I’m here today to share a little bit about my perspective as a social worker. I worked in social work for 11 years, and I have seen that the kids are not okay.

I do appreciate the policies being brought forward today and the efforts they make to stop harm to children and youth in care. We know that these children are the most vulnerable in our society. We’ve seen over the years, especially since COVID, the increased need and complexity of kids acting out. We hear this from our school staff, who face this every day. We also hear about the demand for care, that children’s aid societies are struggling to find enough foster parents to provide adequate care and have enough housing for kids. We have kids living in hotels, kids living in the children’s aid society buildings themselves. We know that this is not okay.

I do want to thank the government also, though, for funding more beds for kids who are facing complex mental health needs. We’ve seen beds in London; we’ve had a few beds added in my community in Kitchener. But I want to draw on some concerns not only about the problem, the root causes of this, but also what we could be doing to prevent kids from ending up in care in the first place.

We are the richest province in Canada, but we contribute least to children’s and youth’s mental health and, of course, children’s aid societies. I was saddened in 2018 to hear that the Child and Youth Advocate, the lawyer for kids in care—their office was closed, their shutters shut. I think we could have done well to avoid some of these bad-case scenarios if we had kept that advocate in their place for the last six years when this government has been in office.

I do appreciate this policy, because as a social worker I know that when I hear a kid is in a certain home or a certain provider in my community, we need to be vigilant. We call children’s aid on the care provider. I’ve had family members work in this care setting and leave traumatized, never to work in social work again, because they’re understaffed and under-supported as social workers. So not only do we need to fund foster parents, but we also need to fund these homes adequately to ensure that social workers working in that setting are supported.

Just this past Friday, I talked to a family whose child has autism. They’re on the wait-list. They’ve been waiting for two years. They shared with me that they’re hanging on by a thread. Because their child doesn’t get the adequate support in the community, they are faced with the reality that they may not be able to support their 12-year-old in their home going forward. We need to do better to fund kids with complex needs.

Not only that, but I have a grave concern for the services we offer kids with complex needs. We’ve seen child and adolescent services in Hamilton and offices in Burlington and other communities facing closures because they offer long-term outpatient care for those with trauma, attachment and complex needs.

So, if I may ask one thing, I hope that this government will properly fund the specialists who are the experts in addressing complex mental health.

It is a for-profit home that I have the greatest concern about. I would like to see the data on the differential. I think that was helpful when it came to long-term care. We saw that the outcomes were better in not-for-profit homes. I know that that was the reality in my community: that they offered better outcomes for all the residents living there in terms of COVID and health outcomes.

I do think that not-for-profits are the way to go for all the complex mental health care that existed in our communities. As it shifts to brief eight-session services and we get away from things like long-term outpatient supports, those expert clinicians, people who write the books on sexual abuse survival, sexualized behaviours, attachment, trauma—all those expert professionals are leaving the not-for-profit sector. They’re being pushed and shoved into the for-profit sector, which we know is out of reach for so many families who cannot afford $180 an hour.

But, yes, I’ve heard time and time and time again social workers quitting for this for-profit setting in my community because they felt unsafe, unsupported and they could no longer do their job, even to keep themselves safe, let alone the kids in their care.

Report continues in volume B.