Quebec youth protection revamp: DPJ director says ‘society’ is biggest hurdle

After numerous controversies and scandals, Quebec officials acknowledge that the province’s youth protection system (DPJ) needs a major overhaul.

In an interview with CTV News, Director Lesley Hill insists now’s the time to overthrow the status quo.

Hill assumed the department’s portfolio in October 2024 after serving on the Laurent Commission, which examined the shortcomings of the DPJ after the tragic death of a seven-year-old girl in Granby in 2019.

Cases like that of the little girl, she explains, are why she wants to make drastic changes for children across Quebec.

• READ MORE: Reports of children in youth protection exposed to domestic violence has doubled in 10 years

Her first step: curbing the high number of runaways in the province’s youth centres.

How? By giving them more freedom, a move rooted in a type of reverse psychology.

“They’re running from the rigid rules instead of trying to work through certain issues with the social workers and educators who are there to help them,” said Hill. “We’re better to help them while they’re young than to keep them safe until age 18, and then they’re completely on their own.”

But why are these teens leaving the youth centres in the first place?

“A lot of kids have told me they’re running not always from the youth centre,” but towards more independence, explains Hill. “They want to go and see their friends. They want liberty, autonomy, a space to sort of chill and enjoy their lives and their teenage years, which is completely normal.”

A new method

Hill says she has been working with the province’s organizations to introduce a new method that allows the teens to safely live their lives and experience a little risk – essentially, giving them a taste of the freedom they so crave.

• READ MORE: Granby girl’s death prompts Quebec to appoint commissioner to better protect children

The method – a completely different clinical model called the self-determination model – was first tested by a unit at an eastern Montreal centre with the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal: “We’re going to be accompanying you, but you’re going to make your own decisions.”

“‘Is this really real, that they’re not shutting the door anymore, that I can go in and out and do what I want?’” she said of the response, adding that the teens were swift to act. “We saw our runaways just go up through the roof for about two, three months.”

• READ MORE: Quebec slow to make changes to child protection system after Granby girl’s 2019 killing

Eventually, Hill says, the teens all came back, and feedback from all sides was resoundingly positive.

“The educators realized that they’re doing real supporting of young people, real coaching, so they acquire the independence necessary to fend for themselves,” said Hill. “The young people’s satisfaction in the services went through the roof as well.”

The method isn’t foolproof, of course, with Hill acknowledging that some children may gravitate towards a gang or become a victim of sexual exploitation.

“You can’t do it with everybody because some young people really do put themselves in dangerous situations,” she said. “Risk management is always important, but we can’t have this across-the-board approach in our youth centres anymore where we’re so afraid that something’s going to happen, that our rules are so rigid that the kids are running anyway.”

• READ MORE: ‘Intolerable’: Educators at Quebec youth detention centre accused of having sex with minors

However, in most cases, Hill points out that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

“We need to be just a little less quick on the trigger to bring them back because they need to live certain experiences,” she said. “When they come back, they’re going to talk to us about what they understood from those experiences that they lived.”

Working together

En Marge 12-17 is one of the organizations that has worked with Hill for years to improve the system from the inside out.

“We recognize the importance of taking the youth as they are, and taking them in their globality and working with risk reduction, as well [as] with them, in order to help them transition to adulthood with decency,” Director General Tristan Delorme tells CTV News. “Maybe we’re not going to know exactly where they are, but we’re going to take the risk that they’re going to start trusting us, and then when they flee, they’re going to write us on Messenger or text us and call us and let us know that they’re alright.”

• READ MORE: Montreal group holds major forum on preventing early childhood neglect

He points out that stifling teens, who just want to rebel and exercise independence, can only backfire.

“They are children. We often forget it because they seem more mature, sometimes, than when we were 16 or 17,” Delorme states. “It’s really, really hard. They don’t know anything because they haven’t been given the opportunity to try it.”

The stats

Hill explains that a child is considered a “runaway” once they’ve been unreported for an hour.

Most of the kids, she explains – 75 per cent – come back within eight hours.

“If we want them to be independent, autonomous, be able to make good choices for themselves, we need to be able to let them experience certain things,” said Hill. “Maybe even go through certain situations where we’re more supporting, accompanying, and trying to understand what happened to them, but always, always making sure that they’re as safe as possible.”

Others – the remaining 25 per cent – can be gone for multiple days.

• READ MORE: Quebec sees a 5% increase in youth protection reports

Numbers provided to CTV News by Montreal police (SPVM) show that the number of teen disappearances (13 to 17 years old), including runaways, in the province has remained relatively steady in recent years:

*Montreal police provided updated data for 2024 and 2025 following publication of this article.

“The SPVM receives an average of more than 3,000 reports of missing persons (including runaways) each year, with this number rising to 3,773 in 2023,” the force tells CTV News. “Around half of all missing persons are found within 24 hours.”

• READ MORE: Quebec’s head of youth protection resigns after sex scandal at detention facility

Additionally, in the DPJ’s annual report, released in June, the department recorded 141,622 safety checks for 105,675 children across Quebec, an increase of five per cent.

Last year, the department recorded 141,622 reports for 105,675 children across Quebec, an increase of five per cent.

Of these, 29.3 per cent (35,264 children) were selected for further assessment.

The report also finds that 10,095 adolescents received services under the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), representing a 7.4 per cent increase from last year.

According to Nelson Pimentel, interim youth protection director at Batshaw Youth and Family Centres in Montreal, the local English sector saw a five per cent increase in wellness reports last year, mostly for children under the age of 12.

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Of the 141,000 reports, 41,000 were retained for evaluation.

Pimentel points out that most of the reports were made by community professionals, including those in schools and daycares, and estimates that 49 per cent were for cases of neglect or risk of neglect.

“There is an obligation for all of us to work together,” he said. “Our hope is that we work better together with one another to ensure that we have a very good safety net around our clients in the community.”

The blame game

The most difficult factor to overcome when enforcing change, according to Hill? Society’s preconceived notions of what happens behind closed doors.

“It’s very difficult to do risk management-type work when there’s a lot of blame in society,” she said. “Right now, unfortunately, there is a lot of blame. And I’m not saying the blame is all undeserved. There have been difficulties in the youth protection system, and we’re trying to address them.”

One of the most notable cases is that of the seven-year-old girl in Granby, who died after being abused by her father and stepmother.

• READ MORE: ‘Damn it, she was seven!’ says judge in sentencing Granby girl’s ‘coward’ father to four years

The girl’s family sued the youth protection agency and the local school board, claiming they failed to act despite numerous warning signs.

Other issues include the Quebec government putting a branch of the province’s youth protection office under trusteeship following a report that showed dozens of violations of children’s rights, as well as claims that educators at a detention centre for youth in Montreal had sexual relations with minors, resulting in the birth of one child.

A ‘risk-averse’ strategy

The province’s current “risk-averse” strategy, says Hill, comes from a place of fear.

You can lock a child in a room, she explains, and they’ll be physically safe, but the psychological harm could outweigh any good.

“Often, security takes a very large space – and it’s OK. We want our children to be secure,” Hill tells CTV News. “But we also need to let them experience certain things, develop their capacity, their autonomy, and that means managing risk.”

Hill says changing the department’s best practices shouldn’t cost much in terms of money.

Time, she says, is a different question.

• READ MORE: Newly appointed youth protection head Lesley Hill promises greater transparency

Hill says there are already a lot of changes being made behind the scenes, including training frontline workers to better help the young people in their care.

Hill is giving herself until December 2026 to achieve the rebuild.

She admits it’s an aggressive deadline, but insists drastic measures are needed given the importance of the issue at hand.