To the member: Bill 188 contains a number of great initiatives to ensure the quality of care and the quality of services provided for children and youth in care. The creation of new offences and the introduction of administrative monetary penalties are all important tools to increase and enhance oversight of out-of-home care. Similarly, updating who has a duty to report to include early childhood educators and increasing information-sharing with professional colleges will keep children safer. The privacy provision contained in the bill could help level the playing field for youth formerly in care.

So my question to the member: What are the steps this government has to support children, youth and families?

Thank you, Minister, for your response and especially for the respect and the care you give to our seniors. It is encouraging to hear that our government is taking action to ensure that seniors are able to receive the care they need and enjoy the high quality of life that they deserve within the very community they helped plan and develop.

For 15 years, the previous Liberal government neglected the long-term-care sector. Now, under the leadership of carbon tax queen Bonnie Crombie, they are turning a blind eye on how the carbon tax is negatively impacting our seniors. Speaker, they did nothing to stop the 23% hike earlier this month.

Unlike the NDP and Liberals in this Legislature, our government will continue to fight the carbon tax and protect Ontario seniors. Speaker, can the minister tell the House what our government is doing to support our long-term-care sector?

I am pleased to be able to ask a question of my colleague from London West, who talked about the importance of keeping children safe who are in care, but also the need to keep them out of care in the first place, as she had mentioned that the government is not dealing with causation in a way that they ought to be with so much at stake and mentioned some of the community-based treatment options generally.

I’m wondering if, specifically, the member could give us some examples of ways to support children so that they’re able to stay out of care and be served better in the community.

Through you, Speaker: This bill contains a lot of positive things for youth, and members opposite are talking quite a bit about things that are not in this bill, but the fact of the matter is that they seem to be missing the point. This bill is just one means of our government to provide a better standard of care. We can always do better, and we’re progressively moving forward so that we can provide better services for our most vulnerable.

I used to work in this area. I worked under the Child Protection Act for countless years. The fact of the matter is, consultation happened in this. I’m just wondering if the member could possibly provide information on how they came to some of the decisions that were made?

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.

Thank you to the member opposite for his thoughts on this bill. I think one thing we could all agree on in this House is that it’s not great when children end up in care. That’s not the ideal scenario. One thing that stakeholders have said is that while these are good measures in the bill, there is absolutely nothing here to actually prevent children from being taken into care in the first place.

We’re seeing a really disturbing increase in the number of families who are having to relinquish their children solely because they can’t get the supports they need—the mental health supports, the supports with developmental disabilities and other health care problems—and the parents are in a place of desperation where they are having to relinquish care in hopes that they can get this care, or because they really can’t take care of them at home anymore without this care.

It costs 10 times more to take a child into care than it would to just provide the care when they’re with their family, and it has significant detrimental impacts on the outcomes for the child. Does the member not agree that it would be an important addition to this bill to actually provide the supports and resources to prevent children from needing to be in care in the first place?