Thank you very much.
Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members. Thank you for inviting me to address you today.
My name, as you've heard, is Laura Eggertson. I'm the volunteer president of the Adoption Council of Canada. I'm also here as an adoptee and an adoptive parent.
We hope that the changes to the adoption tax credit that the federal government introduced in this budget will encourage and support more families who are adopting.
As the budget document mentions, there are about 30,000 children and youth in foster care across Canada who don't have permanent families and are legally free for adoption. Many of them are aboriginal.
Only about 2,000 children and youth are adopted from foster care every year in Canada. About 1,000 children are adopted privately, and another 2,000 or so arrive from other countries and are adopted internationally.
These tax credit changes extend the time period in which adoptive families can claim expenses related to an adoption. When you adopt through the public system, there is not, generally, a cost. But some parents may get their home studies done privately, which they pay for. They also have to undergo pre-service training, which may be a course that is essentially about adoption and parenting. Those expenses are things that now can be covered under this tax credit change.
In Alberta, for example, families may spend $12,000 a year to adopt privately. Previously, families could only claim those expenses in the year they occurred, even if it was several years before the adoption took place. That left many people unable to receive the full benefit of the tax credit, which is a 15% credit, this year, on up to $11,669 worth of eligible expenses. Now families will be able to claim all the expenses in the year they adopt, no matter when the expenses occurred.
You may wonder whether this is an important change. To us it is important, not just for the way it will offset adoption expenses but also because it sends a message that the federal government cares about our Canadian children and teenagers who don't have permanent families.
These young people come into foster care through no fault of their own. We take them into care without their consent, but for their protection. We remove them from family members they love. We separate them from their brothers and sisters—or we may. Then we shift them around from home to home, often for the rest of their lives. Traumatized and grieving, they spend those lives trying to adjust to each new home and new family. They wonder how long each one will last—and most of them won't last.
Youth “age out” of foster care at 16, 18, or 21, depending on their circumstances and their province. That's when we consider them old enough to manage on their own, without permanent families to support them and celebrate the milestones in their lives. One 21-year-old graduate of foster care recently asked me, “Who will come to my university graduation?”
All of us as parents know that children need our support long after they have turned 18. They may need us even more after 18, as they struggle with attending college or university, finding a job, and starting their own families, especially in this economy.
Without permanent families, many youth who age out of foster care end up homeless. They come in contact with the justice system. They live on social assistance, become teen parents, and may see their own children in foster care. The cycle continues.
At the Adoption Council of Canada, we believe we need to change the system to make it easier for Canadians to adopt children and youth of any age, or to make other permanent connections through kinship care, legal guardianship, or customary care. One young man, at age 17, told us recently, “I just want parents who will tuck me in at night.”
These changes to the adoption tax credit are a first step. We believe there is a strong leadership role the federal government can play. We look forward to continuing to work with the government in the coming months and years on more ways to encourage adoption and permanency. So we ask the committee to support these changes to the tax credit in the budget bill.
I would be happy to answer any further questions. Thank you.