Human Resources Committee on Dec. 14th, 2010

[Rénald Gilbert]

As far as the refusal rate is concerned, I will have to send that information to you later, I do not have it on me.

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

I would appreciate that. Bill C-14 essentially makes it easier to acquire citizenship, but it is Bill C-35 that allows us to give our children our citizenship.

[Rénald Gilbert]

You mean Bill C-37. The first Bill C-37, because there is a second that is—

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

Still under review.

[Rénald Gilbert]

That would effectively amend—

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

In that case, would the children have the same legal status? Would children adopted abroad have the same legal status as children born in Canada?

[Nicole Girard]

No. The Bill C-37 under review will not change the equitable treatment between children adopted abroad who take the direct route to citizenship and children born to Canadians abroad.

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

That will not change, but as far as transferring citizenship is concerned, it is the same thing. They can transfer citizenship.

[Nicole Girard]

They cannot transfer it because they are both treated equally.

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

Okay.

I have another question on tax credits. Earlier you talked about all the possibilities available to all children, not just adopted children. Is the information on tax credits for parents wanting to adopt a child made available to everyone? I know these credits include many things, but parents are telling us they would like to see a number of other things added to these credits, namely all the legal fees for a second adoption; any counselling; psychological needs—parents who adopt a child might have more needs than biological parents—and specific post-adoption care.

Could we consider adding these fees to the federal non-refundable tax credits?

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Please answer briefly.

[Mickey Sarazin]

That is a question for the government and the Department of Finance because it concerns the tax credit policy. It is not an administrative question.

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

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you very much for that brief answer.

Thank you so much for being here.

Mr. Paquette, do you want to add something?

[Jacques Paquette]

Yes, I simply want to wish you happy holidays on behalf of all my colleagues. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Merry Christmas to all of you, too. Thanks.

We will suspend for a few minutes while we bring in our next witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

We are ready to begin. I have a reminder for committee members that we do have business that we need to take care of, beginning at 10:30, so we'll just have about 40 minutes.

We're very glad to have with us two witnesses today. Mr. Will Falk is from the University of Toronto, where he is a faculty member. He was a member of an expert panel called the Johnston expert panel, which studied adoption. He is going to share with us his experiences and some insight. We also have with us Peter Dudding, chief executive officer from the Child Welfare League of Canada.

Thank you very much for being here, gentlemen. Each of you has five to seven minutes for your presentations. If you could keep to the time limit, it would be appreciated.

We will begin with Mr. Dudding, please.

[Peter Dudding, Chief Executive Officer, Child Welfare League of Canada]

Thanks very much, Ms. Hoeppner.

Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity to provide information to you regarding adoption in Canada.

This is a summary presentation. I will focus on the questions related to domestic adoption only.

The issues regarding adoption are very complex and multi-faceted. They involve policy, services, data, and research. I will highlight only the key issues that would pertain to federal leadership.

As you know, adoption is part of a continuum of family-based care options for children from birth to 17 years, which includes foster care, kinship care, guardianship, fostering with a view to adopt, open adoption, subsidized adoption, and custom care in aboriginal communities.

There has been progress in building this continuum of care for children who require out-of-home care, and there is growing consensus and emerging research support around key foundational principles. Those principles are: children are unique and require an individualized response to their needs; children require a connection through family to their race, culture, and identity; and children require a sense of belonging--love--within stable and predictable relationships in order to thrive.

We know that across Canada there are insufficient families available for children who require out-of-home care. Despite the heroic efforts of many individuals, families, and child welfare organizations, increasing numbers of children are growing up in unsuitable placements without access to family relationships, belonging, and pride in who they are, and without any permanence in their lives. Rather, these children are growing up in overcrowded homes, shelters, or, even worse, hotel rooms with temporary workers looking after them.

Further, we know there are unresolved conflicts between aboriginal groups and child welfare services about the best approaches to caring for aboriginal children who require adoption.

In this presentation this morning, I will attempt to address the two questions under consideration by this committee: that is, the current situation regarding adoption in Canada, and the potential for a federal leadership role. I will conclude with a number of recommendations for your consideration.

First, I will address the current situation. The situation regarding adoption in Canada was recently studied by the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the Honourable Raynell Andreychuk. Their exhaustive final report, “Children: The Silenced Citizens”, was released in April 2007. There is an entire chapter devoted to adoption and identity. Their conclusion, on page 109, was that “the Committee calls on governments across Canada to recognize and address the adoption crisis in this country, particularly in the case of Aboriginal children”.

The Child Welfare League of Canada agrees with this conclusion and with the recommendations made by the committee. The fact of the matter is that the situation regarding out-of-home care in Canada has been inadequate, under-resourced, fragmented, and struggling for many years. It has been so for most of my 41 years of experience working in the child welfare system, and it's my continuing observation today.

This does not diminish the reality that there are stellar examples of innovation, creativity, and development of best practices, but they tend to be localized or not well supported or replicated: things like foster/adopt programs, subsidized adoption programs, and the adoption programs in provinces like Alberta and New Brunswick.

In my view, a continuum of family-based care has never been developed in Canada, and this perspective is commonly shared by child welfare professionals and substantiated in the limited research that's available.

Some of the Senate committee findings were as follows: an estimated 76,000 children in care in 2007; over 22,000 awaiting adoption; fewer than 1,700 adopted annually in Canada; and more than 50% of the children awaiting adoption are aboriginal. Although updated national data is not available, it is likely that these estimates are still valid, and with the effect of the global economic recession, numbers will most likely have increased.

The most recent data on child welfare services in Canada is the Canadian incidence study on reported child abuse and neglect. It is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada as part of the national child health surveillance program. It indicated that 235,000 cases of child maltreatment were investigated in 2008, and this number was really unchanged from the previous five-year reporting period in 2003.

Let's turn to the federal responsibility in this area. Canada is quite different from the United States in the implementation of child welfare services. In the U.S. there is a more direct federal responsibility for legislation policy and funding. In Canada federal participation is more indirect through measures such as the Canada social transfer, the CST, and monitoring through the social union framework agreement. As we know, provinces therefore have much greater autonomy. However, these are important instruments, both the CST and SUFA, available to the federal government in terms of exercising more leadership.

That takes me right to the recommendations. The recommendations for the federal government are to continue to provide leadership in this area, and from our perspective there are five of them.

First is the establishment of a knowledge exchange centre on family-based care. This would be a federally supported centre that would have the mandate of promoting exchange of information and best practices across Canada, support policy research and training, and of course assist in the collection of national data.

Second is with regard to the social union framework. It is to improve the current capacity at SUFA regarding monitoring, measuring of outcomes, and reporting in child welfare data.

I'm going to quickly mention the final couple of them. Third is to establish a federal child and youth advisory committee, an advisory committee comprised of young people themselves, 12 to 18 years of age, who are really going to speak with the power of a child's voice in this regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

I appreciate your timer. At least I didn't get the daggers thrown at me this time because I had to tell you your time was up, so I appreciated hearing that.

[Peter Dudding]

My colleague has been very helpful.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Mr. Falk, go ahead, please.

[Will Falk, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My name is Will Falk. I'm a business person and the adoptive father of two boys from foster care.

I'd like to start by congratulating the committee for showing leadership on this important issue. Adoption of crown wards is the ignored underbelly of social policy. It's truly a place where dedicated leadership can make a difference, one child at a time.

I've had the chance to listen to or to read ten hours of your transcripts. I guess that's eleven hours, having sat through the first hour today. I'm impressed by your understanding of the issue--because it's a difficult one in a lot of dimensions--and the way you're working together to solve the issue. You seem to be above party pettiness, and that's just great to see, as is your willingness to show leadership on an issue that many people believe is not primarily a federal concern.

And let me say yes, I recognize that the child welfare system is clearly a provincial responsibility first. But the results of our current poorly functioning systems are the responsibilities of all levels of government. We all end up paying.

We know the numbers from Canada and the U.S.: that 45% of homeless youth have been in foster care, and that a large proportion of the prison population are kids formerly in care. We know that about 36% of men and 14% of women in prison were abused as children. We know that wards of the crown are 25% more likely to have a teen pregnancy; 30% more likely to commit a violent crime; two and a half times more likely to abuse alcohol; 3.8 times more likely be drug-addicted; and finally, that 80% of abused and neglected children will abuse or neglect their own children. So this is the cycle of poverty issue, and you are on it and that's great. It is an issue of national concern, with shared responsibility for action. So thank you for recognizing its importance.

I served on the expert panel on infertility and adoption chaired by now Governor General David Johnston, and I was the co-chair of that panel's work group on adoption. There was an Ontario report, which you have as a brief, in both French and English.

Our citizen team looked in detail at the Ontario situation and made recommendations for how Ontario could improve its adoption system. The section of our report on adoption runs to more than 60 pages, so I have about four and a half seconds a page to cover from here on in.

Let me do a couple of things. First, we recommended a targeting of a doubling of the number of crown ward adoptions in five years in Ontario, from 800 to 1,600. Peter has spoken about some of the national numbers. Already in the first year, just by raising awareness, those numbers are up 21%, and most people believe we can keep up that trend.

We know from the U.S. experience that doubling is possible. You've heard testimony from Susan Smith that they tripled, so start with the baseline that doubling is possible and push on it. Strong national leadership is a key part of accomplishing that.

And while there may be some nuances and some uniquely Canadian qualifiers, shared governance, as we've seen in EI, health, and immigration, is possible, and I encourage you to continue.

Let me talk a bit about the Johnston panel's recommendations in Ontario.

There should be a central organization and coordination of the adoption system with known standards and timelines for families and for kids for system entry, training, and home study.

There should be much better central systems to promote available children and available families. We're missing the match, and we need to make those websites and those adoption resource exchanges work much better.

We need to remove barriers from court-ordered access.

And finally, we need to provide standardized and regular adoption subsidies for the adoption of crown wards age two and older, as well as for crown wards under two with special needs. What we recommended in the Johnston report was 50% to 80% of the current foster care board rate. It sounds as if INAC is moving in that direction in at least two provinces, so let's keep pushing on that one nationally to see if we can get that done.

The overall goal is doubling in five years.

It's good compassionate public policy, but it's also very cost-effective. The U.S. data suggest that the saving per adopted child over the life of a child is $124,000.

It costs $40,000 to keep a kid in care in Ontario, and that's just the average number. When you start talking about group home costs in Toronto, you're up $175 to $200 per day. You get these kids adopted early and in permanent homes and you take available funds. And we estimated, without looking at the soft savings of cycle poverty costs, that you would be seeing savings of $26 million a year in the Ontario situation after the fifth year of implementation, in the sixth year. Those data are supported by the U.S. data. We're putting the money in the wrong places, folks. We need to move the money and to make a difference here to save that money and do better for these kids.

Let's make no doubt, these kids are our responsibility as a society. The parental rights have been terminated. These are wards of the crown. We have the responsibility to develop a national adoption strategy, make it the focus of a ministers meeting, and then part of a first ministers meeting. You can bring that time and attention. You can increase adoption supports. The Government of Canada should amend federal employment insurance rules to provide the same treatment for both birth and adoptive parents. That was our recommendation. I've heard some of your discussion today, and maybe we can talk about that in questions. Increase the ceiling of allowable expenses, further expand the post-adoption...available through INAC. We heard about that a little bit earlier.

The interprovincial adoption protocol needs to be expanded on the U.S. interstate model. That may involve putting more money into programs like CWLC so that you have overlays and some supports that allow for that matching. You need a national database of crown ward information. We need to know how these kids are doing. They're our responsibility. As government leaders, they're our responsibility.

If you want more information, there's www.actiononadoption.ca. It's a Facebook account, so you may get blocked on your government sites, but not the MPs.

Thank you very much for your time today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you both very much.

We're going to get right to questions. I think we just have time for five-minute rounds.

We'll begin with Mr. Savage, five minutes.

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

Just do one round?

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Yes. We have committee business at 10:30.