As Shelagh said earlier, we did a tour of the province and talked to people who were front-line workers and who worked mainly with the women who were caught up in the welfare cycle. Without help, they can't get out.
We found that the cycle included the apprehension of children. Once the children were gone, that was the death knell to the family. There is no way the women can get them back, because once they're gone, the social assistance is cut and the housing they need to bring them back isn't available. So no matter what they do, those kids are gone. What happens then is that the mom usually goes into a cycle that results in her own destruction.
If you can get them before the kids go...but given the social assistance, the support, the cutting of all the programs, that's highly unlikely. We found, when we toured the province, that there were situations where the children were being apprehended at birth as well. So once they'd gone through it with the children they had, they were taken away. If they became pregnant again, then the welfare worker was hovering at birth. They would give orders to the hospital to say that the child was not to be released. They would swoop in and take the child, and that one wouldn't come back either.
The other thing that was quite prominent in our consultations was that the welfare rate...if you remove the child from the home.... There is a policy that says that if you can leave the child within the community, within the extended family, that's the preference, especially with aboriginal children. The rate for a child in a home of a relative is about half of what it is for a child in the home of a foster parent who is not related. So it doesn't reflect the desire to keep the family together.
The situation is much larger than just putting some money into it, or putting some programs in it. The situation we're talking about is systemic, and we can look at the individual little pieces, but something larger has to happen. A piece of it I think is the education of people like you who actually are in a position to make some difference. If you don't understand what's going on down there on the ground and you're making decisions over welfare rates and all of that, I can't see a way out.