L. Hayes

The Children's Aid Society brought a motion under section 74 of the Child and Family Services Act seeking production of a psychiatric report and records prepared by Dr. Mary Lilley regarding the young person X. The respondent parents supported the motion, but X. opposed the release of their private psychiatric records.

The court considered competing interests between the society's need for relevant information to inform its service plan and X.'s privacy interests and therapeutic relationship with the psychiatrist.

The court determined that before ruling on the motion, it would conduct a judicial review of the report in a sealed envelope to determine whether the society had met its onus of establishing relevance and whether the report should be released.

The parents appealed a trial judge's final order making their child a Crown Ward with no access under the Child and Family Services Act.

The appeal grounds included allegations of judicial bias, usurpation of the trier of fact's role by an expert, exclusion of evidence, and failure to consider the child's return to the mother.

The appellate court dismissed the appeal, finding no palpable and overriding error in the trial judge's conclusions.

The court upheld the reliance on expert evidence regarding long-term neglect and the mother's inability to cooperate with supervision, which rendered continued access detrimental to the child's best interests and permanency planning.