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Some grim figures were reported this week by Global News that, by rights, Canadian governments should be publishing as a matter of routine: On average, a child who is or has recently been under state care dies in Ontario roughly every three days. Using freedom-of-information requests, reporters found that 354 children with open or recently open child-services files had perished between 2020 and 2022. By my reckoning, that works out to roughly 13 per cent of all child deaths in the province over that time.
Crucially, 34 of those children died while living with their families, albeit (supposedly) under supervision from child services. One of those children was called Neveah. She didn’t live to see her fifth birthday. A contractor found her body in a dumpster in May 2022, and it took more than a year even to figure out who she was — though both York Region and Toronto child services agencies were well aware of her and her mother.
“How can a child long in the care of Ontario child-protection agencies end up dead in a dumpster and no one came looking for her?” Toronto Star crime reporter Wendy Gillis recently asked. The question could not be more apt. The aftermath of these events, however, is always fraught with peril. Every time a children’s aid society drops the ball, there’s a push for children’s aid societies to intervene more forcefully … despite the fact they keep dropping the ball.
Neveah even seemed to have some things going for her: From all accounts she had doting and concerned foster parents, who took in one of Neveah’s siblings as well, and who helped her mother out after she regained custody — in March 2020, just as the pandemic was shutting down the world. Four months later, citing a breach of agreed-upon rules, York child services went to court to review the situation. But Neveah’s mother had moved to Toronto, and York child services no longer had jurisdiction. Toronto child services clearly weren’t nearly so concerned.
All are shocked and appalled, naturally. Children under state supervision “should be within a safety net if you will, under care and protection, yet we’re seeing clearly these are the children who are the highest risk,” Sara Austin, CEO of Children First Canada, told Global. “One child is too many; 354 in three years is completely unacceptable.”
“I think this number is absolutely terrifying and it just really confirms the lack of belief that I have in the government to be able to take care of our most vulnerable kids,” said Monique Taylor, the NDP’s critic for children and social services.
They’re both right. Sort of.
There is no excusing a case like Neveah’s. Even if her child-services file was officially closed, and even considering the pandemic severely limited normal social interactions, it seems inexplicable that it would take a year and a DNA test to connect the dots. Media paid much attention to the fact Neveah was found in one of Toronto’s poshest residential neighbourhoods, but there are much less posh neighbourhoods very nearby, and reports suggest Neveah’s mother was living in one of them. She had enrolled Neveah and one of her siblings in daycare, but they never showed up — a red flag in itself, one would have thought, in a city where affordable daycare spots are rare as unicorns.
It should shock the conscience that 13 per cent of children who die in Ontario do so under some form of state care — especially if it involves, as seems to have been the case in many of these deaths, taking those children away from their parents (although an unknown number may have been kids who recently aged out of the system). The state shouldn’t be seizing kids except in the direst of circumstances, and it then — quite rightly — gives parents many chances to get their acts together and their children back.
The least it can offer parents it deems unfit, surely, is some reasonable guarantee their kids won’t die. Nor is there any excuse, obviously, for Neveah’s body to have wound up in a dumpster, whatever happened to her. (Her mother claims she simply gave her away at a Tim Hortons to two kindly strangers of means, which is so wretched an alibi that one almost wonders if could be true.)
But at the same time, the children that state agencies decide need protection are (or should be) by definition the most at-risk of terrible outcomes to begin with. A 2022 meta-analysis study, published in the journal Biochemistry Research International, looked at the major factors associated with childhood deaths under five years of age (a milestone Neveah never reached). From largest to smaller, they included the size of the child at birth, the age of the mother, the mother’s education, household income … you get the picture. Even the best children’s aid society, even the best foster parents, can’t always make up for some factors.
Conversely, it seems 87 per cent of children who died in Ontario between 2020 and 2022 were not in or recently under kind of state care or supervision. It would be absurd to suggest they all could or should have been.
“You have the right to be raised by your parent(s) if possible,” UNICEF tells kids in its child-friendly summary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. By extension, parents have the right to raise their children if possible. Canada famously conducted a grotesque experiment in the opposite, not so long ago, with deleterious effects that have flowed down several generations of Indigenous families.
The best “safety net,” as Austin put it, is almost always a parent. If children’s aid societies want to expand, or even maintain, their powers to interfere in Canadian families, the least they owe us is detailed and regular disclosure of the outcomes — not via freedom-of-information requests but on a website everyone can see.
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