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.