Advocating for children, families, and nations : kinship care placements for Indigenous families in BC

When children are unable to remain in the care of their parents, they have traditionally been placed in foster care with caregivers who are contracted by a child and family service agency to care for them. Foster care providers are usually not known to the child or their family prior to the placement. Beginning in the 1990s, child and family service agencies in Canada began to place children with kinship caregivers as an alternative to foster care. Kinship caregivers are members of a child’s extended family or community network and are generally selected by parents to provide care. In British Columbia, provincial child and family service legislation, the Child, Family, and Community Service Act, RSBC 1996, c46, requires kinship care placements to be prioritized relative to foster care placements. For Indigenous children, this priority is also reflected in the federal legislation, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, SC 2019, c 24 (the “Federal Act”). Kinship care placements are a uniquely important placement option for Indigenous children given the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families that began with federal residential schools and continues through provincial child and family services. While the Federal Act is intended to make meaningful change for Indigenous families and, in particular, to address the over-representation of Indigenous children in government care, it is not sufficient on its own to improve access to kinship care placements for Indigenous families. The legislation does not address the systemic discrimination and access to justice barriers experienced by Indigenous families engaged with child and family service agencies and kinship care policy in BC is excessively narrow. Only by investing in child and family services designed to promote substantive equality for Indigenous children while addressing the conditions of systemic discrimination that their families experience can kinship care placements be meaningfully accessed in response to the ongoing harms caused to Indigenous families by child and family service interventions.