Human Resources Committee on Dec. 14th, 2010

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you for coming, for your knowledge and your passion on this issue.

I want to get to the issue, for perhaps the both of you, that has come up--I asked about it earlier today, and you've referenced that--which is information and making information available about children who are available for adoption. The idea of a national database has come up on a number of occasions.

Certainly in the Johnston report it speaks a lot about information, collection, reporting. Are we lagging other countries on this?

[Peter Dudding]

The short answer is yes, we are. Part of that is because we really are 13 jurisdictions. The adoption exchanges are really all done within 13 jurisdictions, and what it is that we do at a national level is really over into the voluntary sector.

[Will Falk]

I just add that it's at a provincial level and almost non-existent at the national level. At the provincial level, we don't even know in Ontario across the 53 different childrens aid societies. We have the bizarre situation inside of Ontario where we have some geographies where kids are waiting, some geographies where families are waiting, and we can't match them up. We have parents waiting to adopt. We heard hundreds of stories coming through our committee. We have about 2,500 families in Ontario waiting to adopt, many of whom are frustrated because they can't get through home studies. It is a real problem. When you look at the fact that the Americans have tripled their numbers and that we haven't moved on this, we are well behind.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

You're right. We spoke with Susan Smith, who spoke about the interstate agreements that were made in the United States. I don't think it impinges upon the rights of the states; I think it just develops the rights of the child a little bit better.

I want to ask you, Mr. Falk, about one of the recommendations in the report to better support more timely inter-country adoption processes and that the government--I assume this is the Ontario government--should play an advocacy role with Ontario, with other provincial and territorial governments, with the federal government, and governments of other countries.

Are there discussions now among the provinces at all about how we can do a better job of this?

[Will Falk]

Not that I'm aware of. I'm not aware of any that have moved.

Peter, you may know more about it.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I ask because we did hear, for example, from New Brunswick, which has done a lot of work in the last decade on the issue of adoptions and in trying to increase their number

There seems to be a lot of work, or at least some work, in some provinces to improve the situation within their respective province, but we don't seem to have gone across those jurisdictions. Is that a fair statement?

[Peter Dudding]

That's a fair statement.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Okay.

Susan Smith gave us some very good testimony about the United States, but is there anything specific you would say here? What's the first lesson we should learn from the United States on how to do a better job?

[Peter Dudding]

Because of the different situations involved, I don't think it's quite as easy as that. I think the lesson for Canadians is one of looking at our existing frameworks.

The Canada social transfer is about $19 billion a year, and a good portion of that is for social programs. To the extent we're realizing the kinds of outcomes Mr. Falk talked about, we have no way of knowing what's going on.

So there's a lesson there for us in terms of whether or not we are using our existing mechanisms under CST and SUFA to be able to understand how this important dimension of our social programs is being affected.

[Will Falk]

I'm an adoptive parent in the U.S. as well as in Canada, because I lived outside of Philadelphia, where we adopted my eldest son when he was three. He's an African-American. I learned a few things there about the U.S. model.

First, they were very straightforward about when they had terminated parental rights and how they moved forward on that. Our access orders in Ontario are creating confusion in the system. We need to clean that system up.

Second, on post-adoption supports, I still, to this day, get $12.50 per day from the Bucks County Children and Youth Social Services Agency, because they believed, correctly, that the three-year-old African-American who had bounced between three foster homes would be much better off placed permanently for the long term. Now, we've spent much more as a family than $12.50 a day, but that amount helps.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Madame Beaudin, please.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Good day, gentlemen.

Mr. Dudding, you have 41 years' experience. Congratulations! It is nice to see people who are still here to defend the issues.

I have two or three questions about the information you presented.

First, Mr. Falk, you talked about eliminating some of the legal obstacles. I would like you to elaborate on what those obstacles are.

Then, Mr. Dudding, you talked about best practices that exist. Are there best practices that affect prevention in particular and could you talk about those?

[Will Falk]

I will talk about the situation in Ontario.

I'm not going to burden you with my terrible French accent.

We looked at a couple of barriers. One was geography, which I spoke of, and the other was the access orders question.

In practice, children who have access orders to their birth families are viewed as unadoptable by workers in the system. That should not be the case, but it is the practice at the moment. There are a lot of very good people in the system who do that for a variety of practical reasons.

The third one is the cost barriers.

Madame Beaudin, if you have a long-term foster care placement in Ontario and you convert that to an adoptive placement, you almost always take the foster board rate away from the family. So the reward for adopting your foster child is to lose the money you were receiving beforehand. Maybe that won't happen in the first year, because many of the executive directors do a good job in that respect, but certainly in the second and third year it will happen.

That's simply outrageous. If you're adopting your 14-year-old child who's been with you for four or five years, the idea that the province would take that money away after the adoption is nonsense.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Dudding?

[Peter Dudding]

I would say, particularly in the province of Quebec, that things have moved along in the last five years. This really had to do with the concept of permanency.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Yes.

[Peter Dudding]

That really speaks to this issue in terms of the mindset toward the objective of moving children to permanency, no matter their age. It's clearly one of the issues in training and best practices that it's still not clearly understood within the system.

The other barrier tends to be in the court system and how these access orders are maintained. Once that order is made, it's very, very difficult to remove it from the child's situation, notwithstanding the fact that no access may ever be exercised. The legal impediment to having an access order removed, once given, is a big one.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Since I still have some time left, I would like to know something.

If you had to determine the key challenges, what would they be? We have talked about the issue of time. I do not know what is most important to you, the length of time involved in the adoption process, the lack of resources for post-adoption assistance or the lack of financial resources. What are the key challenges as far as you are concerned?

What is the specific role of the Adoption Council of Canada? You tell me it will take an agency to oversee the entire adoption process, but is that not the role of the Adoption Council of Canada?

[Peter Dudding]

There are a number of things there. There are legal impediments, organizational impediments, and informational impediments. Let me dwell on the information part of it. When we don't know what's going on with kids within the system, it's hard for the system to monitor and correct itself with regard to where it should be placing its emphasis. My colleague spoke of the disconnect. When you have children in hotel rooms and you're hiring staff to look after them and you have a waiting list of 2,500 people looking to adopt, it suggests a system that is crisis-oriented, that has lots of time demands placed on the front line, and that receives little direction in how to respond to children's needs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Did you want to add anything, Mr. Falk?

[Will Falk]

I think that organizations like CWLC and the Adoption Council of Canada could be strengthened, and that this would have a tremendous impact. My own view on the data piece is that we need to decide that a third party is going to collect these data. We are not talking about a big database here. We're talking about 20,000 or 30,000 kids. But these are wards of the crown, and we should know their grade level, their health history, and their last report card. We don't know these things. We don't know, in Ontario today, stuff that—

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Never mind nationally, the provinces don't even know.

[Will Falk]

That's right.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thanks.

Mr. Martin.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I was intrigued with the case you made about the cost of not doing anything, the cost of allowing these children to roll along getting caught up in the system. You mentioned the amount of $26 million a year. We just tabled a report here that was done in an exemplary way—non-partisan, three years across the country, looking at poverty and how children get caught up in it. Over the last couple of years, a number of organizations have made the case that if you don't do anything about poverty it's already costing you. They've put out some pretty extraordinary numbers, anywhere from $60 billion to $90 billion a year. You talked about a small portion of that. Maybe you could comment further on how you've come to these numbers and how they play out in a larger context. Would it be wise for a government to move on some anti-poverty measures, a national anti-poverty strategy—seven provinces already are developing their own strategies—in the context of this discussion?