Doug Ford doesn't want you to know how many kids die in the care of children's aid societies
They still know when the deaths happen, but they won't record the total.
In Ontario, rather than directly running child welfare and protective services through the government, the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services instead funds regional bodies called “children’s aid societies”, which are under government supervision, but are legally considered NGOs and as a result have a wide degree of autonomy.
In the case of indigenous children, this is a good thing. First Nations, Métis and Inuit children are taken care of by their own communities, which is extremely important considering the Residential School Genocide was based on the reality of white people stealing these children while claiming our abuse of them was somehow to their benefit.
But outside the scope of indigenous self-governance, in regard to the settler and refugee populations of Canada, the argument for Ontario using these arms-length bodies is much weaker. The lack of accountability that any regional children’s aid society has to our elected government in their day-to-day operations can result in a variety of issues, including on the severe end threats to the welfare of children.
That exact concern is why it’s important to know how many children die in the care of Ontario’s various children’s aid societies, whether that care is when a child and their parents are being supervised by caseworkers, or when a child has been removed and placed in foster care.
The problem, however? According to my understanding of a Global News report broken this afternoon by Isaac Callan and Colin D’Mello, Premier Doug Ford doesn’t want you to know how many kids are dying under the care of children’s aid societies.
In 2020, the Ford government commissioned public servants to generate an internal summary of all the children who died with an open file with a children’s aid society, or with a file closed in the past year, and public servants continued to create these summaries on an annual basis for the Ford government into 2023.
According to these internal figures, 104 of these children died, spiking up to 129 in 2021, holding at 121 in 2022, and then spiking up to 134 in 2023. These numbers average out over the four-year period to show that a child in the care or recently in the care of child welfare services died roughly once every three days.
When Global News reported these numbers in 2024, only obtaining them through a freedom of information request, public servants flagged it internally for the Ford government, and children’s aid societies demanded more fulsome data explaining the various circumstances of the children.
Rather than make a more fulsome report, one available for public consumption, the Ford government simply decided to stop summarizing the data altogether, and Global News freedom of information requests for 2024 and 2025 were rejected, saying that summaries were not recorded anymore.
Again, these numbers have never been officially published yet, and only became public for 2020 to 2023 because journalists legally requested the materials prepared by our public service. The only reasonable conclusion here is that the Ford government has decided to stop having the public service prepare reports on these matters, to avoid them being subject to freedom of information requests by journalists.
Most egregiously, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services confirmed to Global News in their report that they do continue to track the deaths of children in real time. They simply don’t summarize them anymore, to prevent them from being accessible to the public.
Whether it is a good or bad idea to have children’s aid societies be arms-length rather than a government agency, it should be plainly obvious why a summary of children whom are hurt or killed under the care of these groups should be made transparently available to the public, so we can ensure there is no abuse or other untoward behaviour.
It is indeed quite absurd that such a summary only began being generated by the public service in 2020, and it’s even more absurd that rather than make it public, the Ford government has taken measures to obscure the truth from the public to a greater degree than they had before.
The Liberal and NDP opposition have both registered their ire, but with credit to both of them they are small parties opposing Ford’s commandingly large majority government. The public cannot rely on elected officials to hold Premier Ford and his Conservatives accountable in such a parliamentary configuration.
They must instead rely upon other political avenues, including protest, to disrupt the Ford government and make it clear that the welfare of children is the concern of the public at large, and that we will not allow it to be brushed aside.
Otherwise? We will have no clue how bad the situation has truly become.