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.