Thank you very much for the question, Mr. Martin.
We see a number of potential barriers to adoption. I speak also as an adoptive parent and an adoptee. I adopted two older children through the Children's Aid Society here in Ottawa.
Awareness is one of the biggest barriers. As was mentioned, lot of people don't know how many children are available for adoption in Canada. They don't know the ages. They don't think that it necessarily would be possible for them to parent an older child. One of the issues is post-adoption support. There are ways... We have a couple of different adoptive parents support groups in Ottawa that are just volunteer-run groups, but they're doing a lot of parent-to-parent education. That kind of support, more widely available throughout Canada, is very helpful. Various supports in terms of...
We're not asking for special supports for adoptive parents in terms of EI. We would like equal supports for biological and adoptive parents. That means we would like to see not just the parental leave that adoptive parents can now qualify for, but also to have adoptive parents be able to qualify for the same number of weeks, because of some of the attachment issues that I think you've heard a little about. We can talk about that more at a later date.
Just the awareness, though, just promoting adoption as an option... When we talk about permanency, we're talking about legal adoption, but we also may be talking about kinship care among the aboriginal communities, legal guardianship, and custodial care. We have a number of options, but the intent is that children do not have to be moved from foster home to foster home throughout their time in the child welfare system.
Again, we have a number of areas where we think the federal government could be helpful, even just with a national campaign that would raise awareness of adoptive families, of people who have adopted and how successful that's been, to show that it is an option at different ages and stages.