It’s an honour to rise today to join in this afternoon’s debate. Before I begin, I’d like to thank the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services and his entire team for the tremendous work that has gone into Bill 188, the Supporting Children's Futures Act, 2024. Their hard work and strong leadership does not go unnoticed, and it was a privilege to work alongside the minister, the staff and the member from Markham–Thornhill as the former parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services. I’d also like to recognize the foundational work put into this bill by the now-Minister of Colleges and Universities when she was in her former role as the Associate Minister of Children and Women’s Issues, in collaboration with the now-Minister of Energy in his former role as the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services.

I’m pleased to stand here today to offer my complete support for Bill 188. Speaker, I’m proud of our government’s record in this area, and not just because I was the former parliamentary assistant. Since our government has taken office, we have undertaken a comprehensive redesign of the child welfare system in Ontario. We did this because we want the best for every child and youth living in Ontario. Every single child and youth deserves a decent start in life and a safe, stable home, regardless of their circumstances. Our government wants to ensure that nobody in our province is left behind.

Speaker, as a direct result of that redesign, our government has introduced numerous new initiatives to improve the quality of care in out-of-home settings. For example, we have increased accountability to these settings by adding 20 new positions across the province to support the management, inspection and oversight of out-of-home care for children and youth. Another example includes the launch of the Ready, Set, Go Program, which commenced last April. Our government has invested $170 million into this innovative program, which provides youth with crucial life skills and supports they need to pursue post-secondary education, skilled trades training and employment opportunities early in their journey, to prepare them for eventually transitioning out of care.

Dr. Rebekah Jacques, who was a survivor of the Sixties Scoop, shared her view of the importance of this program, stating, “The Ready, Set, Go Program is a great start to support the transition from being a youth in care to becoming a young adult. By offering an opportunity of gradual independence as well as softening the abrupt effects of being ejected from the foster system, youth are going to be better prepared to enter adulthood.”

As you can see, Speaker, the Ready, Set, Go Program is just one example of the critically important work that this ministry does, and a testament to the fact that the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services is there for people throughout their entire lives.

Speaker, in regard to Bill 188, the Supporting Children’s Futures Act, 2024, at its core, it seeks to protect children and youth in care by establishing new measures for safety, oversight, accountability and privacy. It also seeks to provide better opportunities for children and youth in care so that they can thrive as adults later in life and contribute more fully to their communities.

Strengthening oversight and enforcement tools for out-of-home care works to ensure that all children and youth in care will receive safe, high-quality services. Through new high-impact enforcement tools, bad actors can be rooted out and held accountable. Some of these tools include compliance orders, administrative monetary penalties and enhanced charges with larger fines.

Speaker, Bill 188, if passed, will also work to protect the privacy of children and youth once they leave care. Access to records held by children’s aid societies regarding a child or youth will be restricted once they are no longer in the care. To further support privacy and autonomy of these individuals, another proposal of Bill 188 is to enable adults with a history of child protection involvement to publicly identify themselves and speak about their experiences, supporting them in sharing their story, if they choose to do so. Through Bill 188, access by others to personal records of former children and youth in care will be restricted, while also supporting their ability to speak freely regarding their own lived experiences.

This bill also proposes to establish clear and consistent practices in the Child, Youth and Family Services Act through a number of measures. One proposal of this bill is to enable information sharing between children’s aid societies and the College of Early Childhood Educators as well as the Ontario College of Teachers, which would allow for timely action in the event of an allegation of risk to children that involves a teacher or early childhood educator.

Moreover, if passed, the bill will clarify that early childhood educators also have a duty to report children in need of protection and introduce penalties for those who fail to report such cases. All of these measures are to ensure that every child and youth in care in Ontario is safe and protected.

I’d like to now share some feedback from our valuable partners in the child and youth sector. Valerie McMurtry is the president and CEO of Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada. Valerie states, “We commend the Ontario government for their work to increase clarity regarding the care of young people placed in out-of-home settings through the Supporting Children’s Futures Act, 2024. Our collective priority should be to ensure that young people remain in the care of their families and communities. However, when this isn’t feasible, it’s critical that young people have access to the high-quality supports they need, including understanding their rights and assistance available to them through Ontario’s Ombudsman. We value government’s commitment to making sure young people receive this information and ensuring their voices stay central in shaping this act and next steps with respect to child welfare redesign.”

According to Susan Somogyi Wells, CEO of Family Service Ontario, “The Supporting Children’s Futures Act, 2024, enhances the safety, privacy and rights of children and youth. Family Service Ontario strongly supports this legislation for its commitment to safeguarding the well-being of our children and youth, mitigating the risks of developmental trauma.”

Speaker, this is proof that the proposed changes within Bill 188 are the result of extensive, continuous consultations with our community partners and service providers. The staff at the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services held over 30 virtual engagements with various stakeholder groups, including youth with lived experiences. Stakeholders through the Ontario Regulatory Registry were also engaged with, and 35 written submissions were received on the proposed changes.

Bill 188 is a testament to this government’s commitment to partnership. The progress we have made in this sector has only been possible with the support and efforts of our countless partners and front-line workers. We commend them for their commitment to supporting children and youth across the province.

This government will continue to work in tandem with our vital community partners and stakeholders to bring our joint vision of ensuring that all children, youth and families across our province can access the supports they need to thrive. The children and youth that this bill seeks to protects are our future. We need the children and the youth of today to thrive so that the adults of tomorrow have the tools they need to succeed. For our youth to realize their true potential, we need to be there to support and guide them at each step of their journey.

Since 2020, our government has been redesigning Ontario’s child welfare system to enhance early intervention, improve the outcomes for children and address barriers to support. As we all know, this is a process, and the minister is committed to ensuring that our children are set up with the right tools to ensure that they have the best childhood and futures possible.

It’s an honour to stand up and speak on Bill 188. It’s a bill about taking care of children in foster care. This is an issue that’s pretty near and dear to me. A good friend of mine was raised in foster care. When she was 11, she and her sister were removed from their family because the father was sexually abusing them. She ended up in foster care, and she was being shuffled from foster care home to foster care home with all of her possessions in a garbage bag.

By the time she was 14, one of her friends on the street realized that she needed some money, so he gave her some speedballs to sell and a gun to protect herself, so at 14 she was standing on a street corner with a gun and selling drugs. The next decade and a half of her life was just one horrific nightmare, but somehow, she came out of it and she’s a wonderful mother. She’s an advocate for children. She’s a counsellor to young children. She has taken her pain and turned it into purpose.

If anybody’s interested in reading a book, the book is called If You Played in My Playground, and it’s about growing up in downtown Toronto. When I read the book, I was shocked because I had no idea that things like she describes happened in the city of Toronto. It’s amazing how different our realities can be from somebody you sit next to and the nightmare that they might be living with.

Getting foster care right saves lives, and we’ve seen that over and over again.

In 2022, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and Global News launched an investigation, and the reports in the investigation showed pretty clearly that for-profit care providers were terribly abusing their charges, the children in their care. Hatts Off was one of these large, for-profit residential care providers. The media investigations included details about one young First Nations woman who had run away, and her disappearance was not reported in a timely way by the provider, and she became a victim of human trafficking.

This should not be happening. The most vulnerable people in our society are children in care, and as a government, as a society, we have a responsibility to make sure that they get the best care that’s possible.

On the other hand, these for-profit corporations look at these children not as charges, not as a huge responsibility, but as the words they actually use to describe—particularly First Nations children from northern communities. They get paid more for looking after those children. They call them cash cows, and they describe them as being the bread and butter of their business model.

One First Nations social worker visited a First Nations child in one of these for-profit homes, and the child asked the social worker, “Are you here to rescue me?”

What’s happening to children in some of these homes is absolutely appalling.

There’s one company called Connor Homes; it has been under investigation by children’s aid societies. The report said that the group homes run by Connor Homes in eastern Ontario were kept in a state of disrepair, and the kids in care were left with few resources, while the owners amassed personal fortunes in real estate holdings.

So these for-profit homes are getting tax dollars to look after these children, but instead of looking after the children, the children are left in rundown homes while they amass a fortune.

One of the staff members from Connor Homes said, “You knew that (the owners) had the money but it wasn’t in the home(s).” He said that they’re—actually, sorry; this person is not being identified for fear of reprisal. He said, “The kids didn’t see that money.”

So the solution that came out of this report and what the child advocates were saying is that we need a fundamental change in the system—and the first recommendation they said was to take profit out of caring for kids. A for-profit corporation exists to make profit; it doesn’t exist to look after children. If a corporation existed to look after children, it wouldn’t be for-profit. That was the first recommendation. So one of the biggest disappointments of Bill 188 here, which this government is introducing, is that it doesn’t get rid of the for-profit care model.

There’s a long history coming up to this legislation, and I’ll just quickly go through it. In 2008, the former government created the Ontario child advocate office. This was to be an independent office for children and youth, including those with disabilities as well as Indigenous children and youth. Irwin Elman, the first director of the child and youth advocate office, was motivated by a case that some people will remember was in the media in 2008. A little girl, Katelynn Sampson, seven years old, was horribly abused, and she was killed by her foster parents, who were charged with murder in her case. There were a number of changes that were recommended, that came out of the inquest into her death, including whistle-blower protection, and a second bill, Bill 57, called Katelynn’s Principle Act, and these were both introduced by my colleague from Hamilton Mountain in 2015 and 2016. So, almost 10 years ago, she introduced this legislation for whistle-blower protection, and it’s finally in this bill. So there are some good things in Bill 188, and the NDP will be supporting this bill, but we would like to see a lot more because what’s at stake is the lives and well-being of children.

I would say also that one of the biggest mistakes this government made was, in 2018, they shut down the child and youth advocate office. The argument was that they were trying to reduce the deficit. The Conservative MPP at the time who was the child and youth minister—and I can’t remember what riding she’s from.

Through you, Speaker: This bill contains a lot of positive things for youth, and members opposite are talking quite a bit about things that are not in this bill, but the fact of the matter is that they seem to be missing the point. This bill is just one means of our government to provide a better standard of care. We can always do better, and we’re progressively moving forward so that we can provide better services for our most vulnerable.

I used to work in this area. I worked under the Child Protection Act for countless years. The fact of the matter is, consultation happened in this. I’m just wondering if the member could possibly provide information on how they came to some of the decisions that were made?

I thank the member opposite for allowing me to answer the question. She touched upon the mental health; we’ve invested $3.8 billion in the Roadmap to Wellness with an increased focus on children’s mental health, increasing our investment by 25% to a half a billion dollars, which includes innovative programs. Currently, 120,000 children see this mental health support annually.

For children with special needs, our government took significant action. We’re investing an additional $105 million annually into children’s rehabilitation services. Our government will continue to ensure that the children are looked after for the future.

Listening to the children with lived experiences and the adults with lived experience was extremely important to ensure that we’re pushing this in the right direction.

Thank you to the member opposite for his thoughts on this bill. I think one thing we could all agree on in this House is that it’s not great when children end up in care. That’s not the ideal scenario. One thing that stakeholders have said is that while these are good measures in the bill, there is absolutely nothing here to actually prevent children from being taken into care in the first place.

We’re seeing a really disturbing increase in the number of families who are having to relinquish their children solely because they can’t get the supports they need—the mental health supports, the supports with developmental disabilities and other health care problems—and the parents are in a place of desperation where they are having to relinquish care in hopes that they can get this care, or because they really can’t take care of them at home anymore without this care.

It costs 10 times more to take a child into care than it would to just provide the care when they’re with their family, and it has significant detrimental impacts on the outcomes for the child. Does the member not agree that it would be an important addition to this bill to actually provide the supports and resources to prevent children from needing to be in care in the first place?

Questions?

Professionals in Ontario such as teachers, physicians, and social workers have an ongoing duty to directly report a child suspected to be in need of protection. These would include children that have been harmed or neglected by parents or caregivers or suspected to be at risk to be exploited and subjected to trafficking.

Bill 188 proposes expanding this responsibility and obligation to apply to enter early childhood education—addition to a number of professionals who share in the responsibility of looking out for children who are at risk of being harmed.

Does the member opposite support adding additional eyes to look out for the best interests of young people?

It’s now time for questions, and if the member has a copy of that book, I’d love to read it.

I recognize the member for Thornhill.

Nepean.

Thank you, and through you, Speaker, I was just going to add that the measures contained in the Supporting Children’s Futures Act would, if passed, create a safer environment for every child out of home care. We won’t get into the specifics of profit or not-for-profit. It helps every child.

I was going to talk about the Ontario Ombudsman. It’s an important safeguard that provides rights to children of youth in care. Young people in care already have the right to contact the office of the Ombudsman; however, that’s contained in the Ombudsman Act rather than the Child, Youth and Family Services Act. And since children’s aid societies and service providers are governed by and most familiar with the CYFSA, the status quo leaves a potential gap where a youth may not even be aware of their rights.

This bill proposes to entrench details about this right and remove any lack of clarity for the rights with respect to the Ombudsman. Does the member opposite not support giving young people a stronger understanding of this right to the Ombudsman?

Nepean, okay, Ottawa-Nepean—

When she got to be the minister, she was in charge of actually breaking down and closing the child and youth advocate office, and she said that she would be responsible, she would be the greatest child advocate that they could have. What we saw and what I mentioned when I started my speech was the Global News and the APTN investigation which shows that the abuse in foster homes is continuing. So the question is, does the member from Nepean actually take responsibility for all of the abuse that’s taken place, in part because of the loss of the child and youth advocate office?

I’ve only got a minute and a half left and I want to get to the solutions that we’re proposing. What we would like to see in this bill is getting rid of for-profit delivery. There should be no profit in looking after children. Profit should not be the motive. If you are going to dedicate yourself to looking after children or dedicate a company to looking after children, the children’s welfare has to be the first and only priority.

We also need to restore the child and youth advocate office. That’s an important thing to do. And we need to, as my colleague from Ottawa—

Interjection: Ottawa West–Nepean.

I think this bill—as the members opposite have said, there are some good things in it, but it does not go nearly far enough. With this bill, if this is the only action this government takes, there are going to be many more children like the one I started the story with, who are in foster care, who end up in very, very dangerous situations.

There were 200 complaints in 2023 to the Ombudsman’s child and youth unit by children in care. When the child and youth advocacy office was in play, they received an annual 2,000 cases per year. So there’s 1,800 fewer cases reported to the Ombudsman’s office than there were to the child and youth advocacy office. And the question is: What is happening to those children?

What you’re saying about high-needs children—high-needs children require a lot of care, and depending on the needs of those children, it can be very expensive to look after them. The funding for those children is simply not there. You cannot ask a family to take on a high-needs child and dedicate themselves to that if it’s not possible to do it and if the child needs more care than what’s possible to deliver, especially if the funding is not there.

One of the other recommendations coming out of this for this bill is an increase in funding, particularly for the care of high-needs children.

That the government is expanding that to include ECEs and other professionals who are in care of children, that makes good sense. But at the same time, the government needs to provide funding and also restore the children and youth advocacy office so that those children have an advocate on their side when things happen.

Thanks to the member from Spadina–Fort York for his question. He raised several points that are of interest to me. Our local children’s aid society has come to me and said, “We cannot find foster parents for high-needs children. It’s too hard.” And let me be really clear: There are some really good foster parents out there who are compassionate and caring, and this is not an easy, easy job.

So they’ve had to either create their own model of care for these high needs, which they’re not funded for, or they become reliant on these privatized agencies who say they specialize; however, we don’t have eyes on those agencies. And that’s the key piece: the oversight piece.

There are good intentions with this legislation. It may be good, but at the end of the day, you need to have eyes on these homes and eyes on these children. What does the member say to that?

Did you?

It’s a pleasure and honour to be able to speak to this bill today, Bill 188. Certainly, I don’t profess to be an expert in children, but I’ve had some experience. Some people say I’m still living that experience, working my way up to adulthood, but that’s a debate for another day.

I want to, first of all, commend the minister for bringing forward this initiative because obviously I’ve known this minister for some time now and I’ve got to see how he works, and I really appreciate, in his work in this ministry, how he continuously and incrementally has always put the welfare of children and youth at the top of the priority list.

We do appreciate that, Minister, and this bill is no exception to your commitment, and that is appreciated not just by myself and all of the members in this caucus, but, I do believe, the members on the other side. I think that I heard, if I’m not mistaken, notwithstanding the comments from the member from—is it Spadina–Fort York?

I say this as a person who came from a family—or comes from a family; it’s not like the family has kicked me out or anything. I come from a family of 14 children. Well, you can imagine all of the dynamics that exist in a family of 14 children. You know they say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, we were a village unto ourselves, with all of the challenges and the pleasures and everything else, and the wonders that come with that, growing up in a large family like that.

One thing that you do learn is that even when you don’t want to, you’d better get along. You’d better try to get along, because there are enough battles in a large family. It’s just like a big caucus. You’re supportive of one another, but there is a competition as well. That’s the way teamwork plays out. It will happen tonight on the ice in Toronto, as well, as the Leafs take on the Boston Bruins in game 3. I’m looking for another big performance by world-class superstar Auston Matthews.

One thing that my wife and I have always agreed on—we don’t agree on everything, and she always wins the things that we don’t agree on, but that’s another story too. But one thing we do agree on is the importance and the absolute priority of our children. We’ve talked about it. You do a lot of things in this world, and at some point you leave this world. We’ve often talked about it, that the only really amazing, wonderful, important thing that we have done is brought our children into this world and we have raised them, because when we leave this world, that is literally the only thing that Vicky and I will leave behind.

It doesn’t matter what I did here. It doesn’t matter what she did; it doesn’t matter what I did. It doesn’t matter if I even won the 1977 home run championship in the North Renfrew baseball league—

Those things don’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that I released a couple of CDs to support hospitals and long-term-care homes in my riding. What matters is our children, and without our children, there wouldn’t be our grandchildren, and so on and so forth—we have no great-grandchildren yet; as you can tell, I’m not that old.

But I really like what I’m seeing in this bill from the point of view of prioritizing the protection of children and youth. One of the items in the bill, one of the clauses or whatever in the bill, is requiring early childhood educators to have the same reporting requirements as teachers would have, for example, in reporting suspicion of abuse. Because if we’re not going to protect the children, then we don’t have much of a future, do we?

Now, I can tell you that I’m old enough—and, Speaker, you’re not that much younger than me—that we know of instances growing up where people have failed to report issues of abuse because they’re afraid of the repercussions upon themselves, particularly in small communities where everybody knows each other. This requirement that will become legislated under Bill 188 takes away that fear because it’s now an absolute requirement. It isn’t because you wanted to do this, to report so-and-so or whatever that you suspect there may be abuse; it is because it is now the law. You are required to report the fact that you suspect that there’s abuse going on in this group home or some other facility. That is a huge step forward in protecting the children and the youth in our society, those that are under care.

I know we don’t have a lot of time when we’re speaking on these issues, but there’s another aspect that I wanted to touch on as well, Speaker, and I hope I get this right. Let’s just say that you and I were in a group home at one time, that we were in care. Today, you and I are not allowed to talk about that. We are not free to talk about our experiences while under care.

I can talk all I want about my childhood experiences, about all the good, the bad and the ugly—oh, there was a movie under that name; I think I was the “ugly” part. Absolutely, Speaker, we can talk about those. We have that freedom to speak on any of those subjects we want and divulge what we choose to and withhold what we choose to. But if we were in a home, in a care setting, under the current laws we’re not allowed to talk about that. I mean, it’s like wiping out—how many times have people who know me in here heard me talk about experiences I had growing up?

If this government wants to support children, they need to end Ontario’s for-profit child residential care. We cannot forget the case in 2021, while this Conservative government was in power, when a teenager living in a for-profit home was murdered by another teenager. And guess what? This Conservative government still gave that for-profit care home its licence.

So at this point in time, in 2024, we really want to be able to believe that you care about children and youth. but it’s hard to when we see our schoolboards consistently gutted. And which kids are getting hurt the worst? Kids with disabilities. It’s the kids who are at the margins of the margins. It’s the BIPOC kids. It’s the kids living in poverty.

So is this government going to actually end for-profit residential child care?

I hear the member’s passion in this, and absolutely, we must end for-profit child care. There’s a litany of abuse that’s been happening. There’s the reports that come out about what’s been happening, that these for-profit child care providers are generating profits, that they’re actually making money on this, on the backs of these children, and they call the children “cash cows.” They’re accumulating real estate assets from the taxpayer dollars that are supposed to be going to children’s care.

We need to get the profit out of child care, foster care. We need to make sure that all organizations that are looking after children, that their first and only responsibility is the care for those children, not for generating profits for their owners.

We’re seeing it also with Chartwell, the seniors’ home in Mississauga that’s being shut down. We’ve got 200 seniors being evicted because this company, a real estate investment trust, wants to renovict those seniors so they can make more profit. It’s appalling. The government should not be supporting, either for children’s care or seniors’ care, for-profit corporations.

Further questions?

Through you, Speaker, there are new enforcement tools with Bill 188 intended to hit at the finances of service providers who choose to provide poor-quality care. This bill takes critical steps towards making sure there’s no profit in providing poor care to children and youth in this province.

One of the measures of the bill is to provide an order that funding be returned when a child in care has not received the level of service expected, so this is providing a better outcome. This measure would be supported and strengthen the financial record-keeping. Does the member opposite agree that measures such as these put children first by making sure that every dollar invested in this care results in high-quality care?

A few.

Speaker, if you seek it, you’ll find unanimous consent to see the clock at 6.