Jeffrey could have still wound up with grandparents if Catholic Children’s Aid checked damning records

Sal Salmena, a supervisor with the Catholic Children's
Aid Society at the time of the Baldwin family file

It is one of the most predictably useless moments of any coroner’s inquest, where a lawyer asks the inevitable of the witness: Would you do anything differently?

It’s tiresome on any number of fronts, but chiefly because, as is the mantra at such hearings, the inquest is not to assign blame, but, “moving forward,” what should be changed that the jurors might recommend to prevent another such death?

What is never said is this: Whatever the jurors recommend carries all the weight of them urging that the sun rise in the west.

The recommendations of a coroner’s jury haven’t the heft of the law, only limited moral suasion largely linked to the amount of public shaming the media, whose members have the attention spans of gnats, may have doled out during the inquest.

No one — government, agency, institution, individual — ever has to follow the jury’s recommendations. So often, no one does.

In any case, there we were Wednesday in Toronto, at the inquest into what is always called “the tragic death” of little Jeffrey Baldwin.

Even here, the language is enragingly misleading.

Jeffrey’s death was not a mere tragedy, which suggests an element of happenstance or accident.

What it was, first, is a full-blown homicide.  (more...)

Jeffrey could have still wound up with grandparents if Catholic Children’s Aid checked damning records