This bill has a lot of positive things in it. The creation of a new system contained in this bill so that privacy of these children will help these children when they go into adulthood. It will literally level the playing field for the information-sharing.

Because there’s so much information that’s out there and we want to provide the best opportunities for these children when they start their care, when they complete their care and after their care—I’m wondering if the opposition member could talk about his interest or his comments on the privacy of youth leaving the CYFSA and some of the administrative changes that we’ve made to protect those children.

One thing that hasn’t been discussed so far today, and I actually didn’t hear it even yesterday when I was in the House: Do we realize that 25% of children now use food banks in the province of Ontario? I wanted to make sure we get that out because it’s unacceptable.

Do you believe we need to take proactive steps in the form of increased mental health resources for children and youth?

And, further to that, should inspectors do site visits at night when the kids that are in care are at home?

Thank you to the member for that question. We understand that every family is different and every family needs support in its special way, which is why we have this care for the children and youth and their families, even if they have an addiction problem.

We can see some youth face more challenges than others. We get it. We want to ensure that when they get the support they need, they thrive and build to their bright future. When they are in a family that has challenges of drug abuse, we know that these youth or children are facing a complex condition and we are tracking them, supporting them and tackling them at different angles.

We invested $3.8 billion in the Roadmap to Wellness to increase the focus on children’s mental health, as well as supporting families. And in increasing our—

I would like to ask a question of the member about some of the challenges that children’s aid societies in this province are facing, and I’m speaking specifically about the Children’s Aid Society of London and Middlesex. Fully half of the families that they support are not actually families who are in need of care. They are families who are struggling with the lack of mental health and addiction services in the community. One third of the families have caregivers with a problem. They are dealing with mental illness or drug or substance issues. More have family caregiver-child conflicts.

What is the government doing to ensure that there are services in the community so that these families don’t end up in the care of the CAS?

We would like to see more action from this government to respond to some of the other priorities that we have identified. Returning the child and youth advocate: That office played a vital role for children in this province, but this government decided to eliminate that position, which has resulted in many children not feeling like they have anywhere to turn if they are experiencing abuse in a placement.

We’ve also been calling for a total end to all for-profit group homes that take advantage of children. I know that some of those horrendous media reports about the abuse of children in residential group homes and foster care was a big impetus to bringing this bill forward, but that abuse happened in for-profit group homes that were using those vulnerable children as—and they called them this themselves—cash cows or paycheques, which is unconscionable. It is unconscionable that we have a system that enables children to be used in such a way.

But this bill does have some positive measures to strengthen protections for kids, and I congratulate the government on bringing this legislation forward.

I do, however, want to focus on some of the stresses that children’s aid societies in this province are facing in their efforts to provide child protection. I want to speak specifically about the London and Middlesex children’s aid society. In the catchment area for the London-Middlesex CAS, there are close to 6,000 referrals received annually. More than 2,000 assessments are completed. The last year that there was data, there were 590 children in care, so that’s 17% of the caseload. There were 151 new admissions to care. But the majority of the families that the CAS supports do not have children in care. They are not children who are in need of formal child protection. They are children and families who are struggling with the lack of services in the community.

The executive director of the London-Middlesex CAS made a presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs when it was touring the province in advance of the 2024 provincial budget. They held a meeting in London in January, and Chris Tremeer from the London-Middlesex CAS spoke to the committee and talked about the budgetary pressures that this creates on the CAS when they are supporting families who actually should be supported in other areas of the system, who turn to the CAS because they don’t have any other options, because the services that would be more appropriate for them to access simply don’t exist.

About one third of the families the CAS works with are related to caregivers who are struggling with mental health or addiction issues. Another 17% of the families that the CAS works with are those who are experiencing difficulty managing the behaviour of a child, or, in some cases, a child who is over 12 whose behaviour is such that there is a risk of physical harm to the rest of the family. These are families, these are kids who should be able to access the services that they need in the community.

You can imagine, from the perspective of a child protection worker, how frustrating it must be to see these families in such distress that they come to the CAS to hopefully be able to try to access services, but the CAS doesn’t deliver those kinds of services. The CAS is not a front-line mental health service agency; the CAS is a child protection agency.

One of the questions I asked Chris Tremeer when he appeared before the budget committee is, what would be the financial implications for the CAS, what would it mean in terms of resources for the CAS to do that vital child protection work that it is mandated to do, if appropriate services were available elsewhere in system? He told me that, in London, the amount that is represented by the non-child protection services that the CAS is providing is about $3.5 million. He said they were projecting up to $5 million by the end of the year in terms of the child welfare budget that is used to house and provide interim treatment support to youth who need a different style of placement. He said across the province, it amounts to more than $50 million worth of pressure on the children’s aid budget envelope because of the absence of community services, leaving the CAS struggling to support these vulnerable families.

And one of the heartbreaking things that we hear as MPPs, and I’m sure that every member in this House has had constituent families who are desperate and they share their stories of the challenges that they’ve had, trying to get appropriate treatment for their children and they are advised—we hear this often—to relinquish their child to the CAS in the hope that this might fast-track access to treatment for their child, but in fact, it doesn’t. The CAS does not have a back door to children’s mental health services to enable that child to get the appropriate support they need.

What happens when children are relinquished to the CAS is that the other children in the home are kept safe—or the caregivers. If the behaviours of the child are so violent, then the parents, the caregivers, are also kept safe.

But what are we talking about here? If we were able to provide the supports that that child needed, that that family needed, we could support the child at home. We could prevent that child from being relinquished to the CAS. And, Speaker, I would strongly urge this government to look at the dire gap in acute children’s mental health services that we are seeing in our communities.

I did want to highlight the experiences of three London families who approached my office to talk about what it means when there are no intensive mental health services for children and youth in crisis. Over a short period of time, Speaker, I had three separate families approaching my office whose stories were quite similar, related to the lack of acute mental health support services for their children.

One family had been searching for intensive mental health treatment for their daughter since that child was at least 12 years of age. They contacted me when their daughter was about to turn 18 because they were frantic with worry that their daughter would never be able to access the children and youth mental health treatment that she needed and would become ineligible for the services that she was on a wait-list for. That child ended up at London Health Sciences Centre for months in a hospital room, which was not an appropriate placement for her, when she should have been able to access a community-based treatment.

Another family was told that their child would have to go on an indefinite wait-list and was told by ministry services, “There is no provision in the existing model that facilitates a crisis response if/when one is indicated. We are reliant on community-based ministry-funded services to address the needs of community youth to the extent that they are able.” So, if there are no ministry-funded services to address the community needs of youth, then those youth are out of luck and they’re told, “Well, one option is to relinquish your child to the CAS,” but the CAS doesn’t have the—as I said, they’re not a front-line mental health—

First off, we’ve worked very hard to ensure all children are in school for the next three years with stability. Children with special education needs are the ones with the greatest exceptionality, are the ones who need stability in schools, and our party alone stood up and delivered deals with every teacher union, providing some stability in their lives.

We also increased the funding for special education. We’re talking about an increase of nearly $540 million since 2018, $125 million more this year compared to last year—3,500 additional EAs in school boards, as reported by our school board associations.

Mr. Speaker, we know there’s more to do. It’s why in this year’s budget we announced additional funding for additional staffing in addition to supports for co-op education to help ensure these young individuals are able to put their talents to work in the labour market and seek employment and build skills.

We’ll continue to be there every single year to increase funding, staffing and supports for our kids with the most exceptional needs in Ontario.

When I had to end my debate this morning, I was sharing some of the pressures that are facing the Children’s Aid Society of London and Middlesex, and I had talked about the fact that fully half of the families that the children’s aid society is working with are those who are struggling with lack of access to mental health and addiction services in the community.

One third of the families are struggling with mental health or addiction challenges for caregivers and an additional 17% of families are struggling with a child’s behaviour or conflict in the home that could be endangering other children. These families are struggling because they can’t access the community-based services that these caregivers or their children need, and the consequence, particularly for those young people with the most critical needs, is that sometimes those families feel that they don’t have anywhere to turn; they don’t know what to do next. What we are seeing in London, and we are seeing across the province, are young people, children, being surrendered to children’s aid in the desperate hope that this might be a way to get their children the treatment they require.

The children’s aid society—their data system to keep track of the children in the system, they’ve actually created a new category called “youth in need of treatment” or “not otherwise in need of protection,” because the children who are being surrendered are not being surrendered because of child protection reasons. They’re being surrendered because they need mental health treatment and they don’t have access to that.

The reason for this is that community-based agencies in the province that support children and youth mental health services are not mandatory services. They are funded to a certain level, and that is the amount of support that they provide. When they run out of resources, young people are put on a waiting list, and that’s what we hear more and more from families in the province.

But the mandate of the CAS is that children who are surrendered to that agency are taken into protection. The CAS does not have the ability to turn these families away. In London, we heard that nine youth have been voluntarily surrendered to CAS, and that is a more significant increase than we had seen in the community previously. It’s frustrating for the staff at CAS, who know that these young people who are being surrendered aren’t going to get the treatment that they need after being surrendered to the children’s aid society. The problem is the lack of services in the community.

When the government launched this bill, that was one of the responses of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies. They said that the bill addresses the back end of child welfare. We have to address the back end of child welfare. We have to ensure that when kids are housed in group homes or foster families, they are safe, but we also need to act proactively to keep kids out of care in the first place.

The Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies said that the issue is that the government is not dealing with causation. They’re not dealing with those factors that lead to children going into care in the first place. And so, I would encourage this government to look at the community-based treatment options that are available to young people in this province and provide the funding that those services need so that young people can get the support, the treatment that they require in order to move forward.

Another issue that I would encourage the government to address and that has been brought to my attention in London is the issue of kin families. In the London CAS, there are 135 foster homes, but there are 72 kin homes. Kin placements are really—where they are available, that is a preferred option for CASs when they have to take kids into protection. It is much better for the child to be with kin family, rather than to be in a foster family or a group home. And yet, we do not provide the same support for kin arrangements as we do for foster families.

This again makes it frustrating for those child protection workers at the CAS when they have a kin family, a willing family who wants to take that child in, but can’t afford to do so because the amounts that kin families are reimbursed are so far less than the amounts that foster families or adoptive families receive. Kin families receive $280 a month for a child, whereas families that adopt or take legal custody receive over $1,000 per month per child until the child turns 21. I have heard from kin families or potential kin families who would like to support that child, who would like to take that child in, and simply can’t afford to do so. That should never be the case, because that is in the best interests of the child.

So, Speaker, this bill that we have before us today, Bill 188, as I said at the outset, it’s actually a pleasure to be able to participate in a debate on legislation that all sides of the House seem to agree on. But it’s also an opportunity to highlight some of the other issues that need to be addressed to fully support young people in this province to enable them to reach their full potential and to prevent young people having to go into care in the first place.

Thank you to the member from London West for such an impassioned speech on the Supporting Children’s Futures Act. One thing that really struck me is her talking so passionately about parents having to surrender their children to access services and really giving their children up to the children’s aid because they have no other options. The fact that in Ontario, children’s aid societies now have a youth in need of treatment but not in need of care really tells the story of how broken this system is. I wanted to give you an opportunity, please, to talk about why this is happening and really how desperate and dismal a state of affairs it is that parents have to give their children up for them to access mental health supports.

Thank you to the member for the question. I want to assure the member that the NDP would never prop up the Liberals, just as we would never prop up any government that was going to undermine the rights of vulnerable children. The NDP has been calling for the reinstatement of the child and youth advocate. That is something that is missing from this bill that there was an opportunity for the government to move ahead with. The NDP has been calling for years for an end of for-profit group homes that exploit loopholes, that take advantage of children, that are abusive to children. We saw that horrendous exposé of what is happening to some of the most marginalized and vulnerable children in a for-profit group system.

We agree that is a very good development. It’s too bad that it has taken this long for such a development to be put in place, because we have been calling for whistle-blower protections in this sector for a number of years. Certainly we have an obligation to ensure that people—teachers, educators—who are employed in the care of children can report suspicions of abuse without fearing that they will not be protected. This is one of the reasons that we do support this bill. We do recognize that this is important, but it’s sad that it is so long overdue.

We do not have a children’s mental health system that is coordinated, that is easy for families to navigate, that ensures that young people who are in deep crisis get the mental health treatment that they require. We really need to take a systemic look at the mental health system and make sure that the services are there for parents and children who need them.

We had heard the former provincial child advocate—he had said that he received roughly 19,000 serious occurrence reports, a quarter produced by group residential homes. The government has failed to enable that kind—

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.

Back in 2012, when we had a Provincial Advocate for Child and Youth here in the province, that office recognized the disproportionate needs for children in care who identify as Black and Indigenous.

I wanted to quote from this book called HairStory: Rooted—A Firm Foundation for the Future of Black Youth in Ontario’s Systems of Care.

“Benefits of Kinship Care

“Children in kinship care can maintain their racial, cultural and religious ties. They are living with families where they are, for example, speaking the same language, getting the same kind of food they are used to, and the family traditions are very similar, if not the same. It strengthens their identities and allows them to remain connected to their community.”

My question to the government is, if you purport to care about all children and youth in Ontario, why not ensure we have kinship care in this bill that’s supposed to support children and youth, knowing how important it is to Black and Indigenous—

Freedom of expression is a core Canadian value. Beyond that, it is a fundamental freedom in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Currently, individuals with a history of child protection in Ontario are prevented by the Child, Youth and Family Services Act from telling their own stories of their childhood in care. That was doubtless an oversight, but it is significant. Does the member opposite believe that children who leave care are less deserving of freedom of expression themselves than others?

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?

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?

Professionals in Ontario such as teachers, physicians, and social workers have an ongoing duty to directly report a child suspected to be in need of protection. These would include children that have been harmed or neglected by parents or caregivers or suspected to be at risk to be exploited and subjected to trafficking.

Bill 188 proposes expanding this responsibility and obligation to apply to enter early childhood education—addition to a number of professionals who share in the responsibility of looking out for children who are at risk of being harmed.

Does the member opposite support adding additional eyes to look out for the best interests of young people?

Thank you, and through you, Speaker, I was just going to add that the measures contained in the Supporting Children’s Futures Act would, if passed, create a safer environment for every child out of home care. We won’t get into the specifics of profit or not-for-profit. It helps every child.

I was going to talk about the Ontario Ombudsman. It’s an important safeguard that provides rights to children of youth in care. Young people in care already have the right to contact the office of the Ombudsman; however, that’s contained in the Ombudsman Act rather than the Child, Youth and Family Services Act. And since children’s aid societies and service providers are governed by and most familiar with the CYFSA, the status quo leaves a potential gap where a youth may not even be aware of their rights.

This bill proposes to entrench details about this right and remove any lack of clarity for the rights with respect to the Ombudsman. Does the member opposite not support giving young people a stronger understanding of this right to the Ombudsman?

If this government wants to support children, they need to end Ontario’s for-profit child residential care. We cannot forget the case in 2021, while this Conservative government was in power, when a teenager living in a for-profit home was murdered by another teenager. And guess what? This Conservative government still gave that for-profit care home its licence.

So at this point in time, in 2024, we really want to be able to believe that you care about children and youth. but it’s hard to when we see our schoolboards consistently gutted. And which kids are getting hurt the worst? Kids with disabilities. It’s the kids who are at the margins of the margins. It’s the BIPOC kids. It’s the kids living in poverty.

So is this government going to actually end for-profit residential child care?

I hear the member’s passion in this, and absolutely, we must end for-profit child care. There’s a litany of abuse that’s been happening. There’s the reports that come out about what’s been happening, that these for-profit child care providers are generating profits, that they’re actually making money on this, on the backs of these children, and they call the children “cash cows.” They’re accumulating real estate assets from the taxpayer dollars that are supposed to be going to children’s care.

We need to get the profit out of child care, foster care. We need to make sure that all organizations that are looking after children, that their first and only responsibility is the care for those children, not for generating profits for their owners.

We’re seeing it also with Chartwell, the seniors’ home in Mississauga that’s being shut down. We’ve got 200 seniors being evicted because this company, a real estate investment trust, wants to renovict those seniors so they can make more profit. It’s appalling. The government should not be supporting, either for children’s care or seniors’ care, for-profit corporations.

It’s a pleasure and honour to be able to speak to this bill today, Bill 188. Certainly, I don’t profess to be an expert in children, but I’ve had some experience. Some people say I’m still living that experience, working my way up to adulthood, but that’s a debate for another day.

I want to, first of all, commend the minister for bringing forward this initiative because obviously I’ve known this minister for some time now and I’ve got to see how he works, and I really appreciate, in his work in this ministry, how he continuously and incrementally has always put the welfare of children and youth at the top of the priority list.

We do appreciate that, Minister, and this bill is no exception to your commitment, and that is appreciated not just by myself and all of the members in this caucus, but, I do believe, the members on the other side. I think that I heard, if I’m not mistaken, notwithstanding the comments from the member from—is it Spadina–Fort York?

I say this as a person who came from a family—or comes from a family; it’s not like the family has kicked me out or anything. I come from a family of 14 children. Well, you can imagine all of the dynamics that exist in a family of 14 children. You know they say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, we were a village unto ourselves, with all of the challenges and the pleasures and everything else, and the wonders that come with that, growing up in a large family like that.

One thing that you do learn is that even when you don’t want to, you’d better get along. You’d better try to get along, because there are enough battles in a large family. It’s just like a big caucus. You’re supportive of one another, but there is a competition as well. That’s the way teamwork plays out. It will happen tonight on the ice in Toronto, as well, as the Leafs take on the Boston Bruins in game 3. I’m looking for another big performance by world-class superstar Auston Matthews.

One thing that my wife and I have always agreed on—we don’t agree on everything, and she always wins the things that we don’t agree on, but that’s another story too. But one thing we do agree on is the importance and the absolute priority of our children. We’ve talked about it. You do a lot of things in this world, and at some point you leave this world. We’ve often talked about it, that the only really amazing, wonderful, important thing that we have done is brought our children into this world and we have raised them, because when we leave this world, that is literally the only thing that Vicky and I will leave behind.

It doesn’t matter what I did here. It doesn’t matter what she did; it doesn’t matter what I did. It doesn’t matter if I even won the 1977 home run championship in the North Renfrew baseball league—

Those things don’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that I released a couple of CDs to support hospitals and long-term-care homes in my riding. What matters is our children, and without our children, there wouldn’t be our grandchildren, and so on and so forth—we have no great-grandchildren yet; as you can tell, I’m not that old.

But I really like what I’m seeing in this bill from the point of view of prioritizing the protection of children and youth. One of the items in the bill, one of the clauses or whatever in the bill, is requiring early childhood educators to have the same reporting requirements as teachers would have, for example, in reporting suspicion of abuse. Because if we’re not going to protect the children, then we don’t have much of a future, do we?

Now, I can tell you that I’m old enough—and, Speaker, you’re not that much younger than me—that we know of instances growing up where people have failed to report issues of abuse because they’re afraid of the repercussions upon themselves, particularly in small communities where everybody knows each other. This requirement that will become legislated under Bill 188 takes away that fear because it’s now an absolute requirement. It isn’t because you wanted to do this, to report so-and-so or whatever that you suspect there may be abuse; it is because it is now the law. You are required to report the fact that you suspect that there’s abuse going on in this group home or some other facility. That is a huge step forward in protecting the children and the youth in our society, those that are under care.

I know we don’t have a lot of time when we’re speaking on these issues, but there’s another aspect that I wanted to touch on as well, Speaker, and I hope I get this right. Let’s just say that you and I were in a group home at one time, that we were in care. Today, you and I are not allowed to talk about that. We are not free to talk about our experiences while under care.

I can talk all I want about my childhood experiences, about all the good, the bad and the ugly—oh, there was a movie under that name; I think I was the “ugly” part. Absolutely, Speaker, we can talk about those. We have that freedom to speak on any of those subjects we want and divulge what we choose to and withhold what we choose to. But if we were in a home, in a care setting, under the current laws we’re not allowed to talk about that. I mean, it’s like wiping out—how many times have people who know me in here heard me talk about experiences I had growing up?