Thank you, Madam Chair.
A number of witnesses have testified that for adoptive parents and children, there's grief, trauma, and loss of culture and identity. I was struck by the fact that some children were adopted from the hospital, so to speak, some at a later age, some within the country, and some internationally. It seems that more supports were required for some than for others, just because of the nature of the circumstances.
They also mentioned that there were children waiting to be adopted and parents who wanted to adopt, but the two groups never met. I was struck by the fact that we don't have a way of connecting the many people. I understand there are 30,000 children who could be adopted but aren't, and people who are going internationally to adopt--so that's not happening.
You said that aboriginal children were overrepresented. Do we have a system of tracking the aboriginal foster and adoptive parents who are available to adopt, with respect to first nations custom adoptions, if you want to call them that? Do we have some means of identifying who they are so we can match the two, as a start? They obviously need supports if you can't, but down to the basics, do we have that kind of information available from province to province?