Aging out of care focus of Senate Human Rights Committee report

People First Radio

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Melanie Doucet, Executive Director of the National Council of Youth in Care Advocates, says there can be a hard cut off for people raised in the foster system when they reach adulthood.

“ Parents don’t just go, ‘hey, you’re 18 or 19 now, so I’ve done my job and here’s a garbage bag of your belongings out the door you go, and don’t call, don’t email, don’t text, you’re completely on your own now, good luck and goodbye,'” she said.

“That’s kind of the picture of what youth in care have to go through when they age out of the system. So it’s not really something that should be normalized, but it’s unfortunately something that happens because it’s been legislated like that.”

Doucet was one of a number of witnesses who spoke before the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Human Rights about the issue of youth aging out of care. The committee has released a report calling for a number of changes to improve outcomes for youth nationwide.

Each province and territory has its own system in place, and the age until which former youth in care can access varies widely across the country. In B.C. recent changes have made some supports available for people up to age 27, while a press release accompanying the report suggests a Manitoban is likely to be cut off from the majority of supports at age 18.

“ Some places actually don’t even have any official post majority support programs in place. So that means hard cutoff at age of majority,” Doucet said.

However, Doucet said the pandemic prompted improvements to post majority supports in a number of provinces, including B.C, Nova Scotia, and Ontario.

Jessica Knutson, a social worker in B.C. and former youth in care, says she’d advocate for readiness based indicators instead of age cut offs for when former youth in care stop receiving support. However she said the changes in B.C. represent a step forward.

“Being able to go up until your 27th birthday is longer than any other province or territory has for post majority services, so really, you know, even though there is always room for improvement and growth in ways that can, that youth can be better supported, really wanting to highlight the immense effort, particularly from the youth in care community around this advocacy that’s gotten us to this point where we do have these more extended services.”

Knutson says she’s interested in seeing how many former youth in care access the programs over the coming years, and she highlighted the over-representation of indigenous people within the child welfare system in the province.

Jacquie Gahagan, Associate Vice-President, Research at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, also spoke before the senate committee. In 2022, Gahagan wrote an article in The Conversation Canada about tuition waivers for former youth in care.

“For the first time in my career I received hate mail from people saying, ‘why should we care about these kids? They’re not my problem. I can barely afford my own kids’ expenses,'” Gahagan said.

“What was telling from that is the cost of investing now in kids coming out of care in terms of their access to post-secondary education is a far better investment ethically, financially, however you wanna look at it, than waiting for those kids to fall through the cracks even further and end up in the criminal justice system, which as we know, is not a very cost effective way of dealing with social issues that could be dealt with by investing in primary prevention.”

Gahagan says that comprehensive data isn’t being collected nationwide on youth in care, which makes understanding the scope of the problem difficult.

“Do we see higher rates of depression? Higher rates of poor mental health outcomes across the board? Do we see better sort of resiliency among kids in care? What are we seeing in terms of their mental health outcomes? And we don’t have a good sense of that.”

“It is ultimately a bit of a patchwork from coast to coast to coast in Canada. So there’s lots of things that we don’t know and we are extrapolating from limited study related data or provincial data where it’s available or we’re looking at what are other similar sort of OECD countries doing around these kinds of indicators of health, social, economic, and other outcomes for kids with care experience.”

One thing Gahagan says existing data does reveal is that educational outcomes tend to be poor for youth in care.

“What we see in larger provinces where the data have been collected more frequently is a less than 50%. chance of completing high school.”

Among the senate report’s recommendations was that the federal government establish an independent, national children and youth commissioner with a mandate to monitor and report to Parliament on children’s rights and those of people in emerging adulthood in the country.

The senate also called for a national database, a framework to implement international commitments around child welfare, and a number of other measures to address issues faced by youth aging out of care

Doucet says when it comes down to the basics, youth in care want to be treated with as much value and importance and compassion and love as any other kid.

“Whenever we speak to politicians or even like frontline workers, it’s like, just treat them like a human being and treat them like you would treat your own children. Like would you want your child to be in the street with no supports? No. Then why is that acceptable for youth in care? It shouldn’t be and it isn’t.”

Listen to the full episode above, and explore the resources below to learn more on the issue.