:
Good morning, everyone.
I'd like to call this meeting to order, meeting number 40 of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, further to our study on the federal support measures to adoptive parents.
We are very pleased to have officials from four different departments with us this morning.
Ladies and gentlemen, you may have been following along some of our study. We've been looking at adoption. As we've been studying it and speaking to witnesses, a number of questions have come up that would pertain to your different departments. We wanted to invite you here today, not necessarily to bring us a statement but just really to answer our questions.
I do understand that there is one statement by Mr. Sarazin from CRA. I also want to introduce the other departments. We have representatives from the Canadian Revenue Agency, Department of Citizenship and Immigration, Department of Human Resources and Skills Development, and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Thank you all for being here.
We will begin with a brief statement by Mr. Sarazin, and then we'll go right into questions.
:
Good morning, Madam Chairperson, and thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.
My name is Mickey Sarazin. I'm a director general in the legislative policy directorate within the Canada Revenue Agency. I'm accompanied today by Nathalie Dumais, who is the director general of the individual returns processing directorate.
As we've tabled a longer version of the remarks for the committee's consideration, in the interest of time may I simply say that the CRA's mission is to administer tax benefits and related programs and to ensure compliance with tax laws on behalf of the governments across Canada.
In short, the CRA is responsible for administering the Income Tax Act as enacted by Parliament, and our comments today will be confined to the administration role.
The Department of Finance is responsible for policy direction and amendments to the Income Tax Act. We're prepared to discuss the adoption expense tax credit today contained within the Income Tax Act. And we would note that once a child is adopted, parents are entitled to claim all the other benefits that are available to all taxpayers with respect to children.
We're prepared to answer any and all questions this morning.
:
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming.
This has turned into a very interesting piece of work that we've undertaken here. I hope some of you have had the chance to be following some of the testimony we've been receiving.
There are a whole number of questions that have come up about Canada's, specifically the federal government's, role in adoption. Some interesting points have come up. I want to get a sense of whether any work has been done by departments, not just in terms of what this committee's been hearing but about adoption overall in the last few years.
One of the issues that comes up a lot, and this would be for Mr. Paquette, perhaps, from Human Resources and Skills Development, is the whole issue of parental leave or adoptive leave in the EI system. One of the things that's come up is that it might make sense to have a whole new category instead of trying to emulate parental or adoptive leave. We might just want to have an adoptive leave, period, so that they would be equal, but it would be separate, as opposed to trying to gerrymander an existing system.
I wonder if you or your department have had a chance to have a look at that and any idea of what the implications might be.
:
Good morning. I am Nicole Girard from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
If I understand correctly, that question was raised by some witnesses about the potential future transmission of citizenship to children who are adopted abroad.
Mr. Yves Lessard: That is correct.
Ms. Nicole Girard: In fact, the current act gives equal treatment to children born abroad to Canadian parents and children who are adopted abroad by Canadians and acquire citizenship directly. As well, children born in Canada to Canadians and children who are born abroad to Canadian citizens and naturalized are treated equally with regard to transmission of citizenship.
This is as a result of two fairly recent changes to the Citizenship Act. In 2007, Bill gave parents who adopt children abroad direct access to citizenship. Previously, there was a two-step process. Parents first had to sponsor a child for him to obtain permanent residence in Canada and then apply for citizenship. In response to calls from parents for faster, more direct access to citizenship, the law was changed to allow parents to apply for citizenship directly, without having to go through the permanent residence stage. When the law changed for the second time more recently, on April 17, 2009, the changes imposed a first-generation limit on children born or adopted abroad, once again to minimize the difference in treatment between children born abroad to Canadians and children adopted abroad by Canadians who access citizenship through the direct route.
:
I would like to first clarify that in terms of the number of aboriginal kids in care, INAC is responsible only for those first nations on reserve. That's about 9,000 children that are in care.
What INAC has started to do, since 2007, is move towards an enhanced prevention-focused approach. We've done so incrementally, starting with Alberta. Then we did Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Quebec, P.E.I., and most recently Manitoba. With that focus on prevention, it supports the families to try to keep them together.
As I mentioned earlier, we also, in 2007, amended our terms and conditions to allow for post-adoption subsidies and supports. That is happening, in particular, in Alberta and Nova Scotia. Where we have legislation that supports that, they are being taken advantage of by the agencies to support families.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our officials for being here today.
The discussion around the table is sort of along two tracks. One, we're examining, in terms of federal supports and federal policies, what's there. The other question is what's not there. For those perceived gaps, if you will, in terms of the federal government's ability to support the provinces in delivering adoption, are there new mechanisms for support that need to be developed, or is it possible to expand existing mechanisms or definitions? I think the committee has expressed an appetite to have some of your input into both of those questions, not just evaluating what's there but some potential guidance in terms of what's not there. We'll potentially have to make some recommendation at the end of this.
With that in mind, in terms of context, I have a number of questions. I want to begin with Mr. Paquette. In response to questions from Mr. Savage about the national interstate compact in the United States, you referred to a protocol. I think you read from a document, even. For my benefit, at least, and the committee's benefit, what protocol are you referring to, and can it be tabled with the committee? What is it? You just read a portion of it.
:
That's all your time, Mr. Watson. Thanks.
We're going to have a five-minute round, but before we do I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to follow up with Ms. Girard.
We heard testimony from a father. He and his wife had adopted a child internationally--I think he was from South Africa. Then very soon after they had a biological child, so he was able to really give us the comparison. He said, “I have two sons, and they are not equal. When they grow up one will be able to pass on his Canadian citizenship to his children; my other son will not be able to.”
To us in this committee who have heard that, there does appear to be a problem in terms of equality. When parents adopt a child, we would like to see them be able to experience equality.
I'm not sure if there's a solution to that, but maybe you can think about that, and at some point in this meeting you can let us know if you think there would be a solution to it that wouldn't have to involve changing our entire Immigration Act. That is something that is an issue for us.
Do you have anything in response, off the top of your head?
:
There are maybe just a couple of points I would like to make. That's one perspective on the issue, certainly. Those are concerns we are aware of at CIC.
The other thing to be aware of is that the law does provide for equal treatment, but it's an issue of who the comparator groups are. Currently the Citizenship Act looks at the comparator groups, as I was trying to explain earlier, perhaps not very clearly, in terms of treating those who were born in Canada and those who are naturalized in Canada equally, as far as their ability to pass on citizenship goes. If their future children are born abroad, they are citizens. The law also treats equally those who are born to Canadians abroad and those who are adopted abroad, who go through the direct route to citizenship.
Something else to be aware of is that adoptive parents, in many cases, have an option open to them, which Canadians living abroad do not. For Canadians living abroad, if the Canadian is born or naturalized in Canada, their child is born abroad as a citizen, and they're impacted by the first-generation limit. A parent living in Canada who's adopting internationally can choose either to apply to bring the child in as a permanent resident of Canada--so if the child is being naturalized through that route, the child would be able to pass on their citizenship--or to bring them through the direct route to citizenship, in which case they're impacted by the first-generation limit. That's not an option that's available to the parents whose children are born to them abroad, because they're citizens from birth, but they're impacted by the first-generation limit.
I'm not sure if that's a little bit clearer, but hopefully it provides a broader picture.
:
Thanks very much, Ms. Hoeppner.
Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity to provide information to you regarding adoption in Canada.
This is a summary presentation. I will focus on the questions related to domestic adoption only.
The issues regarding adoption are very complex and multi-faceted. They involve policy, services, data, and research. I will highlight only the key issues that would pertain to federal leadership.
As you know, adoption is part of a continuum of family-based care options for children from birth to 17 years, which includes foster care, kinship care, guardianship, fostering with a view to adopt, open adoption, subsidized adoption, and custom care in aboriginal communities.
There has been progress in building this continuum of care for children who require out-of-home care, and there is growing consensus and emerging research support around key foundational principles. Those principles are: children are unique and require an individualized response to their needs; children require a connection through family to their race, culture, and identity; and children require a sense of belonging--love--within stable and predictable relationships in order to thrive.
We know that across Canada there are insufficient families available for children who require out-of-home care. Despite the heroic efforts of many individuals, families, and child welfare organizations, increasing numbers of children are growing up in unsuitable placements without access to family relationships, belonging, and pride in who they are, and without any permanence in their lives. Rather, these children are growing up in overcrowded homes, shelters, or, even worse, hotel rooms with temporary workers looking after them.
Further, we know there are unresolved conflicts between aboriginal groups and child welfare services about the best approaches to caring for aboriginal children who require adoption.
In this presentation this morning, I will attempt to address the two questions under consideration by this committee: that is, the current situation regarding adoption in Canada, and the potential for a federal leadership role. I will conclude with a number of recommendations for your consideration.
First, I will address the current situation. The situation regarding adoption in Canada was recently studied by the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the Honourable Raynell Andreychuk. Their exhaustive final report, “Children: The Silenced Citizens”, was released in April 2007. There is an entire chapter devoted to adoption and identity. Their conclusion, on page 109, was that “the Committee calls on governments across Canada to recognize and address the adoption crisis in this country, particularly in the case of Aboriginal children”.
The Child Welfare League of Canada agrees with this conclusion and with the recommendations made by the committee. The fact of the matter is that the situation regarding out-of-home care in Canada has been inadequate, under-resourced, fragmented, and struggling for many years. It has been so for most of my 41 years of experience working in the child welfare system, and it's my continuing observation today.
This does not diminish the reality that there are stellar examples of innovation, creativity, and development of best practices, but they tend to be localized or not well supported or replicated: things like foster/adopt programs, subsidized adoption programs, and the adoption programs in provinces like Alberta and New Brunswick.
In my view, a continuum of family-based care has never been developed in Canada, and this perspective is commonly shared by child welfare professionals and substantiated in the limited research that's available.
Some of the Senate committee findings were as follows: an estimated 76,000 children in care in 2007; over 22,000 awaiting adoption; fewer than 1,700 adopted annually in Canada; and more than 50% of the children awaiting adoption are aboriginal. Although updated national data is not available, it is likely that these estimates are still valid, and with the effect of the global economic recession, numbers will most likely have increased.
The most recent data on child welfare services in Canada is the Canadian incidence study on reported child abuse and neglect. It is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada as part of the national child health surveillance program. It indicated that 235,000 cases of child maltreatment were investigated in 2008, and this number was really unchanged from the previous five-year reporting period in 2003.
Let's turn to the federal responsibility in this area. Canada is quite different from the United States in the implementation of child welfare services. In the U.S. there is a more direct federal responsibility for legislation policy and funding. In Canada federal participation is more indirect through measures such as the Canada social transfer, the CST, and monitoring through the social union framework agreement. As we know, provinces therefore have much greater autonomy. However, these are important instruments, both the CST and SUFA, available to the federal government in terms of exercising more leadership.
That takes me right to the recommendations. The recommendations for the federal government are to continue to provide leadership in this area, and from our perspective there are five of them.
First is the establishment of a knowledge exchange centre on family-based care. This would be a federally supported centre that would have the mandate of promoting exchange of information and best practices across Canada, support policy research and training, and of course assist in the collection of national data.
Second is with regard to the social union framework. It is to improve the current capacity at SUFA regarding monitoring, measuring of outcomes, and reporting in child welfare data.
I'm going to quickly mention the final couple of them. Third is to establish a federal child and youth advisory committee, an advisory committee comprised of young people themselves, 12 to 18 years of age, who are really going to speak with the power of a child's voice in this regard.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Will Falk. I'm a business person and the adoptive father of two boys from foster care.
I'd like to start by congratulating the committee for showing leadership on this important issue. Adoption of crown wards is the ignored underbelly of social policy. It's truly a place where dedicated leadership can make a difference, one child at a time.
I've had the chance to listen to or to read ten hours of your transcripts. I guess that's eleven hours, having sat through the first hour today. I'm impressed by your understanding of the issue--because it's a difficult one in a lot of dimensions--and the way you're working together to solve the issue. You seem to be above party pettiness, and that's just great to see, as is your willingness to show leadership on an issue that many people believe is not primarily a federal concern.
And let me say yes, I recognize that the child welfare system is clearly a provincial responsibility first. But the results of our current poorly functioning systems are the responsibilities of all levels of government. We all end up paying.
We know the numbers from Canada and the U.S.: that 45% of homeless youth have been in foster care, and that a large proportion of the prison population are kids formerly in care. We know that about 36% of men and 14% of women in prison were abused as children. We know that wards of the crown are 25% more likely to have a teen pregnancy; 30% more likely to commit a violent crime; two and a half times more likely to abuse alcohol; 3.8 times more likely be drug-addicted; and finally, that 80% of abused and neglected children will abuse or neglect their own children. So this is the cycle of poverty issue, and you are on it and that's great. It is an issue of national concern, with shared responsibility for action. So thank you for recognizing its importance.
I served on the expert panel on infertility and adoption chaired by now Governor General David Johnston, and I was the co-chair of that panel's work group on adoption. There was an Ontario report, which you have as a brief, in both French and English.
Our citizen team looked in detail at the Ontario situation and made recommendations for how Ontario could improve its adoption system. The section of our report on adoption runs to more than 60 pages, so I have about four and a half seconds a page to cover from here on in.
Let me do a couple of things. First, we recommended a targeting of a doubling of the number of crown ward adoptions in five years in Ontario, from 800 to 1,600. Peter has spoken about some of the national numbers. Already in the first year, just by raising awareness, those numbers are up 21%, and most people believe we can keep up that trend.
We know from the U.S. experience that doubling is possible. You've heard testimony from Susan Smith that they tripled, so start with the baseline that doubling is possible and push on it. Strong national leadership is a key part of accomplishing that.
And while there may be some nuances and some uniquely Canadian qualifiers, shared governance, as we've seen in EI, health, and immigration, is possible, and I encourage you to continue.
Let me talk a bit about the Johnston panel's recommendations in Ontario.
There should be a central organization and coordination of the adoption system with known standards and timelines for families and for kids for system entry, training, and home study.
There should be much better central systems to promote available children and available families. We're missing the match, and we need to make those websites and those adoption resource exchanges work much better.
We need to remove barriers from court-ordered access.
And finally, we need to provide standardized and regular adoption subsidies for the adoption of crown wards age two and older, as well as for crown wards under two with special needs. What we recommended in the Johnston report was 50% to 80% of the current foster care board rate. It sounds as if INAC is moving in that direction in at least two provinces, so let's keep pushing on that one nationally to see if we can get that done.
The overall goal is doubling in five years.
It's good compassionate public policy, but it's also very cost-effective. The U.S. data suggest that the saving per adopted child over the life of a child is $124,000.
It costs $40,000 to keep a kid in care in Ontario, and that's just the average number. When you start talking about group home costs in Toronto, you're up $175 to $200 per day. You get these kids adopted early and in permanent homes and you take available funds. And we estimated, without looking at the soft savings of cycle poverty costs, that you would be seeing savings of $26 million a year in the Ontario situation after the fifth year of implementation, in the sixth year. Those data are supported by the U.S. data. We're putting the money in the wrong places, folks. We need to move the money and to make a difference here to save that money and do better for these kids.
Let's make no doubt, these kids are our responsibility as a society. The parental rights have been terminated. These are wards of the crown. We have the responsibility to develop a national adoption strategy, make it the focus of a ministers meeting, and then part of a first ministers meeting. You can bring that time and attention. You can increase adoption supports. The Government of Canada should amend federal employment insurance rules to provide the same treatment for both birth and adoptive parents. That was our recommendation. I've heard some of your discussion today, and maybe we can talk about that in questions. Increase the ceiling of allowable expenses, further expand the post-adoption...available through INAC. We heard about that a little bit earlier.
The interprovincial adoption protocol needs to be expanded on the U.S. interstate model. That may involve putting more money into programs like CWLC so that you have overlays and some supports that allow for that matching. You need a national database of crown ward information. We need to know how these kids are doing. They're our responsibility. As government leaders, they're our responsibility.
If you want more information, there's www.actiononadoption.ca. It's a Facebook account, so you may get blocked on your government sites, but not the MPs.
Thank you very much for your time today.
:
I will talk about the situation in Ontario.
[English]
I'm not going to burden you with my terrible French accent.
We looked at a couple of barriers. One was geography, which I spoke of, and the other was the access orders question.
In practice, children who have access orders to their birth families are viewed as unadoptable by workers in the system. That should not be the case, but it is the practice at the moment. There are a lot of very good people in the system who do that for a variety of practical reasons.
The third one is the cost barriers.
Madame Beaudin, if you have a long-term foster care placement in Ontario and you convert that to an adoptive placement, you almost always take the foster board rate away from the family. So the reward for adopting your foster child is to lose the money you were receiving beforehand. Maybe that won't happen in the first year, because many of the executive directors do a good job in that respect, but certainly in the second and third year it will happen.
That's simply outrageous. If you're adopting your 14-year-old child who's been with you for four or five years, the idea that the province would take that money away after the adoption is nonsense.
:
I have two or three comments.
First, the source is “Youth Leaving Care: How Do They Fare?”, September 2005. It's available at www.childhelp.org. You can go through some of my figures. I'll provide that to the committee clerk.
Second, as the Johnston panel did its work, we dug into this issue, Mr. Martin. And we came to the conclusion, particularly in Ontario, that the population we were talking about was so high-risk, was so important to general poverty issues, and was accounting for such a large piece of incarceration and homelessness that if we could tackle it one child at a time, we could make a huge difference.
When we looked to the field, we saw some programs that were really eye-opening. The one I'll highlight for you is Wendy's Wonderful Kids out of the Dave Thomas Foundation. We support that through the Children's Aid Foundation. If you look at their numbers, they do adoptions at between $20,000 and $25,000 a kid. What they do is hire workers and do adoptions. So some of us in the philanthropic community have come to the conclusion that it's a no-brainer to raise money for that. Forget about government doing it. We're now supporting seven workers and just doing it, because you can take kids that are costing $40,000 a year in the system and find them permanent homes at $25,000 a year.
The economics of this are staggering. The money is in the wrong place. We're paying $100,000 a year for some of these kids, keeping them in the proverbial hotel rooms. And we could put the money in a different place.