Good afternoon, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to raise an issue where grandparents have been denied caregiver status when their grandchildren have been apprehended by Social Services.
When this happens in our small communities, our children are sent to another community like Fort Simpson and fostered to homes there. They are usually never fostered in the home community with which they are familiar, where they have close extended family and childhood friends.
Throughout Canada it is increasingly common that grandparents are raising their grandchildren. Here in the Northwest Territories when our Aboriginal children are apprehended, grandparents and extended family are never seen as a first choice in placement of the children. Our jurisdiction has the highest rate of child apprehensions in the country, and approximately 90 percent of the children who are in the child and family services system are Aboriginal.
For years the Social Programs committee of the Legislative Assembly has been calling for a less adversarial approach. The committee has called on the government to put into practice what the act already stipulates, the use of the least intrusive measures whenever possible. The committee has likewise been calling on the department to use a more collaborative approach in specific cases, like in a small community, social workers and courts might engage in non-adversarial outreach by meeting with the grandparents instead of apprehending the children and sending them to foster care in a larger centre. Social workers might then have discovered that the grandparents were accustomed to caring for their grandkids and, further, that grandparents were willing and able to serve as foster parents. Considerable upheaval and distress to the children could be prevented.
On another note, our child care legislation provides for and recognizes the Aboriginal custom adoption practices, a less legalistic procedure where parents give up their child to a family to love and care for as their own, even verbally. We should also design our child apprehension laws to the same effect, recognizing Aboriginal custom and involve grandparents and extended families a role in caring for their children in their communities, not apprehending them and carrying them off to another community, which is so reminiscent of the residential schooling system.
I will have questions for the Minister of Social Services during question period. Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
