Sure.
My name is Paula Schuck. I'm an adoptive parent to two little girls, a parent support group leader in London, Ontario, and I'm also the co-founder of a group called the Canadian Coalition of Adoptive Families. We're a non-profit, national organization that supports families throughout the process and throughout the life span. We hear from families when they are struggling with adoption, when they are struggling financially, physically, and with a variety of issues.
We have two particular issues we want to address today. The first one is the Employment Insurance Act and the inequities there. We would like to see you amend the Employment Insurance Act to give all parents the maximum amount, 50 weeks, to bond with new children. We believe that's an initial barrier that sets adoptive parents, adoptive families, and their children on an unequal playing field, so to speak.
A family that adopts right now under the Employment Insurance Act will receive 35 weeks of paid parental leave as opposed to the 50 weeks for families formed through biology. The 15 weeks designated for the maternity benefit plan are not accessible to parents who become parents by adoption. The grounds for the inequity are often cited as the physical and psychological stress of the biological process of childbirth. But the process of adoption is also stressful for both families and children.
While there are a few employers in Canada that recognize the merits of supporting adoptive families, there are not nearly enough to alter our numbers. We're not arguing against biological parents. We refuse to be pitted against anyone. We want only to give the best start to all Canadian children, not simply those who were born into their family of origin and remain there.
While birth parents get nine months to bond and begin preparing for the addition to their family, adoptive parents do not. They're often given an overnight timeframe to adjust; the children, no different, sometimes arrive overnight. Sometimes they can be 10 years old, they've bounced through five different homes, and they're expected to instantly become family. It is a very difficult task for all involved. Children who come to their families through adoption have often experienced the opposite of a healthy attachment. It may take several years for them to bond properly with their adoptive family.
Adoption has changed dramatically over the last 30 years—2,122 children adopted through international channels by Canadians. I'm not going to get into the other numbers, but suffice it to say that children adopted through the public system come to us with several issues that we need to address—sometimes attachment issues, trauma, physical and sexual abuse, and prenatal alcohol and drug exposure.
In cases of domestic foster care adoption here in Canada, that means at some point the government has decided to become the legal parent to the children. We call them crown wards. Where that is the case, I would argue that we have a higher burden of care to those children. Adoptive parents will spend lifetimes trying to help a child bond, attach, and be safe in a new family. We believe the government needs to step up and amend the Employment Insurance Act to benefit all children.
In Canada, all of our provinces are failing at placing older children and children with special needs in adoptive families. I want to tell you a bit about my experience. I have two children, both adopted as infants. My younger child has been diagnosed with SPD, sensory processing disorder, and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I want to tell you that it took us months to figure out what her behaviours meant, what was going on with this child. She was very young when she came to us, but she would rage, she would scream, she would bite, and she would resist touch. It's very hard to bond with children who resist touch or hit you every time you are picking them up.
I want to tell you a bit more about FASD because that is something we need to address nationally, not just province by province. As a parent of a child with FASD living in Ontario, I have travelled to Saskatchewan, to B.C., and to Alberta to find out how to parent my child. That's not okay. Our parents are already struggling financially, physically, emotionally. We're barely holding on, but I have to go out of province to Saskatchewan to get strategies to be a parent to my child. That's not okay.
We are calling on you to develop a national FASD strategy. We need supports. FASD is a neurological disability caused by a birth mother's alcohol use while the child was in utero. It is estimated there are 300,000 Canadians affected by FASD. That means those are greater in number than all the people, combined, with Down's syndrome, muscular dystrophy, HIV, and spina bifida. FASD is now the leading cause of preventable developmental disability in the world.
I want to tell you about my youngest daughter. She is six. She is beautiful and smart and athletic, and she has a brain injury that will never go away. That's a fact. I can parent her. I like to say to some of our parents it's like this. They're like fish in a world full of cats. If you parent that fish and expect it to walk, it's never going to work. Imagine you are a fish and you're being raised in a world full of cats. People over the years wonder why you can't walk like a cat. You can't eat the same things. It's not your parents' fault; it's not your teachers' fault. They think you're a cat, so the consequences of you not walking.... They give you sticker charts, behaviour modification programs. They throw their hands up in the air, thinking you must just be a bad cat. That's how we are raising kids with FASD. It's not okay. We need a national policy to address all of this.
We parents of fish have been given our children through agencies. We're not the same as parents mobilized by autism or ADHD, learning disabilities. They've come to us through agencies, when we are foster or adoptive parents. Some are being raised in birth homes; others are being raised in kinship arrangements.
I want to tell you of a couple of personal experiences that friends of ours have had--