Thank you.
Madame Chair, members of the committee, I want to thank you for inviting me. I am very excited to be here.
I have a vision for Canada's waiting children.
As background, hopefully you have in both official languages the first national magazine to tackle the issue. I co-wrote the cover story concerning Canada's 30,000 adoptable children. My comments are based on a more lengthy text with detailed recommendations, which I have already tabled with the clerk.
After years of investigation and talking with those working on children's welfare, I can say that those who are living the adoption journey are excited about this study—and yet at the same time, they aren't waiting for government to fix the big problems. My maxim is “No childhood can wait for the big problems to be fixed”. So part of my post-adoption supports project is voluntary in nature and includes mobilizing ordinary Canadians now, with the primary goal of filling some very basic gaps at ground zero in educational awareness and recruitment.
That being said, the government is not off the hook. Part of my post-adoption support activity has been in research as well. Public agencies, provincial commissioners, researchers, and those working in children's welfare will by and large admit a need for a national vision, a national study, and a national action plan coordinated at all levels of government. Indeed, the Senate has been calling for a national children's commissioner for three years now.
What I learned as a citizen, as an academic, as a researcher on Parliament Hill, and since becoming a mom is that when it comes to decision-making, it's not the quantity of information that matters but the quality. This is very important to Canada's 30,000 children and the thousands of other children in government care who are your constituents. But they are the voiceless constituents you have, dependent on others to empower them. My definition of being an adoptive mom is about the empowerment of all children, and not just my own. This is what I mean by the phrase “adoption-savvy parenting”.
Parenting at ground zero didn't mean simply the discovery of a complete vacuum of healthy resources and education, but also that there wasn't accurate national information on domestic adoption. I was shocked at what I found. I wanted to know if MPs were at least being briefed by the bureaucracy on simple questions. When I started my investigation there were an estimated 18,000 children waiting. In five years it has morphed into 30,000, and that is proportionately 260% higher than in the U.S. That is why those in the field use the language of “crisis”.
If you were given the file called adoption in Canada or child welfare in Canada, you would quickly learn there is no one place to go within the civil service to get simple questions answered about Canadian children. How many children are in government care? How many are in foster care? How many are available for adoption? How many boys are there, and how many girls?
To get national information, you would have to go to a fast-food chain restaurant. Most NGOs are relying on the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption to gain a national perspective on adoption in Canada, and they are not necessarily tracking post-adoption supports. This foundation is a laudable effort by its founder, and an adoptee, Dave Thomas, but it also tells us about how we are measuring up in our priorities and planning at a federal level.
Federal MPs or Canadians cannot obtain accurate national information because there are—and are you guys ready for this?—no national standards on how we describe a child or universality in that description. How a child is defined differs from province to province, as do the definitions of special needs and what is old—for starters.
There are no national standards on portability. It's been said many times that an adoptable child and an adopt-ready family face what some have called a “bureaucratic nightmare”, going from province to province, and even, in some cases, county to county.
There are no national standards for services. We have a piecemeal, patchwork quilt of regional agencies working independently and as hard as they can. From what I can tell, not all have new acts or commissioners, nor is there any consistent agreement in their action plans.
In terms of accessibility, a child at age 16 in one province or territory does not qualify for services granted to a child at age 18 in another province or territory. Without national standards, we create and condone an un-level playing field at ground zero for children.
In terms of administration and funding, there is no standard reporting of the total cost of keeping a child in care, and no estimate of the social and financial costs of the failure to provide stable and nurturing homes to children. Ask me sometime about my conversation with the Auditor General's office on this.
To help you understand just how fragmented the picture is, I decided to do an access-to-information experiment. We loved doing them when we were on the Hill. I asked your very own human resources committee for access to specific and relevant information from the HRSD briefing manual that is given to ministers when they assume their position. I asked them some simple questions. For the sake of time, ask me what happened.
I was then sent to Health Canada to get my simple questions answered. I went to six provinces. Some had the information, and the most disturbing response eventually came back from Alberta. Canada's most vulnerable children tell us a lot about how we are measuring up as a society. They tell us about unemployment, finance, dignity, human rights, citizenship and immigration, public services, poverty and homelessness, and the decline of parenting skills and education. They are the tip of the iceberg of a lot of social issues going on right now.
Canada's children are not one of Canada's top domestic priorities for information gathering. I believe we can do better. It's going to take all of us to get Canadian children home and to level the playing field for all kids.
