Walk for Reconciliation - Vancouver, BC
Native leader says the situation today is worse than during the "Sixties scoop"
OTTAWA - First Nations are now facing another tragedy of lost children.
Provincial and federal data suggest there are double the number of children living apart from their parents compared with the residential school system of the late 1940s and 50s.
That was a brutal period of Canada's history that still haunts First Nations families.
John Beaucage was recently hired by the Ontario government to look into aboriginal child welfare.
He has given the heartbreak he sees around him a name: the Millennium Scoop, referring to the seizure of kids since the year 2000.
But Beaucage says it's not the same as the Sixties Scoop, when children were removed from their homes and adopted by families far from the reserve.
Analysis finds more First Nations children in care than at height of residential school system
CBC (2011).
John Beaucage has given the heartbreak he sees around him a name: the Millennium Scoop.
The First Nations leader was recently hired by the Ontario government to look into aboriginal child welfare and what he found – not just in Ontario, but across the country – was despair.
There are more First Nations children in care right now than at the height of the residential school system. That system was a national disgrace that prompted Prime Minister Stephen Harper to apologize for its catastrophic impact on natives.
"It's a culmination of decades worth of social ills," Beaucage says.
A disheartening mix of poverty, addiction, history and politics has conspired to separate First Nations children from their parents.
Researchers aren't certain how many native kids are no longer living with their parents. A major study in 2005 pegged the number at 27,500. Since then, provincial and federal data as well as empirical reports suggest the numbers have risen.
That's easily double the size of the cohort forced away from their homes and into residential schools during the late 1940s and 50s – a brutal period of Canada's history that still haunts First Nations families.
Former auditor general Sheila Fraser estimated First Nations children were eight times more likely to be in care than other Canadian kids. She pointed out that in British Columbia, of all the children in care, about half are aboriginal – even though aboriginals are only about eight per cent of the population.
Beaucage's report says aboriginal people make up about two per cent of the population, but between 10 to 20 per cent of the children in care.
"Given the data I've had a chance to see, if anything, it's an underestimation," said Nico Trocme, director of McGill University's Centre for Research on Children and Families.
