The Following is an portion of the article written by: Christie Blatchford
By: Christie Blatchford
Published Dec 06, 2012
WINNIPEG — There are no heroes in the Phoenix Sinclair story now unravelling at the provincial inquiry into her death, but a man who tells the unvarnished truth and who loved that little girl is close enough to count. This is Rohan (pronounced Ron) Stephenson, the 42-year-old who was for much of Phoenix’s short life one-half of the couple who acted as her parents and who, when he and his wife split up, took over the in loco parentis role on his own.
Her father, Steve Sinclair, was a drinker, and by this point was irregularly in his daughter’s life, and much of the time Mr. Stephenson didn’t even know where he was. The same was true of Phoenix’s mum, Samantha Kematch. The young people partied hard (“partying” is the inquiry euphemism for getting blind drunk), were unemployed and on social assistance. Now, Mr. Stephenson sees himself as being on the margins of society, but he was and is nothing like Mr. Sinclair or Kematch.
So when he and Ms. Edwards broke up in early 2003, by which time they were both well and truly smitten with Phoenix, they didn’t tell the CFS they had parted. They wanted, as he put it, “to increase the chances of Phoenix” being allowed to stay with him.
In cross-examination by Kris Saxberg, lawyer for Manitoba’s uber-child welfare agency ominously called the General Authority, Mr. Stephenson admitted that his failure to fill in the CFS “probably did hinder the ow of information,” though, he noted wryly, “a little bit of interest from anyone [at CFS] would have uncovered most of this anyway. “I was not conveying information to CFS and if I had conveyed it, they may or may not have acted in the same way,” he said. He said he wasn’t trying to blame the agency, and that he shoulders a portion of responsibility himself, or, as Mr. Stephenson put it with the special ruthlessness that a human being can direct only to himself, “We can all agree: I was a liar and they [the CFS] were incompetent and 15,000 other circumstances came together, and Phoenix is dead.”
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