientific medicine. Adults are free to make that choice for themselves. Children are not.
The BFCS is understandably reluctant to enter a reserve and remove a child against a parent's will. But a hospital is not a residential school under some other name.
Whether the court decides that a children's aid society can be compelled to act in these circumstances remains to be seen, but the hospital is right to act. For one thing, failure to do so would amount to discrimination against the Jehovah's Witness parents and children who have already been through this.