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.

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?