The least the state can offer parents it deems unfit, surely, is some reasonable guarantee their kids won’t die if they're taken away

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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.

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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........

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