This morning when we all woke up, there were 30,000 children who woke up today who do not have a family to call their own. Why does this bother me, and why should this bother you? It is because these are Canadian children. As the mother of 14 children, it grieves me to think about a single child in this amazing country not having a family of its very own.

My name is Joy Loney, and my husband Dan and I have 14 children. Twelve years ago we opened our home to become foster parents. Little did we know the impact it would have upon our lives. Over the next six years, our family increased by six children, four of whom we were privileged to adopt. Three of these children are registered aboriginal children.

Of all families surveyed in Canada, 43% say they would consider adopting a child. This means there is a home for every child who is waiting to be adopted right here in Canada today. There are more than enough homes waiting to adopt children, but there are many bottlenecks in the way of those potential adoptions. Statistics from the United States show that 51% of kids who remain unadopted and age out of the foster system end up unemployed, 30% receive public assistance, and 25% are homeless. We expect the results in Canada to be similar. The cost to our society is evident in the failure to place children in homes that will support them, to help them avoid these outcomes.

As a mother, I bring to you the passion of a mother's heart for each of these children waiting to be adopted in Canada. We need the federal government to support the solutions to this national crisis.

My husband, Dan, will now address how this national crisis can be solved and what we need to do at the federal level.

9:50 a.m.

Dan Loney As an Individual

Good morning.

How do we solve this crisis? We believe the only way is to remove the bottlenecks that are involved in adoption and to address the fear, the frustration, and the finances that challenge us around adoption.

Fear can be eradicated by federal programs that support adopting families, providing education for every challenge they will face in the adoption, from attachment disorder issues to fetal alcohol syndrome and learning disabilities. We'd like to recommend that the federal government establish a web-based resource centre to support questions and supply education in all the challenges that adoptive parents will face. We suggest webinars to provide continuing education and to support adopting families to solve problems long before they occur in the growth of the adopted child. This resource could also include interactive blogs wherein adoptive parents could create an online support group for all families of adoption. The purpose of these initiatives is to remove the fear that many families face toward adopting Canadian children.

Frustration in dealing with bureaucracy must be minimized by expediting the adoption process from its current one-year to three-year timeline. Our own adoption of our four children took over four years, and the process was emotionally draining, due to the periods of uncertainty that the adoption process might fail. Could you imagine being pregnant for four years and having to manage the emotional roller coaster of expecting your child's arrival in your family to be finalized?

We need to have a central database for all children eligible for adoption in Canada at the federal level, to track statistics and progress of the adoptions in Canada. At this time there is no central point at the federal level keeping track of Canadian children, both in foster care and those up for adoption. This is why we never really know at any time how many kids are totally in the system. At the provincial level, kids are lost in the system by moving between provinces, and provinces do not communicate in keeping track of the children at risk. We believe this is very alarming.

Finances tend to be a huge concern for families interested in adoption. There is often a misconception that adopting children in Canada can be very costly and range between $10,000 to $30,000, as it is in foreign adoptions. Further concerns are that parents will be unable to financially support adopted children for expenses over their lifetime.

We would recommend the federal government look at providing tax credits for food, clothing, and transportation costs, to offset the increased costs that are incurred by adoptive families.

Housing tends to be the greatest cost and concern for families, and we would ask that this committee look at a Bank of Canada mortgage at prime rate over the life of a child to age 21, to assist with the housing costs of a growing family.

Many families have great concern over financing post-secondary education, and a scholarship for adopted children would alleviate this concern. This support from the government would be of great encouragement for families to adopt children, by helping minimize their financial concerns around adoption.

9:55 a.m.

As an Individual

Joy Loney

So why am I so passionate about this issue? Three of our adopted children are Canadian registered aboriginal children, and these kids mean the world to us. This makes us think about all the other children, just like them, being denied adopted families because of their aboriginal status. How sad. This is truly a travesty.

In 2007, the number of aboriginal children in foster care was three times the number that were in residential schools at their height.

As a nation, we cannot afford to lose yet another generation of aboriginal children. Our own three aboriginal children are well on their way to going into their adult lives physically and emotionally healthy, while holding high school diplomas and the opportunity to follow their own dreams with higher education. We consider our adopted children to be the lucky children. They are growing up loved and secure. They are ready to take on life and find their own success. This is the hope we have for every child waiting to be adopted.

Every single child in Canada will one day grow up and either become a taxpayer or a tax burden. Today we have the opportunity to bring changes that will give each child the support he or she needs to become a taxpayer, who contributes to this amazing Canadian life, instead of a tax burden.

Every single Canadian child deserves parents in their corner, cheering and encouraging them on and believing in them. Let's not let this shame of 30,000 kids continue any longer. This truly is a Canadian issue that must be dealt with immediately. The children are depending on us. Our nation is depending on you to help us find some solutions.

Thank you.

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Candice Bergen

Thanks very much.

Now we'll go to Ms. Lewis, please.

9:55 a.m.

Jennifer Lewis As an Individual

Good morning.

My name is Jennifer Lewis, and I am really thankful for the opportunity to be here today and to share the story of my family.

I am a wife and a mother of four children, three naturally born and one adopted. My husband and I always knew that we would be adoptive parents; our idea was that at some point in our marriage we would add a little girl from China to our family. After three naturally born children and a wait time that was stretching on to four years for international adoption, we weighed the possibility and considered the age of our children, our desire being to keep them all close in age.

In the midst of this process, we heard about a little boy whose reality touched our hearts. This little boy had been born to a young, single mom, one who wasn’t quite ready to lend her identity to motherhood and whose lifestyle was more party girl than consistent caregiver. Her son was almost two and seriously neglected.

The Children's Aid Society had been called on several occasions, but they felt he was not in danger, just not in the best situation. Their caseload had no room for a child in neglect because they had to focus on children in extreme cases.

She, as his mother, knew he was in trouble and she made the decision to break a cycle in her life of neglect and abuse. She reached out and said, “Please, is there someone who will take this child before I hurt him?” She's one of my heroes.

We said yes. We were naive, though. We were unqualified, but our hearts were wide open. He was a beautiful baby, and so full of rage, so full of hurt, so totally incapable of trusting anyone. He was almost two, and he made his bed, he cut his own fingernails, and he washed his own dishes, not because he was bright—even though he was—but because he had to.

When the process was started, we jumped in. We had no idea what was waiting for us—legally, mentally, emotionally, or physically. She chose us; she knew he was in danger and she wanted him in our family. We looked at finding a lawyer—that's how little we knew. Our searching led us to a private adoption agency that said it could help us, and because of the situation that we and he were facing, they said they could help us quickly by speeding up the process and doubling up on our home study sessions.

Two weeks after that initial phone call, that cry for help, we were meeting twice a week with a social worker and watching our family, our marriage, our children, and our history get picked apart and analyzed. We spent four months under an intense microscope. They questioned our motives, our communication, our parenting, and our marriage. We usually left those meetings feeling wrung out and completely bare, all the while knowing that his situation wasn’t changing and he was facing the same neglect he had always endured. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep for worry. He was one of my babies. I knew it even without having the chance to hold him yet.

We weren’t the only ones dealing with the stress of transition. His birth mother, already having decided to give him up, just wanted it finished, and every morning it was harder and harder for her to face a day in this long goodbye. Near the end, she couldn’t wait and terminated her rights before we were approved to bring him into our home, before it was legal for us to do so.

An emergency response was necessary, and we had to establish care for him every night for two weeks leading up to our approval. We didn't know when that was going to happen. A network of friends came forward and offered spare rooms so that he could spend the day with us and sleep somewhere else so that the process would not be jeopardized. This was agony for all of us. But once those beds were found, his birth mother chose the transition day—one that I will never forget.

No one will ever be able to convince me that children have less of an awareness than adults do. Sometimes I believe they are more keenly aware of what is happening. I know this was true of our little boy. He knew she was leaving him forever and he reacted like she was. I have never heard a cry like the one that came out of his little body that day—not before and not since. He shook with loss, he sobbed with loss, he fully understood loss, and a part of his heart was broken. That is what it sounded like, and six years later it is what we still face every once in a while—a broken heart, more ready to lash out at love than to receive it, and more able to test than to trust.

Once our rights as parents were established, two weeks after “leaving day”, we thought he would be able to experience a smooth transition into our family. We spent a year thinking that, every day, and every day his actions begged that we would reject him.

He had been broken from the only reality he had ever known and he wanted us to pay. If we hugged, he bit; if we praised, he ripped. He banged his head into walls and threw himself off stairs. He rolled screaming from one end of the room to the other for hours and hours, sometimes for the entire time he was awake.

We loved and we cried and we despaired and we held on harder. We were told that he had an attachment disorder, but no one needed to tell us that because we lived it. When I considered the attachment I had to my other children, to his brother and sisters, I remembered the time spent holding them as infants, rocking them and cradling them. So we wrapped him in his snugglie and we held him. And he screamed. And we held him longer.

The stress was overwhelming. The bar for adopting had been set so high that we felt as though we were barely approved as parents. We felt like we were failing him. Our children were stressed. All of them had been eagerly anticipating this little brother and he had rejected each one of them in turn. So as a family we decided to make lists of what we were thankful for in him so that we could yell those things out in the midst of his fits. He had an amazing laugh. He giggled. He loved to help. He made us laugh. And when he disconnected from us, those things kept us holding on.

Six years later, because this is a story of hope and it is one of love, this little guy still loves to laugh, and he loves to make us laugh. He has come so far.

Our first year as adoptive parents was full of stress, love, tears, victories, tragedies, and triumphs, a year that needed our complete focus, our undivided attention, and all of our time. We needed this transitional time to bring a little boy from a painful place to a place of belonging. We needed this time to become a family. And we faced things in this transition that no one could have prepared us for, but we came out of it stronger than we could have ever imagined.

Children need all the support we can give them, and parents who bring a child into their homes by heart choice need to be able to focus on that child. We are whole as a family. We're not perfect, but we're whole, and that would not have happened without consistent time and effort. It is a worthy investment.

I believe the strength of a nation is built on the strength of its families and the hope of its future is built on the health and well-being of its children. With these two things in mind, I believe the government can ease transition for adoptive parents and their children by removing some of the stressors that diminish our focus, both financially and socially.

By recognizing the limitations and legislating on an issue that falls primarily to the provinces, I hold to the belief that Canada can be unified by a decision for our children that crosses the federal-provincial divide--transitional leave for parents and a nation-wide effort to unify adoption strategies that are expressed so differently among the provinces--because the journey from brokenness to mending is a beautiful one, and it's one that we should all support and engage in.

Thank you.