Earlier in the debate, we heard about kin placements, which is a preferred option for children being placed in temporary custody, but the money reimbursed to those families—so a family placement, a kin placement—is $280 a month versus the $1,000 that is for adoptive families. That’s a huge difference.

And when we know being placed with family is a better option with better outcomes, why is that not something we see in this bill? And would the government be willing to make that change based on the recommendations from those in the know making decisions in the best interests of children?

My question to the government with regard to Bill 188, the Supporting Children’s Futures Act: There are immediate steps that you can do today to advance the futures and keep safe and well the children and youth of Ontario.

One of those things is to pass Bill 174, the Missing Persons Amendment Act. That would really help protect vulnerable people, especially those with disabilities. This is a bill that I understand the member from Hamilton Mountain has put forth. This government has said yes to this and yet you have not delivered.

Another thing to help our children and youth: bring back the provincial child and youth advocate so there can be a voice, an independent non-partisan voice, in this Legislature speaking on behalf of children and youth. Don’t do it for the NDP; do it for the kids. Do it for the family. Do it for the people who feel down and out and betrayed by the care system.

I’m happy to have a few minutes to talk to Bill 188, An Act to amend the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017 and various other Acts.

It has been a long time coming, Speaker. We have known of horrific situations in the child welfare system for a long time. The children’s aid societies have come forward, telling us, asking us, begging us to make changes, and I’m happy to see that some of those changes have been incorporated into this bill. But there are other big asks that have been there for a long time that are not in the bill, and I’m sorry that they are not there.

When you look at child protection, you have to look at the continuum of it. You start with: How do you protect them? How do you make sure that they do not end up in care? How do you make sure that they do not end up having to be cared for by the children’s aid society and cared for in residential care in different parts of the province?

I can tell you that in Nickel Belt, for the people who I represent, the number one reason why the children’s aid society goes in and takes the child away from the family for the protection of the child is the lack of mental health services. In my community, first of all, 40,000 people do not have access to primary care, so they cannot go see their family physician or their nurse practitioners because they are on the wait-list for Health Care Connect for years on end.

Their child that they love, that they want to support—they are good people who want to do good for their children—develops a mental illness. The child will be admitted into the hospital. After you wait for 36 hours in the emergency room, your child will finally be seen. He or she may be admitted and then get discharged, and they say he needs or she needs to have follow-up in the community. The average wait time for community-based mental health services for children in my community is 18 months. It used to be 12 months, which was way too long; 18 months is a lifetime when you’re a child facing mental illness. During that 18 months, Speaker, the family will fall apart.

We are not mental health experts. They don’t know what’s good to do for the child. One parent will say, “We should do this”; the other one will say something else. Then the child starts to act up in school, and the school sends the child back home and calls the children’s aid society because they can see that there’s something going on. Those are good families who want to care for their kids; they just don’t know what’s the right thing to do when the kid starts to act out, when the kid starts to be sick and there’s no way for them to access care, so the kid eventually will fall into the protection of children’s aid.

The good thing, if there’s ever a good thing when a child is taken away, is that the children’s aid will have access to intensive children’s mental health services and the kid will gain access. That access will not be in our community; that access will be hundreds of kilometres away, where the child will be sent.

For the family, it is extremely difficult. They will continue to have visiting access to their child, but it’s not obvious to drive 400 kilometres away for a two-hour visit in person with the child. It becomes really, really difficult. The family will fall apart; most of them will end up in divorce.

When the child gets the treatment he or she needs, comes back to northern Ontario, their life will be completely different. There’s no more mom and dad. There’s no more family. The family has fallen apart.

None of those working up front to support children, to support families so that we don’t end up needing children’s aid services are addressed in the bill. What is addressed in the bill is residential, group and foster homes, and believe me, Speaker, there is a lot of room for improvement at that end.

There are quite a few First Nations families in my riding. I’m proud to say that Wahnapitae First Nation, Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and Mattagami First Nation are all in my riding. There are quite a few First Nations around Bisco, Westree, Shining Tree etc.

You will have seen in the news a report that was done about children from First Nations who are in care. This report was really hard to read. There was a most serious allegation involving one of the biggest for-profit residential care providers, Hatts Off. The investigation showed that the privately run group home had, as a profit model, First Nations kids from northern Ontario communities. Those kids are called “cash cows.” They’re called “bread and butter.” One of the children who was in one of those homes asked a First Nations social worker if she had come to rescue him—this is how poorly.

I can also talk about Connor Homes in eastern Ontario, which were kept in a state of disrepair. The kids in care were left with few resources, while the owner amassed a personal fortune in real estate holdings. Some of the people who worked there would tell you that you knew that the owner had money, but it wasn’t the kids who saw that money or saw the care that should have come with it. The homes frequently used physical restraints on the kids in their care. And the story goes on—that goes from bad to worse.

There are steps in this bill that would help. One of the big ones is that every child in care will know that they can call upon the Ombudsman. Don’t get me wrong; I, like every member on this side in my caucus, in the NDP—we want the child and youth advocate to come back. The child and youth advocate was the one telling us where the complaints are coming from, and of the—I forgot the numbers—roughly 19,000 serious occurrence reports, a quarter of them were produced from group residential homes. We’ve known about this for quite a few years. The special task force on residential care is several years old. The time to act was years ago. But I’m happy that some steps are being taken so that every child who is in a residential, group or foster home will know that if they feel something is wrong, they will be able to call the Ombudsman. This is one part of the bill that I support—make it readily available so that children can call out for help.

I would have liked to see more protection for whistle-blowers. Everybody who holds a health professional licence in Ontario—we have a mandate to call a children’s aid society the minute that we suspect that a child is in need. We don’t have to have any proof. If we suspect that a child is in need, everybody who holds a licence in Ontario has a mandatory obligation to call. This mandatory obligation to call will now be for people who work in our schools; it should have been there way before, because every kid in Ontario goes to school. They are our eyes and ears as to what’s going on with the children, and they should not have to amass a proof big enough to get a police officer to look at the case. If they suspect something, call the children’s aid society and let them do the investigation to make sure that the child is safe rather than amassing enough proof to show that the child has been abused. This is something else in the bill that I’m more than willing to support.

Thirty.

When you’re speaking about mental health and children’s mental health, a statistic that’s disturbing which was shared by Children’s Mental Health Ontario at the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs was that four of the top 10 reasons for the hospitalization of children and youth are for mental health challenges.

Particularly, I’d like to hear the member comment about wage parity, because mental health care workers in hospitals make 50% more than someone in community-based mental health services. As well, mental health workers in the youth justice sector haven’t seen an increase in over 17 years. Would you care to comment about the importance of wage parity and how that will help children receiving mental health services?

Thank you to the member from Nickel Belt for her comments today on this bill. I’m very happy to hear that the opposition members have said things like it’s a good bill, it’s a good start and, after years of neglect, we’re starting to see some progress. We all think this is an important area to make progress in.

On April 20, 2021, your leader said, “The research is clear and it is exhaustive. It shows that the system needs to be overhauled to prepare youth better to transition into adulthood. Kids now are aging out with no transitions or supports past the age of 18.”

Our government, understanding that challenge, set up the Ready, Set, Go Program, a program for youth leaving care across the province, which I was pretty excited about. I think I heard Jane Kovarikova talking about that on TVO’s The Agenda, but the members of the opposition voted against that. Does the member now regret that vote?

We have time for questions.

To the member from Nickel Belt: With the new enforcement tools proposed in this bill, there’s going to be more information about the track records of service providers, with all the history of non-compliance. This will be transparently posted on the government’s website. Now, agencies placing children and the public at large would be able to access the history of enforcement actions taken against a particular service provider, including new compliance orders right up to the new administrative monetary penalties.

So my question to the member is: I’m assuming that you would prefer that this information about service providers definitely be publicly disclosed.

Back in 2012, when we had a Provincial Advocate for Child and Youth here in the province, that office recognized the disproportionate needs for children in care who identify as Black and Indigenous.

I wanted to quote from this book called HairStory: Rooted—A Firm Foundation for the Future of Black Youth in Ontario’s Systems of Care.

“Benefits of Kinship Care

“Children in kinship care can maintain their racial, cultural and religious ties. They are living with families where they are, for example, speaking the same language, getting the same kind of food they are used to, and the family traditions are very similar, if not the same. It strengthens their identities and allows them to remain connected to their community.”

My question to the government is, if you purport to care about all children and youth in Ontario, why not ensure we have kinship care in this bill that’s supposed to support children and youth, knowing how important it is to Black and Indigenous—

Freedom of expression is a core Canadian value. Beyond that, it is a fundamental freedom in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Currently, individuals with a history of child protection in Ontario are prevented by the Child, Youth and Family Services Act from telling their own stories of their childhood in care. That was doubtless an oversight, but it is significant. Does the member opposite believe that children who leave care are less deserving of freedom of expression themselves than others?

The member who just spoke I think did a fine presentation on the bill that’s before us today and outlined some of the very important and positive measures that are being taken in this area. I want to congratulate him for his comments.

I do have a question that I’m going to ask him about the obligation of early childhood educators to report if they have a reasonable suspicion of child neglect. I think that’s an important obligation. As I was saying earlier to another member, I think the obligation actually protects the professional, the early childhood educator, from having to decide one way or another whether they should. Because now that the obligation is placed on them, they have a certain protection under the law because now they are obliged to report. I just invite the member to offer his observations on that.

It’s now time for further debate.

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.