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—

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.

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.

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—