I am pleased to join my colleagues the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services; the Associate Minister of Women’ Social and Economic Opportunity; and fellow parliamentary assistant the MPP for Markham–Thornhill and rise on behalf of Bill 188, the Strengthening Children’s Futures Act, 2024, now under consideration by this House for third reading.

It has been truly a pleasure to work with the minister on this bill. We believe that all children and youth deserve safety, stability and access to resources and supports to help them succeed and thrive, and as the minister said before, children and youth may only be a portion of our population today, but they are 100% of our future. This is why our government is working to ensure that no child or young person is left behind in Ontario and that everyone has the best chance of success as they approach adulthood.

Speaker, I think we all want to see successful transitions for individuals as they leave Ontario’s child welfare system. I think we all want to see and we all need to see these children and youth becoming confident adults who can contribute to the success of our province, and this is the essence of Bill 188.

Speaker, as I outlined for the House at second reading, our government has worked diligently to introduce other reforms into the child welfare system that will deliver better outcomes for children and youth and their families and caregivers who are receiving support from the child and youth services sector.

But components of Bill 188 are an important part of the government’s ongoing redesign of the child welfare system, and I’d like to take this opportunity to speak to the connection between the proposed changes in child welfare design as it provides important context for the proposals in this bill.

Members of the House will recall that the ministry announced the Child Welfare Redesign Strategy in July of 2020. Through this strategy, our government has introduced new initiatives to improve the quality of services that children and youth receive in out-of-home care. Some of these initiatives have included developing a new framework for what quality of care looks like and feels like; increasing and enhancing oversight and accountability for out-of-home care; and adding 20 new positions across this province to support the management, inspection and oversight of out-of-home care for children and youth.

Speaker, every child and youth deserves a fair start and position in life, and our government is delivering on that. We hit the ground running by:

—consulting widely in the community and with service providers to better serve children and youth;

—increasing the numbers of inspections;

—increasing access to customary care, which helps children and youth remain connected to their culture and traditions—and this is very important. As somebody who worked within the child protection act, having that child touchstone with their community and their culture gives them the essence of the child and helps them really be a positive person for the future;

—bolstering family-based options like kinship and foster care to ensure children and youth and families have a voice and decisions about their care;

—improving the quality of child welfare data, as well as developing an outcomes-based performance measurement framework; and

—releasing the children and young persons’ rights resource to help children and youth understand their rights and use their voices.

Speaker, we have backed this important work with significant investments of more than $1.5 billion in the child welfare system. This investment supports Ontario’s 50 independent children’s aid societies, including 13 Indigenous children’s aid societies.

Since announcing the child welfare redesign in 2020, we’ve made several changes and investments to better support children, youth and families receiving child welfare services.

We have invested almost $3 million to help support kinship service and customary caregivers, adoptive parents, and caregivers who have obtained legal custody of a child in extended society care. I can’t stress the importance of kinship—I worked in that area, and I know the value of that work and putting the child in the right place.

We have annualized $800,000 in funding to One Vision One Voice, which supports culturally appropriate service delivery for Black and African Canadian children, youth and families in the child welfare system.

We’ve invested an additional $1.5 million annually in the Education Liaison Program to help children and youth in care across this province get the support they need to focus on their studies.

We are providing $5 million in annualized funding to enhance access to prevention-focused customary care for Indigenous children and youth, helping them remain closer to their homes, families and communities.

And we launched and invested $170 million in the Ready, Set, Go program which provides youth in the care of children’s aid societies and other eligible youth with the life skills they need, starting at age 13. This includes financial and other supports to those aged 18 to 23 so that they can focus on post-secondary education, skilled trades, or pursuing employment.

I’m so proud to add that youth and child welfare first-voice advocates were important contributors to the design of Ready, Set, Go and the new youth-leaving-care policy.

Aside from these investments, we’ve directed children’s aid societies to end the practice of using birth alerts, which we heard disproportionately affected Indigenous and racialized expectant parents and families.

As Associate Minister Williams outlined, we continue to work with Indigenous communities that are pursuing Indigenous-led models of child and family services.

Speaker, I believe all of this is a strong record of achievement, and the passage of Bill 188 would continue our efforts to improve the child and youth services sector.

Thank you to all the children and youth with lived experience—so important—families, children’s aid societies, service providers, as well as First Nations, Inuit, Métis and urban Indigenous communities, who have taken the time to share their insights with us through various engagements. Your input is vital to the success of our government’s work.

The Supporting Children’s Futures Act, 2024, would, if passed, modernize and standardize important safeguards throughout the child and youth services sector. We are proposing changes that would provide new and enhanced enforcement tools. These changes would support better compliance with licensing requirements that are designed to protect the safety and security of children and youth in licensed out-of-home care, including foster care and group homes. In addition, these changes would hold service providers more accountable for the care they deliver. The proposed changes include amending the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017, to strengthen ministry oversight, enforcement and licensing; mandating children’s aid societies to provide information about health and safety risks to the ministry’s licensing and enforcement staff; and enhancing information-sharing between stakeholders and the ministry’s licensing and enforcement staff.

These changes would help children and youth in three important ways.

First, they would supplement current ministry compliance and enforcement tools by enhancing the ministry’s progressive oversight model. This would better enable the ministry to choose and use the right tools to respond to instances of non-compliance. The proposed new tools include compliance orders, restraining orders, orders requiring management, orders for the return of funds, and notices of administrative penalties. In addition, we’re proposing enhancements to existing powers, including powers to refuse issuing, renewing or revoking a licence.

Second, these changes would enhance program administration and delivery by enhancing criteria to obtain a first licence, strengthening ministry staff’s oversight and enforcement powers, clarifying regulatory and administrative processes, and improving transparency and information-sharing.

And third, these changes supported by recent complementary regulatory amendments would enhance oversight of children in care by children’s aid societies by requiring societies to visit each child placed in out-of-home care more frequently and enhancing information-sharing and service coordination between societies.

We are proposing changes under the Child, Youth and Family Services Act that would restrict access to the records of individuals involved with the child welfare system, in certain circumstances, once regulations are developed. These changes aim to better protect the privacy of individuals who were formerly children or youth involved with the child welfare system. They would also enable individuals to speak freely—which is so important—about their lived experiences which would give them more say and control over what they want to share publicly about their time in the child welfare system in circumstances that would be prescribed at a later date.

Speaker, our government is working so very hard to ensure that individuals involved with the child and youth services sector receive high-quality care from service providers—care that supports their health, their safety and their ability to reach their full potential. We’re working to help ensure that all children and youth have access to the resources and supports they need to succeed and thrive.

I would like to just briefly provide a little bit of context for all of the wins that we’ve had in this, because this has been a positive time for the ministry. I’d like to share some important feedback that we’ve received.

From Valerie McMurtry, president and CEO of Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada:

“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.... 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” the “Ombudsman. We value the 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.”

Madam Speaker, it is so clearly apparent to me, as somebody who worked within the child protection act, that these proposed changes are a result of extensive and continuous consultation with so many valued stakeholders. Now that we’ve arrived at third reading, I owe it to our stakeholders and people across our great province, and in particular to the children and youths’ families, who will ultimately benefit from the proposals in this bill, to take the next steps and pass this bill.

I want to thank everyone in the House for listening to my statement, and I truly appreciate all of my colleagues within the ministry for their support on this bill.

I would like to welcome Oliver Stone, general manager with Chartwell Retirement Residences, and a very special shout-out to my very own fire chief for Vaughan, Chief Andrew Zvanitajs, also known as Chief Andy. Welcome.

Through you, Speaker, I truly appreciated listening to the members opposite—or the members with me—speak on what a progressive move this is.

I was interested in the member for Kawartha Lakes. She talked about being involved in this, hands-on, and there are so many improvements that are coming forward with this bill. One of the things that’s provided through this bill is protecting the children, but also enabling the new students, the ECEs, through the colleges and universities—actually, we could ask the Minister of Colleges and Universities this question, perhaps, because it’s better suited for her—but enabling that individual, that student to realize what they are supposed to do in those circumstances where they do see a child that’s in distress—