Del Graff warns vulnerable children will suffer from cuts

Albertas child and youth advocate says budget cuts imposed on his office will hurt vulnerable children in the province.

The delays in completing child death reviews results in delays in the recommendations that we can make for the system to learn from these reviews, said Del Graff. Those delays can be serious.

• Tories vote down request to restore funding for child death probes

The advocate investigates the deaths of children who are in the province's care or whoare supported by the province.

Graff pleaded with a committee of MLAs Tuesday to restore $275,000 sliced from his offices budget in face of declining oil revenues.

The Tory-dominated committee denied the request, with MLA Genia Leskiw suggesting Graff needs to sharpen his pencil to find the money.

Tory MLA Richard Starke said Wednesday he doubts the funding cut willsignificantly affect the advocate's abilities.

"First of all, I was not convinced that it would be that negatively impacted, and secondly, I was not convinced that the child and youth advocate's office had really done the amount of diligence required ...to find additional savings."

Graff, however, said his budgetary process is sound.

We have our budget and expenditures audited annually by the auditor general, he said. We present our budgets to the very committee that made its decision yesterday, so if theyre concerned about our budget thats new information to me.

Last May the government expanded the responsibilities of the advocates office, effectively doubling the number of child death reviews that need to be done each year, Graff said.

In July, the committee agreed to increase Graffs budget, so there was acknowledgement that the additional work demanded additional resources, he said.

This is an absolute example to do more as a result of legislative amendment and then with the decision yesterday being provided with less resources to do it.

Graff is worried they may have to reduce their workload.

The very best we can do is delay some of investigations, he said. We wouldnt want to be making decision about whether or not theyre ever done based on dollars.