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—

This morning I shared the stories of Gloria and Susan, just two of the more than 65,000 Londoners who do not have access to primary care. In her response, the minister talked about the expanded family health team in Elgin, which will help about 1,200 of those 65,000 patients. This is completely inadequate to deal with the scale of the problem and frankly insulting to people in my community, who deserve to see a family doctor in London.

My office gets calls daily from people desperate to find a family doctor or nurse practitioner. Often, they haven’t seen a primary care provider in years. The only solution this government offers is to register with Health Care Connect and then wait indefinitely without ever hearing back about a doctor accepting new patients.

With burnout the number one issue facing family doctors in Ontario, more and more doctors are retiring without a replacement, leaving more and more people without care. When people don’t get the care they need, they are forced to rely on walk-in clinics that book up as soon as they open. They wait hours at St. Joe’s urgent care or have to go to one of our overwhelmed emergency rooms.

Speaker, this government’s tiny expansion of team-based care was described by one family doctor as about as helpful as an umbrella in a hurricane.

This is an all-hands-on-deck situation, which is why the NDP has put forward this motion. We are calling on the government to invest in the number of family health teams we actually need in Ontario. We are urging an investment in administrative staff to help reduce the paperwork burden that consumes about 40% of a family doctor’s time—time that could be spent seeing patients instead. Support this motion.

I seek unanimous consent of the House to wear an Our London Family ribbon until the end of question period.