January 17th, 2012
A Commons committee’s
work on adoption has been taken up anew by a reconstituted
committee. Just weeks away from tabling its report,
the committee is considering recommendations to:
• Provide tax support
for post-adoption training and counselling for
adoptive parents and children — some of
whom grapple with difficult effects of parental
neglect or substance abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome,
or abandonment.
• Provide a 15-week
federal leave benefit to adoptive parents struggling
to form healthy emotional attachments to their
newly adopted children. All new parents, adoptive
and biological, are eligible for 35 weeks of parental
leave. Many witnesses argued the emotional transitions
for adoptive families deserve the same support
as the physical post-partum transition for birth
mothers, which is recognized by a 15-week maternity
leave — a benefit adoptive parents are ineligible
for. Only Quebec extends additional leave to adoptive
parents.
• Ease immigration
hurdles to allow Canada’s adopted children
to pass on Canadian citizenship to their future
children who are born abroad. The law now disallows
that. It means the grandchildren of adoptive parents
today could find themselves stateless.
• Help establish
a memorandum of understanding between provinces
to ease inter-provincial adoption. The committee
heard it is easier to adopt internationally than
it is to adopt inter-provincially in Canada.
• Collect national
data on adopted children and children in foster
care, guardianship, or kinship care. There is
no national data collection in Canada unlike the
U.S., which gathers valuable statistics to inform
policy-making. The Adoption Council of Canada,
an advocacy group, estimates there are between
70,000 and 100,000 children in care. It says statistics
suggest between 30,000 and 40,000 are legally
available for adoption. Statistics from the Ontario
Association of Children’s Aid Societies
suggest about 9,400 children and youths up to
age 18 are legally available for adoption in this
province. They languish longer in care than in
the U.S. and nobody knows why.
• Fund a national
awareness campaign to promote adoption as a way
to build families, to highlight the benefits for
children, and the number of children in need of
permanent families.
• Fund a Canada’s
Waiting Children program that would be the sole
national photo-listing service that connects waiting
kids to waiting parents.
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