Thank you. I'm Sandra Scarth. I'm president of the Adoption Council of Canada. I actually have worked in child welfare for close to 50 years, primarily in adoption in three provinces, and I have a personal as well as a professional interest in being here. I'm also an adoptive parent. Two of our four children came from the child welfare system, a little boy at age five and a half and a little girl at age 10. They're both now in their early forties. Both are doing okay. Our little boy had probably undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome, so he has struggled, but he's doing okay.
I'd like to sort of take you a little bit back to why the Adoption Council came in the first place. We started as a group of adoptive parents and workers who felt there were not enough children being adopted in Canada and too many children leaving foster care and ending up on the streets homeless, in the federal justice system, and so forth. We're still concerned, after 20 years, that the same situation exists. We'd like you to think about the things the federal government could do in terms of finding more families for children in this country, not just those who come from other countries.
Child welfare does a good job of taking care of children and bringing them into care but does not make a good parent. Our brief speaks to what happens to these young people when they leave care without supports. We're concerned that we're creating thousands of legal orphans, and we hope this committee will be a catalyst for action at the federal level for these highly vulnerable Canadian children and youth, many of whom are aboriginal. Over 50% in B.C., where I come from, are aboriginal children. And it's much higher in western provinces.
One of our major concerns is, as I mentioned in the previous instance, data. We have good data on intercountry adoption, but we have almost no data on domestic adoption in this country. Our information is pathetic. We collected data at one point in time in this country on domestic adoptions. The most recent is 2004. It was only released in 2007. We can't tell you how many there are right now in the foster care system or who are being placed for adoption. We have estimates.
We can't answer the simplest questions about children in care. We can't tell you how many there are. We can't tell you how many have an adoption plan. We can't tell you how many of them have been referred for adoption, how long they wait before being referred for adoption, how long did they wait for adoption placement, how many siblings do they have who are also free for adoption, how many are aboriginal, how many receive adoption subsidies, how many are exiting care without family support or a connection. We can't tell you any of that. We have no way to track trends. We don't know why the number of children in care is increasing in some provinces, such as Manitoba, and declining in British Columbia.
In contrast, the United States has a very rich data system. They collect every six months. They now have 2009 data, and draft reports are available almost immediately. Their preliminary estimates were available in July 2010 for 2009. Their database has given them three things: accountability for people who look after those kids; it has provided information on trends; and it has tested information beliefs so that we can target things at the real issues. For example, people thought for many years, both there and here, that children stopped being placed for adoption at about age 13, that they lose their ability to be adopted then. We now find it's probably at the age of seven. If they don't get placed by the age of seven, their chances for adoption drop dramatically.
We do have a very rich database about children and their well-being and education in Canada, called the national longitudinal survey on children and youth. It is looked after by StatsCan and HRSDC. That has collected, since 1994, information on children in this country from zero to age 25 on health, welfare, education. But unfortunately, foster children and aboriginal children on reserves are excluded from that rich database, so we don't have any information in that area. This is something I think the federal government should address. There is no reason why they shouldn't be over-sampled and put into that database. So this is something your committee could look into.
The second thing I think I won't repeat because of the shortness of time.
Our recommendation is that we look at some collection of data on domestic adoption statistics. This is a federal government responsibility, for Canadian kids, aboriginal children. We think this is something that your committee could also look into and do something about.
The last thing I want to do is just mention briefly the disparate numbers.
We're about one-tenth the size of the United States. If you look at their numbers, they have 423,773 children in care. We have 78,000. If we're one-tenth, we should only have about 45,000 kids in care.
So why is there this huge difference in the numbers? They place 57,500 children a year. We place about 2,000. We should be placing double the number of children in this country. So we'd like to answer questions about why there is the difference in this situation. A lot of it has to do with lack of public awareness, but there are other reasons.
I'm going to close here and let Laura have some time to talk about the other issues in our brief.