To donate your time for a good cause you need to prove, on your own dime, that you're not a predator
By Peter Shawn Taylor
Canadians are becoming less generous with their time. According to Statistics Canada, only 41 per cent of us work as volunteers, down from 47 per cent in 2010. There are probably as many explanations for this decline in civic generosity as there are sociologists. But the most obvious seems rooted in basic economics: As we make it harder to be a volunteer, we are getting fewer volunteers.
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Once all it took was an interest in helping others. Now to be a volunteer you must submit to being rigorously checked and screened, often at your own expense. If the activity involves children, elderly or the disabled, you’ll require a Vulnerable Sector (VS) police check, entailing a criminal record check plus a scan of the National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR).
In Ontario, a VS police check can cost the applicant up to $35. If you match birthdate and gender with someone on NSOR, you’ll need to be fingerprinted at a police station to confirm your identity. Plus, best practices across the volunteer sector now require a VS check every two years. In some cases, applicants need a separate check for each volunteer job they do. Giving away your labour for free is getting more and more expensive.
The ubiquity of VS police checks is inevitably pushing existing volunteers away and discouraging new ones from getting involved. But are we safer because of our safety obsessions?
A key benefit of a VS police check is that it reveals pardoned sex offences that do not show up on a standard criminal record check. In 2012, however, the Harper government eliminated pardons for most sex crimes against minors, which means anyone with a post-2012 sex offence conviction will have it recorded on their standard (and usually free) criminal record check. VS police checks are thus becoming less useful with every passing year.
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Not to mention that most of Canada’s most notorious sex offenders — hockey coach Graham James, Anglican priest Ralph Rowe and Ontario Provincial Police officer Gary Blair Walker — were all first-time offenders when finally caught. A VS police check would have done nothing to protect their many victims.
It is always possible, of course, that a convicted sexual predator could find a way to reoffend through a volunteer position. But the risk is actually quite small (and could be reduced further by tougher sentencing). Even so, to try to eliminate this slight possibility we have imposed costly and often redundant security protocols that – given their inevitable impact in reducing civic effort and community engagement – are having their own terrible social effect.
The price paid for focusing solely on the risks of volunteering to the exclusion of its broader benefits can be seen in the unhappy trajectory of Block Parents, once one of Canada’s greatest volunteer success stories.
Block Parents came about in response to the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Frankie Jensen in London, Ont., in 1968. This shocking event spurred the community to swift action and the Block Parents program was born later that same year. Participating households placed distinctive red-and-white signs in their front windows whenever they were home and stood ready to assist if there was a knock at their door. The program went national in 1986 and at its peak in the early 1990s boasted 500,000 Block Parent homes across the country. The signs gave life to the African proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child” — behind each was a volunteer ready to help a stranger in need.
More recently, however, security concerns have overwhelmed the community spirit that once animated Block Parent efforts. A 2006 RCMP risk assessment forced the organization to recall all its old signs and issue new ones with serial numbers. There were additional demands for an electronic database. And now all household members over the age of 12 must have a police check. Such a requirement “is a deterrent for many,” said Linda Patterson, long-time national president of Block Parents Canada, in an interview.
Because of all the hassles and obstacles created by these new safety requirements, as well as the loss of police support, Block Parents has largely disappeared from B.C. and from many large cities elsewhere in the country, including Toronto, Ottawa and even its birthplace of London. Membership bottomed out at 25,000 participants in 2013, although there are still pockets of support in Alberta and Quebec.
“There are many communities where children have nowhere to go if they are in trouble. It is very sad,” said Patterson. In the name of protecting children, we have left them all worse off.
It may take a village to raise a child, but — to paraphrase another famous aphorism, this one from the Vietnam War — we seem intent on destroying that village to keep it safe.
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2CJournal.ca, where a longer version of this story first appeared.
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