Social workers are increasingly being asked into the courtroom, and the ethical stakes are higher than most of us realize.

In this episode of The Social Worker Podcast, we speak with Dr. Cindy Blackstock and Andrew Eckert as part of CASW's special series celebrating 100 years of social work in Canada.

The conversation looks at a place the profession is being drawn into, one it was not always trained for: class action litigation. Across the country, social workers are being asked to support class actions affecting First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples through reports, expert evidence, research, and help with implementation. It is work with real stakes, and real ethical risk.

Dr. Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, came to this work through a landmark human rights case and through her own family's experience. Andrew Eckert, staff lawyer with the Independent Class Action Clinic at the University of Windsor, came to it through the class members who are too often left without a voice at the bargaining table. Together they map the terrain a social worker enters when the invitation arrives from class counsel, when there is money on the table, and when the harms are so severe that settlements climb into the billions.

Throughout the conversation, they return to a set of quiet tensions that do not resolve on their own. Where does a social worker's duty lie when the pursuit of compensation comes into conflict with the deeper goal of systemic change. What happens to research data gathered for one purpose when it is later sought for another. Who is an expert actually working for when their duty is to the court, but the pressure comes from elsewhere.

This episode invites us to think about ethics as something practiced in the light rather than in the dark. Sometimes that means learning what a class action is before stepping into one. Sometimes it means naming a conflict of interest and refusing to let small compromises accumulate into a violation.

Dr. Blackstock and Andrew Eckert leave listeners with a grounding reminder for the next century of social work: the best apology is changed behaviour, know what space you are entering before you enter it, and have the moral courage to stand behind the ethics of the profession even when the chips are down.

Listen to the full series celebrating 100 years of social work in Canada: https://www.casw-acts.ca/en/social-worker-podcast