Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I want to express my concern today about the well-being of the children in this territory, specifically those involved with child and family services. I've been waiting to speak about this until I felt I had solid solutions to propose, but this is a tough one. That might be one reason that no one particularly likes to talk about this. It's depressing, it makes us feel hopeless, and it's easy to ignore because these children are not the ones emailing and calling our constituency offices, and yet these are likely the most vulnerable of our community members. They have so little opportunity to control what is happening to them, to control the direction of their lives, and that's not fair.
According to the last annual report by child and family services, we had 106 children and youth in permanent care of the state and 45 in temporary care. While at first glance, things seemed to be improving with 40 percent fewer children in permanent care compared to a decade ago, we suddenly have many more children being put into plan of care agreements. And even though this is listed as a preventive measure, it's become very common for social workers to use these agreements to remove children from their homes on a temporary basis with much less oversight than if they were formally apprehended. While plan of care committees are supposed to involve family and community members, in practice, the committee seemed to mostly involve simply the social worker and the parent who may feel pressured or not have the resources to dispute the conditions written up by CFS.
It's also worth pointing out that the majority of the reports of mistreatment, which can lead to these apprehensions, are related to neglect, which is often rooted in poverty. And no child should ever be removed from their family due to poverty.
Meanwhile, we keep hearing about the government's attempts to transform the CFS system, but what I see is a lot of focus on improving processes, frameworks, programs. What I would rather see is us trying to put children and youth themselves at the centre of our strategy and hold ourselves accountable for better outcomes in their lives.
We speak a lot in this House about the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and for good reason, but we rarely speak about the UN convention on the rights of the child. What if we built into our legislation that children's rights must be heard, and they should have as much control as possible over their lives? Mr. Speaker, I don't have all the answers, but I do feel it's important to keep the vulnerable children of this territory in our sights. Thank you.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member from Yellowknife Centre.
