Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre MLA Jason Nixon will be joining the 12 other members of the Ministerial Panel on Child Intervention today at Government House for their 1st meeting.
 
The Notley government is tasking the panel, which includes representation from all parties, to strengthen the child intervention system in Alberta and to take a closer look at the child death review process.
 
The panel was announced in December following the case of 4 year old Serenity who died while in provincial care; it came to light there had been little action in the case for two years.

Nixon says he's eager to get to work and feels the panel review process is the right way to address concerns “I think this is quite frankly the only way is to be able to get people from all political stripes to put aside partisan politics and get in a room and really talk about how we can fix it. I mean quite frankly I don’t know what the point of being elected MLA is if you can’t tackle something like this, so I’m looking forward to working on it with my colleagues. We’re a little bit skeptical that the government may continue to try to whitewash certain things, we hope we’re wrong on that, we are going into it with a relative open mind hoping we can get this fixed.”

In terms of being skeptical Nixon adds “let’s be clear there have been many panels over the years and in the reading I’ve been preparing for this panel there are lots and lots of recommendations that have not been implemented so I think a lot of the early focus is going to be on why those recommendations have not been implemented. I don’t think Albertans want us to redo all that work, so the question should be where is the hold up in the system and how can we get this process fixed”.

Nixon says for the first 8-10 weeks they'll be focused on the child death review process and then be tasked to take a closer look at the overall system and the problems that are happening in the system.