‘It blew my mind’: Advocate questions why Alberta is cutting Child and Youth Support program

A provincial program that provides benefits to Albertans caring for another person's child is ending. CTV News Edmonton's Nicole Weisberg reports.

The province is cutting a program that provides financial and medical benefits for Albertans looking after children whose parents can’t or won’t take care of them.

While it says the program was underused, those it helps disagree.

The Child and Youth Support (CYS) program offers caregivers between $105 and $148 per month for expenses, as well as supplementary benefits like school fees and extended medical coverage for a child being looked after by another family.

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Colleen Breitkruetz and her husband have raised four of their grandchildren from birth, due to their mother’s mental health and substance abuse issues.

Breitkruetz said her daughter can’t care for them and can’t pay child support to help with their care. She and her husband have received the benefit for 15 years.

With all of the children having special needs, and Breitkruetz retiring to care for them, she said her family relies on the program for a lot.

“It provides all of their health benefits. So any glasses, a dentist, eye doctor, prescriptions,” she said. “They all have neurological disorders. We have epilepsy, so we have medications. We also have medications that we have to have that are not covered.”

Breitkruetz said she was shocked and angry to learn the program was being cut on Sept. 1. It works, she added, and the financial support – even if it’s not very much – can make a big difference for the families that get it.

“That $600, or $150 or $200 that they’re getting each month can make or break a family, especially when they’re working from paycheque to paycheque, like lots of us are in society these days,” she said.

Daniel Verrie, press secretary for Children and Family Services, said the CYS program offers “limited” support and is only used by 650 caregivers.

The money saved, he added, will be reallocated to the Alberta Child and Family Benefit, to address the “increasing complexities in caseload within the child intervention system” and increase foster caregiver rates by two per cent.

“Discontinuation of the program does not impact caregivers of children in the child intervention system — including kinship, foster or permanency,” Verrie said.

Human rights advocate Mark Cherrington said the program is preventative, helping keep kids out of foster care and off the streets.

He fears cutting the program will hurt kids who have the option to stay with a loved one for as long as they need, such as those running away from home.

“It’s to help those kinds of kids that just aren’t able to live at home, but aren’t in imminent need of intervention like child welfare, because this family stepped up and stepped in,” Cherrington said.

“It’s cost effective, so it blew my mind that there’s no pragmatic reason the government would get rid of this,” he added.

Breitkruetz said she will be looking into the Kinship Caregiver program as an alternative, but she would rather see the province change its mind.

“I hope that they don’t cancel it. I hope that they continue with it,” she said. “It’s worked for us for 15 years. It’s worked for other families.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nicole Weisberg