Human Resources Committee on Nov. 30th, 2010

[The Chair (Ms. Candice Hoeppner (Portage—Lisgar, CPC)), Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Good morning, everyone.

I would like to call to order meeting number 36 of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), today we are doing a study of the federal support measures to adoptive parents.

I am very pleased today to have four witnesses with us who are going to be talking about some of their experiences. Primarily they are going to be speaking about what kinds of measures the federal government can provide parents who are adopting children, as well as those children who are being adopted.

First of all, I want to thank you so much for being here. We really look forward to hearing your stories. We would ask that you try, as much as possible, to stay within those parameters. Give us a very brief description of your experience. Then if you could let us know what kinds of supports the federal government could provide, or could do a better job of in helping adoptive parents and the whole adoption process, that would be very appreciated by the committee. It would help us to do our work.

As a quick note to the committee members, on your orders of the day we do have committee business at the end of the day. However, Mr. Lessard will not be moving that motion. We will go right through until the end of the meeting, as per usual, and we'll deal with any motion at another time.

We will begin today. We have four witnesses. We have Jane Blannin-Bruleigh, who is a social worker. As well, we have Jennifer Haire, Kim Jones, and Sandy Kowalko.

Again, ladies, we thank you all for being here. I'd ask that each of you stay within a five-mimute to seven-minute timeframe. If you keep an eye on me, I'll let you know when your time is up. We are pretty strict on time around here because we have such a short amount of it.

I will begin with Ms. Jones.

Thank you.

[Kim Jones, As an Individual]

Good morning

My name is Kim Jones and I live in London, Ontario. I am the proud mother of two amazing, beautiful, little girls, ages nine and seven, and both of them were adopted from China.

Adoption and adoption issues are subjects I'm very passionate about. I've been volunteering my time helping couples and families navigate the adoption and post-adoption system for the past six years. I'm the post-adoption coordinator for the Children's Bridge China program in southwestern Ontario, and an Ontario parent liaison for the Adoption Council of Canada.

In 2004 I began, and have continued to run, a monthly support group for parents who have adopted. I see the concerns, issues, and challenges that adoptive Canadian families are facing. Many adopted children cope with a range of issues, including grief, loss, anger, post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma, and learning disabilities. They come from situations of abuse and neglect and often the loss of their culture and their identity.

The families who adopt these children continue to need help advocating for them in the school system in coping with the behaviours that many of these issues generate. Pre-adoption training and post-adoption support and continued training are critical to ensuring that adoptions succeed and that children flourish in their adoptive families.

In January 2008 the Ontario ministry did make PRIDE training--that is, Parent Resources for Information, Development, and Education--mandatory for all prospective adoptive couples. This training is to be completed in order to get a home study approval and to proceed with an adoption plan. The federal government should look into this program and consider making it available right across Canada. PRIDE training is designed to teach knowledge and skills to help individuals become better foster and adoptive parents.

I am a parent co-trainer involved with this training in London. I believe that this education is helping couples enter into their adoption journey with eyes wide open.

Education is power, and now more than ever, these soon-to-be parents are more prepared to anticipate, prevent, and seek assistance for any bumps that might arise. The training is a wonderful opportunity for couples to network with others who are also adopting. Because there are no organized post-adoption services provided in Canada, these couples really lean on and learn from one another through the adoption process and definitely post-adoption. I am constantly trying to connect people who have had like experiences, so that they can turn to one another for help and advice when it is needed.

The downside of the training is that the model for PRIDE was developed in the United States. There's absolutely no Canadian content in it. Our participants who are taking the PRIDE training constantly ask us why all the film clips are about U.S. adoption services. They wonder why Canada has not made its own training model. We need an updated Canadian version of PRIDE training that contains a training manual chock full of Canadian post-adoption resources available right across the country.

The biggest major obstacle facing parents is where to find help. Post-adoption services are hard to find in Canada. Unlike the United States, most child welfare agencies do not provide formal post-adoption support. Parents themselves typically bear the burden of locating services. It would be really great if there were a centralized place or a government website where families could go for information or support when issues arise.

Grief and loss issues are part of adoption. Children with a background of abandonment, neglect, and abuse have challenges to overcome. And yet families who adopt these children are the least likely to confide in their social workers when problems arise. Adoptive parents may sometimes fear being judged too harshly or feel like they've failed as parents. Rather than seeking help, they continue to struggle on their own.

I have had couples tell me that others have come up to them and made comments to them like “What did you expect?”, or “This was somebody else's problem that you took on”. If there were a specific place families knew where they could go to find resources and qualified therapists who deal with adoption issues in their area, it would be a huge step forward in this country.

I know parents who have asked family doctors questions about behaviours and health issues exhibited by their adopted children, only to feel that their concerns were marginalized. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, is a common problem for families with adopted children to cope with. Many families struggle with their child's unexplained behaviours for years before they finally receive a diagnosis of FASD.

Attachment issues are a real concern with children who are not adopted as infants. More research on attachment is needed in Canada. Pediatricians and other professionals need to be educated about the differences between attachment formation in adopted versus non-adopted children.

I have seen families who have really struggled and cannot understand why their child is acting out. Struggling families need help. Perhaps the funding of future training for parent leaders to run pre- and post-adoption support groups should be considered.

The Adoption Council of Canada offered training for parents a couple of years ago. The training was educational and informative. Most importantly, it brought parents together to brainstorm about problems that many of us have experienced. We identified some of the issues, and we discussed ways to assist families facing some real challenges.

This sort of training is invaluable to parents who are trying to help make a difference by setting up support groups in their communities. I know I really appreciated the support and the educational materials that I received. I frequently refer to the training tool kit that I received at that training, and I share it with others.

We need more parent-to-parent leadership and mentorship in this country. Unfortunately, the one-time funding that the ACC received to help launch this program was not enough for them to continue with their efforts right across Canada.

Parent support groups and parent education, on issues of critical importance to children and youth, are vital to ensuring that these permanent placements continue and that the children do not end up returning to the child welfare system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Ms. Jones, you just have a few seconds left, just to let you know.

Thank you.

[Kim Jones]

Okay.

Another big step we could take is to consider extending the EI for adoptive parents. We realize that we did not physically give birth, but there are other considerations to take into our situation. I don't think you realize how important attachment is to brain development. Attachment can cause developmental delays, as well.

Because many of our adopted children have not had a stable background, they've either come out of a....

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Just finish up that sentence.

[Kim Jones]

Okay.

They've come out of an institution or they've been in foster care or they've been bounced back and forth from foster care to their parents, so they have not had a chance to form a strong attachment. I think the additional time, the 15 weeks for adoptive parents, if they could stay home with these children.... Time does heal wounds. The 15 weeks would be a big step forward in helping some of these families form that attachment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you so much.

Ms. Haire, would you like to give us your presentation, please?

[Jennifer Haire, As an Individual]

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here today to speak to you.

I'm an adoptive parent, and I'm also a professional librarian, responsible for aboriginal studies at the University of Ottawa.

I've been involved in the adoption community for 18 years. I have two adopted boys. One was adopted as a newborn. It was a kinship adoption, meaning within family. My second was an international adoption, which was a two-year nightmare, that I completed myself. I went to Guatemala and completed that with a Guatemalan friend.

With my second son, I definitely needed recovery time. When I returned from Guatemala, I had to return to work the very next day because of the way the benefits worked. I suspected that my older son had attachment difficulties and I realized that I was actually his fourth caregiver. There were no post-adoption support services on either the Quebec or Ontario side. This was in 1994.

Adoptive parents, then and now, are reluctant to approach social services for help for fear of being labelled as unfit parents and also of losing their children to the system. This is a real concern.

I was fortunate to find a supportive and sympathetic psychologist at CHEO, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, here in Ottawa. However, I had to go to the U.S. There were no attachment specialists here. There was no attachment help. As a librarian, at least I had access to information resources. But I went to the U.S and sought help from Dr. Dan Hughes, a psychologist specializing in attachment issues.

In terms of support, I received UI support. I'll just go over that very briefly, because you do have the notes and statistics. I figured it would be easier to refer to the notes.

My employer gave me whatever benefits were the equivalent to a biological parent, so I had 12 weeks. Then when I returned from Guatemala, I had to immediately return to work and work for another 20 weeks so I could get a second leave. For the second leave I was allowed an additional five weeks, because if a child over six months had physical, mental, or emotional problems at that point, you were allowed to have another five weeks. So I had another five weeks.

At that point I had to take a three-day-a-week workload. I could not properly support these children and help them with all their needs working full-time. I neglected to mention that both of these children came within a three-and-a-half-month period, so you can imagine the challenges.

You also asked if I received federal benefits. I received the Canada child tax benefit for both children.

What I really want to focus on are my recommendations for awareness and training. I've given you very specific examples of people I think we should bring to Canada as support for the post-adoption support services. That's my main concern here.

I suggest that the Mental Health Commission of Canada, that newly formed commission, and the Public Health Agency of Canada create awareness of these issues by placing appropriate information on their sites--for example, a tab for adoption, and then under that attachment: grief, loss, and FASD.

I also highly recommend that the HRSDC fund a train-the-trainer program. The North American Council on Adoptable Children has already established this program. They would like to bring it to Canada. It's already there. It would be training adoptive parents who have a lot of experience, such as myself, to then make presentations to the mental health community and mental health professionals.

It's so important to get the message out that there needs to be awareness. I'm including not only mental health professionals, I'm including lawyers and judges. I think that's really very important. That program could also be appropriate for training teachers in the public schools as well. We really need that.

Parent volunteers also have a limit to the amount of time they can give. If there were some remuneration, that would really help. We all want to help one another, but we all are limited in time and have to make a living.

I suggest that the Mental Health Commission of Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, or HRSDC sponsor speakers who are specialists in adoption and attachment. I've mentioned specific ones in my notes. I know them all, I've heard them all, and they're excellent. The training they offer is also at a very high level. It is appropriate for curriculum in our medical schools, in our social work schools, for any type of professional training like that, and for judges too. It's of that high a calibre. I've taken it and I really suggest that. I think that's really important.

I also suggest that a national public awareness public health campaign be created and funding provided for a public service announcement and film. We had started on that last year as part of the Adoption Council of Canada, but we weren't able to go forward. We had already identified a filmmaker who has experience in the field of adoption and has continued to work and do research on this—and I've helped her with it—on her own. So I've also mentioned her name and contact information there.

Coming from the academic community, I think the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other academic funding agencies should be encouraged to fund research on adoptee FASD. There is one professor at the University of Ottawa who does research in this area and is really interested in this. I've also provided you with another link of an agency that I recently found regarding that.

The final point I want to make is that the aboriginal community should be encouraged to participate. I noticed that Cindy Blackstock's name had already come up last Thursday. She's from First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, which supports aboriginal families dealing not only with adoption outside the aboriginal community but aboriginal families dealing with those issues within their own communities too, especially with fetal alcohol syndrome.

Please feel free to contact me for more information or if you need more help with the research, because I'm a professional researcher. That's my profession.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you very much. That was excellent.

So far, both have been very good. We're looking forward to the next two presentations as well.

We will now go to Ms. Blannin-Bruleigh, please.

[Jane Blannin-Bruleigh, Social Worker, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Adoption has always been a part of my life. I was adopted as an infant in Victoria, in a traditional adoption. I came home from the hospital at 11 days of age. As well as being an adult adoptee, I'm an adoptive parent. I also have an undergraduate degree in child development, and a graduate degree in social work.

I have been a board member of Open Arms International Adoption, which facilitates adoptions from China. I did that for several years. I founded a local playgroup for children who had been adopted in our community in Belleville. I'm also a member of the planning committee of our annual Jane Brown workshop, which is a playshop program for children in workshops and parents in separate workshops. We meet once a year, usually in the fall.

If you think about traditional closed adoption, a good analogy would be marriage. Pretend that on the day you get married, your future spouse suddenly announces to you, "Now that we are married, you don't need to have a relationship with anybody in your family, because my family is going to meet all your needs. You don't need to have any contact with anyone in your family, and this is going to be really good for you." Those are some of the reasons that children who are adopted have so many problems surrounding losing their original family—not that some of us don't have relatives that we'd rather lose, if we all come from normal families.

I have a biological sister, born four years after me, who was also placed for adoption with a different family. We met for the first time through the adoption reunion registry in British Columbia, which has made much more progress than the registry in Ontario, where I now live. My sister is a medical doctor specializing in geriatrics. At the time we met, I was working on the geriatric psychiatry team as their social worker. When we met, we wondered whether this was a coincidence or genetics. I'll let you think about that.

I'm going to tell you a bit about our first daughter's adoption from China. There aren't as many international adoptions happening now, but Singshan was two and a half years old at the time of her adoption, and I think that her story and her circumstances are very similar to children who have been taken into care in Canada because of neglect and abuse.

When I met Singshan in 1998, she was two and a half years old. She wore size-12 clothes, she weighed 18 pounds, she had no language—Chinese or English—and she had never met a white person. From her perspective, I didn't look right, I didn't sound right, and I didn't smell right. I was then 100% responsible for this child. Both of us agreed that we were totally overwhelmed. We didn't need language to express that we were totally overwhelmed.

When you talk about adopting a toddler or an older child, a good analogy is dance. When you learn to dance with an infant, you begin together and you learn together. But when you start with a toddler, you both already have your dance established. If you have a strong-willed toddler—and both of my daughters were strong-willed toddlers—you each know how to dance, and it's different, and you step on each other's feet, and you tug each other back and forth, and you try to figure out how to do this together. It's an incredibly frustrating process for both of you, but eventually you learn to work together. This takes a lot of time.

When I returned from China, my husband and I decided it was obvious that our daughter needed more time. Instead of the brief weeks that were available, we decided that I would be at home full-time, and we lived on one income. My husband is a United Church minister, and they do not make good money. We made a lot of choices and went through a lot of economic challenges, but we believed it was really important. So if you take this “little waif”, as we referred to her at the very beginning, and fast-forward to now, you could see that she has just entered grade nine. She's in the arts program of her high school, which she auditioned for. She's a confident, bright student, who spent a year in a gifted program. She's a musician and a dancer, and has come to be this amazing person. There are days when I wonder where this beautiful child came from, and then there are other days when she's a normal teenager and I wonder where this child came from.

The two things that I think went into this was Singshan had this huge potential within her. It was there, it needed to be nurtured, and the time we had together at the beginning was to build a strong foundation for nurturing. That was critical for her.

The other piece was that we had a lot of friends and family who supported and encouraged us. You cannot parent an adoptive child with high needs on your own. You need help, sometimes professional help, but you need a community of people to encourage you and to encourage your child.

With our second adoption, our child was in much better shape physically. However, she had been with an amazing foster mother and she was devastated at the loss of her foster mother, which I witnessed, and I knew from that point that this was going to be really difficult. This little girl in foster care had been the princess of her family, and her needs were probably met in ten seconds or less. And I obviously was not dancing well with her, because I was unable to meet her needs at the beginning and she certainly let me know that. So we worked really hard to come together.

I asked Donnshai what I should tell you about adoption, and she said please tell them that

Sometimes adoption is sad and hard work and sometimes it is good. The bad part is the bullies who make fun of you for being different. The sad part is missing your first parents. The good part is that it doesn't matter if you are adopted, because you have a heart inside just like everybody else and on the inside we are all the same.

In closing, to make recommendations, I believe that all families would benefit from having a year-long maternity leave, family leave, and that if adoptive families had an adoption leave instead of maternity leave, it would allow us to take the full year. Our family chose to do that, but we put a lot of economic challenges in our way because of that.

We also believe there is a need for a better-informed picture of adoption across Canada so we know what's going on, what's working, what's getting older children placed. I wanted to close with a quote from an orphanage director in Haiti:

I have never heard a child talk about wanting to spend their entire life in an orphanage, but I cannot even begin to count how many times I have heard children dream and yearn for the possibility of a permanent family.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Ms. Kowalko, please.

[Sandi Kowalko, As an Individual]

I'm wondering if I could pass my family picture around to the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Sure.

[Sandi Kowalko]

Thank you for having me.

I also am an adopted child, one who was very celebrated in my growing-up experience. Frankly, I was so celebrated that I felt sorry for birth children. That is actually the truth. I remember that my mom would tell me how the rest of the families did not get a choice about the children they had, and they did have a choice. That was the premise in which I grew up. I'm very thankful for that.

I am also an adoptive parent. And I'm a foster parent, and I have been for 18 years.

We have two biological sons.

Adoption was a first choice for us. We had no difficulty having children, but we knew that adoption was going to be part of our family picture. Before we were even married we discussed adoption being part of our family, regardless of the ability to have children of our own.

We started as foster parents. Our daughter, which is the singled-out picture you have, came to us when she was 13 months old. She had 19 fractures. She had shaken baby syndrome and suffered from failure to thrive. We dealt with her situation closely, with medical and assessment teams, not knowing what the future would hold for her. The court process would take four years until she was actually available for adoption. We were madly in love with her the first time we met her, so we walked through her journey with her and then chose to adopt her.

Over the years, we have fostered 19 children. And our heart is for Canada's children.

We adopted her. She has some issues with learning disabilities. The post-adoption supports we have had do not meet the needs she has. We have paid for private school for her, and that is not covered through adoption. The reason we chose the school we did was that they provided specific supports for her. Aside from that, post-adoption pays for tutoring. We've had assessments done so that we can raise her up to her abilities. Just last night she told me that she received an award.

She is now in a public high school. We've taught her strategies so that she can be her own best advocate. She has been on the websites looking at the colleges she is going to go to. She's dreaming for the future. We are so thankful that we've had the opportunity to raise her and give her those privileges.

We did not receive any time off, because we received her through foster care.

The other single picture we have is of a little fellow we received when he was two. We will adopt him. He has fetal alcohol syndrome, and he came to us with two subdural brain hemorrhages from injuries that occurred in care. He has quite severe brain damage. We are using all the money we receive from foster care to provide the services he needs. We are paying for private school. We are paying for recreational activities that he excels at, because his academic disabilities are limiting. The system pays for assessments that are extremely expensive so that we can understand how to raise him and parent him in the way that he can best move into the future. We've gone to classes and learned that you can actually and prayerfully move forward in raising children with fetal alcohol syndrome.

I have also placed children into adoptive homes and have worked with the families that have adopted children out of my home.

As a government, the need that I see you can meet is giving the full parental leave that other families have. Families that bring children home that are adopted have, at the very least, attachment issues. The children and the mothers and fathers need those weeks to bond with their children.

The children in Canada, if they are children who have been taken from their families because of neglect or abuse, often have challenges that are daunting. If we support our families right from the beginning when they have been willing to take children into their home, and we give them the time they need to bond and build relationships with their children, that will be the best way to ensure family preservation.

You provide a tax benefit for families. It's under the “compassionate care” section. I would love to see that extended, to give families the full benefit of the opportunity for attachment, because families often need counselling and a variety of things. They may need medical attention, and there are all kinds of things that they need to be available for their children. Then also at another time, if crises occur—because so many of our children are affected with fetal alcohol issues and neglect issues, which come into play later in life—there could be a tax benefit for families that would allow them potentially as much as a year to have EI so they could take the time to preserve their family and meet the needs of their children.

I could go on and on.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

We will have an opportunity to ask you questions, so maybe that will give you a chance to give us the rest of your suggestions.

[Sandi Kowalko]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you all so much. That was really good.

We're going to begin with our first round of questions. Just so the witnesses are aware, every one of the members has a certain amount of time in which to ask you the question and hear the answer. In this case, each side will have five minutes to ask a question, and then you'll provide the answer. So we'll be on a time limit as well.

We'll begin with the Liberals, with Madam Folco, please.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

Ladies, I have nothing to say except that I am absolutely overwhelmed by what I just heard from all four of you. What can we say except that it's wonderful, particularly in the case of those of you who have actually lived adoption as adopted children and now want to give back. This is just wonderful. In the face of so much adversity--I'm listening to Madam Kowalko and the other ladies as well--and so many problems, you've developed the flexibility and the pragmatism and everything else to accept what is going on in the children, and yet bring the children to another level.

To say congratulations is such a weak, paltry word in the face of what you have lived through and what some of you are still living through in an everyday situation.

Really, Madam Kowalko, you didn't really need to bring a picture to us. The portrait all four of you have drawn of the difficulties but I think also of the joy you have had and the joy you have certainly brought to those children really speaks for itself. So thank you very much for all the work you've done.

We sit in Parliament, and we try to think about legislation, but in the end we look at you and people like you who have done so much work. It makes me—I'll speak for myself—feel small in the face of what you have lived through and have chosen to live through every single day. So all I can say is thank you.

But I'm also going to go back to my job as a legislator. You want Canadians to have a better-informed idea of what adoption is about and the problems that you would meet through adoption, and of course I come to the rule of the federal government. Many of the things you have suggested seem to my mind to be in the realm of the provincial government's responsibility, but quite a lot of them also should be taken on in a very constitutional way by the federal government.

Madam Haire, several of your recommendations touched the federal government and agencies of the federal government in a very concrete way. But I'd like to hear from everyone. When you've come into contact with the federal government over adoption, what has been lacking? Be specific. What would you like to see to fill in this lack, to make it better for those people who are going to be coming after you? Be as specific as you possibly can. My question is addressed not to one person but to all four of you.

[Sandi Kowalko]

I would like the federal government to have an umbrella that would expand on tax benefits specific for families with adoption, because assessments, medical attention, therapy, and educational expenses are daunting for families. That at least would be a tax benefit.

I don't believe that throwing money at families at the front end is a benefit. I have seen families come forward because I have dealt with some interprovincial adoptions, and different provinces provide more money for adoptive families than others. I literally had a family that said “We want to quit our jobs, so we're going to adopt some kids and raise kids”. That's not what we're looking for.

We're looking for families that are faithful with the children they have, pursuing the needs that they have. They could have a benefit or reimbursement for the services they provide for their children, to encourage them to pursue all that's available to them, and at the government level they would meet that need.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Ms. Blannin-Bruleigh, you have about 30 seconds.

[Jane Blannin-Bruleigh]

One of things we're lacking is that we don't have a national picture of how many children are in care across this country, who is placing older children well, which provinces do a better job of that and which provinces don't.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Some kind of comparative study.

[Jane Blannin-Bruleigh]

In order to see what's happening right across the country, we could come up with some very good ideas from other places, but there isn't enough dialogue across the country.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thanks very much.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

By the way, you can use your answer time to answer my question too.