The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary were called to a home by child protection workers when a mother of three children would not cooperate with the said workers in the apprehension of her children. The police then made a small mistake that probably isn't going to sit well with the Newfoundland public (CBC reports):

St. John's police officers used pepper spray on a boy during a confrontation in which he and his siblings were seized from their defiant mother, her boyfriend says.

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary was called to the woman's home on Cookstown Road, near downtown St. John's, on Wednesday night to assist child protection workers who had arrived to take three children into custody.

The woman, however, refused to co-operate and barricaded her family inside the house in a confrontation that went on for hours.

At one point, police said, she swung a baseball bat at an officer's head, grazing but not injuring it.

"She didn't want them to go," the boyfriend, who was at the house during what he called a "crazy" confrontation, told CBC News.

....

The boyfriend said the woman's 12-year-old son was pepper-sprayed while he used a stick to keep a police officer from climbing through a window.

At that time, he said, the mother reached for a baseball bat.

The RNC confirmed pepper spray was used in the incident, but would not say on whom.

A negotiator was called and the matter was resolved, however, one would think that pepper spraying the kids you are supposed to be protecting wouldn't be an option.  Apparently one would be wrong in that thought.

Of course, child protection in Newfoundland has been under the microscope since the Dr. Shirley Turner incident who, while accused of murder in the USA of the father of her expected child and fleeing to Newfoundland, her child, Zachary Turner, was placed in her unsupervised care. This was despite protest from US justice officials and from the family of the Dr. Andrew Bagbey (The father and murder victim). The Courts had cleared the procedural steps for the extradition and it could no longer be avoided so Turner then did the old murder-suicide by stapping the infant to her body and walking into the North Atlantic Ocean. This raised more than a few questions about what was going on in the child protection industry in Newfoundland.

As a result, however, we are probably going to see a fair bit of over-reaching on the part of child protection workers. Without knowing the facts of this recent case it would seem, however, that it was the RNC who did the over-reaching.

(Speaking of Dr. Shirley Turner, her kids, or someone representring themselves as the same, will have none of the murder allegations against Turner going unanswered. They are out and about on the internet with the most pathetic defences of their mother including that both Shirley Turner and her child were murdered, Turner didn't have a trial so nothing was proven, the extradition didn't happen, etc. It is sad to read the ramblings and it has come to some serious threats being made against a blogger by one of the kids. However, it is like the mother who will not believe her son died at sea because she hasn't seen the body, denial is part of human nature and we are seeing it. There seems to be little need to continue to debate this poor girl in denial; for her it is reality (it's like debating with a fundamentalist over the existence of God or with a delusional person about the effect of mirowaves) and to continue to do so seems a tad cruel. No amount of debate  is going to bring back Andrew Bagbey or Zachary Turner. No amount of debate will make the survivors feel any better.)