Marina Miller has raised five siblings with a little help from strangers, but precious little from government

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The hairdresser’s chair can create the atmosphere of a therapist’s couch, and this is how Marina Miller, who has carried a heavy burden for a decade now, quietly shared the frustration of her latest challenge.

Ms. Miller wasn’t expecting help, just a sympathetic ear, as she contemplated a $35,000 orthodontics bill for her five siblings. The young woman has been raising the five without financial assistance since 2009. She has endured much and knows how to persist, but this was a staggering bill.

“I was laughing about my tough week,” she recalls from that moment at the salon. “Laughing was a better option than tears.”

Unlike a therapist’s office, the salon lacks privacy. The conversation was overheard by another client, who shed those tears Ms. Miller had held back. Before she left the salon, Joanna Peitler was working on a plan to provide Ms. Miller and her brood of five the kind of help that a parade of bureaucrats, in the span of 10 years, failed to deliver.

A legal trap

But for a single ill-advised step 10 years ago, Ms. Miller, now 36, and her clan would never have needed to accept the help of strangers.

Ms. Miller doesn’t like to dwell on the “why” of this story, how she chose, at 25, to take custody of siblings Clarke, Preston, Austin, Rhoan and Luccia – the oldest was 9, the youngest just 3.

But the specifics of how she did that – through a formal guardianship agreement – turned out to have a massive impact on the Greater Victoria Area family’s circumstances. A more informal arrangement would have entitled them to financial assistance. Instead, the five have relied on the grit of a big sister determined to be the parent that she herself didn’t have in her life.

Ms. Miller was raised by her grandparents since she was an infant. In 2009, Ms. Miller was living on her own in another country. Her mother by then was in a new relationship and had given birth to five more children in quick succession. Ms. Miller knew her mother was struggling to cope and was incapable of caring for her children, but during a visit that year, she concluded the children were not in a safe space and, with the advice of a lawyer, the family agreed to give her legal responsibility for her younger siblings.

That guardianship agreement gave her the authority to protect and care for the children, but financially, it would turn out to be a ruinous decision. She had unwittingly joined a growing cohort of families who step up to care for young relatives, but do not qualify for provincial government support that is given to foster parents and, in certain circumstances, extended family caregivers.

“Who was supposed to have their PhD in child acquisition at 25?” Ms. Miller asks. “I did not sign this, knowing I was signing away help.”

Just as the ink was drying on the guardianship papers, the British Columbia government was dismantling its Child in the Home of a Relative program. The timing was unfortunate, as that program would have provided her with some financial support as she suddenly scaled up to raise five children.

That program was replaced with the Extended Family Program – a more generous regime that pays roughly $1,000 a month for each child, plus options for dental, counselling, respite and other resources. (It is similar in scope to the support given to foster parents.) The new program was designed to provide assistance in situations when it’s best for a child or teenager to live with a relative or close family friend when their parents are temporarily unable to care for them.

But there is an arbitrary line in the sand: That program does not help families who have legal guardianship. Ms. Miller is regarded, in the state’s eyes, as the parent of the five. And parents do not qualify.

The Parent Support Services Society of BC is an advocacy group that has been researching this issue of families who have been denied support because of a guardianship agreement. The organization believes that all children should be eligible for services and benefits when they enter into care, whether it is with foster parents or extended family. Either way, these children all have experienced trauma when their parents can no longer care for them.

“We see this all the time,” said Christina Campbell, a social worker who runs the agency’s support line for kinship care. “Some families are served, and some are not."

The structure of the Extended Family Program renders many families ineligible for assistance. According to the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development, there are 717 families receiving funding under the current program, and another 660 families that continue to receive assistance under the old one. But Ms. Campbell says an estimated 13,000 children in B.C. are in the care of extended family, and that means thousands are not being supported.

“Just getting to tomorrow”

The Parent Support Services Society counsels families against signing a guardianship agreement, at least until they have examined the financial consequences. But Ms. Miller didn’t know that when she signed on.

The early years of raising her siblings were a blur. Lunches to be made, clothes laid out for school, children out the door and then to work before they returned home. “Then it would be three o’clock and it would be supper, and then a lineup of everybody for a shower, throw some pajamas on," she said. “There was a lot of years of just getting to tomorrow.”

She didn’t feel there was a choice – the alternative was giving her little brothers and sister up to government care.

The children remained in the family home, initially, while Ms. Miller took over the family cleaning business. It was sustainable, until in 2015, when it all fell apart. What she thought was a secure foundation turned out to be a chimera.

The bank foreclosed on the house, and Canada Revenue Agency came calling about delinquent taxes on the business. What was difficult now seemed impossible. She called a social worker. “I was in the driveway, bawling profusely, begging them, ‘Please help me.’ "

She was told to deliver the five to child-protection workers if she couldn’t manage. Perhaps they would provide her with support, but there was no guarantee the children would come back home with her.

Ms. Miller would not risk sending her five siblings into foster care, so she turned her mind to building a new home and starting a business of her own. Somehow, her bank found a way to approve a mortgage based on her new venture, a commercial cleaning outfit. “It was a gift from something bigger than all of us, because mathematically, that was a long stretch," she said.

A turning point

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Today, Ms. Miller’s work keeps the family supported, but running a small business and acting as the sole parent of five teenagers means constant pressure. They are all good kids, she says, but the work of raising the five isn’t over, and Ms. Miller has finally reached the point where she is willing to fight.

She wrote to her MLA, who happens to be Premier John Horgan, in 2018. He shuffled her off to the bureaucracy and she was stonewalled. This year, she wrote again: “I ask you to please finally give direction and attention to the branches of government that have failed myself and these children.”

Mr. Horgan was asked this week by The Globe and Mail for his response. On Wednesday, he promised to ask his staff for an update on this case. “My heart goes out to anyone who has to step up to care for others in difficult situations," he said.

Behind that generic statement, things began to move. Ms. Miller was invited to a lengthy meeting with the Premier’s constituency assistant. It turns out, after all these years, there is latitude for government to accommodate exceptional circumstances and provide additional financial assistance to caregivers who may not meet the eligibility requirements of the Extended Family Program. She is hopeful the Premier’s new interest will finally forge that path.

Kindness of strangers

Meanwhile, the five are getting the dental care they need after Ms. Peitler persuaded her colleagues at Otter Point Dental to provide the family free treatment.

Ms. Peitler said she hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. But she was struck by Ms. Miller’s stoicism and her determination to protect her siblings. “She didn’t complain once, she wasn’t asking for help,” she said. "She didn’t want the kids going into care, it was terrifying to her. ... I started to cry.”

And then she went back to her office, where her colleagues didn’t hesitate to commit to offering the dental work.

For Ms. Miller, it was far more than just a solution to a financial challenge.

“What they are doing is amazing to me after 10 years of being told 'no’ by everybody,” she said.

“The amount of hoop-jumping that I have gone through, begging and pleading and justifying and trying to show you why I’m worthy of help, and here’s this person, a stranger, she doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, she just looked at me and inside of three minutes was like, ‘yes.' ”