Adopted woman calls for changes to Canada’s child foster system

When Cierra Simon looks back on her life, she has many questions and very few answers.

“There was a complete alienation … because of their actions,” she said.

Simon was taken into foster care in Ontario when she was six and a Saskatchewan family adopted her when she was nine. While she acknowledges she needed to be separated from her parents, she said the choices made for her resulted in her becoming homeless and unaware of her First Nations heritage.

She believes the system needs to change and told Global News the effects of adoption will always be a part of her.

Simon was born in Kingston 28 years ago. She lived with her parents, who she said struggled with addictions, and then with her grandparents. She recalls that her grandparents were overwhelmed with raising the then-six-year-old Simon and her two younger sisters, so the girls were transferred to the care of Dave and Deb Carter, a foster family in Bracebridge, Ont.

“They felt abandoned in a way,” Deb said, describing the girls upon their arrival.

Speaking from Bracebridge, Carter told Global News that Simon’s grandparents visited and took her to First Nations events to help maintain her connection to her culture.

Carter and Simon both said Simon was able to stay in contact with her extended family, until her father threatened them.

After stating privacy laws prevent her from saying too much about the matter, Carter said child welfare services personnel decided to move Simon and her sisters away.

By this time, the Carters had decided to adopt Simon and her sisters. Carter told Global News that she and her husband worked to keep the girls with them and even offered to move when welfare staff insisted the girls couldn’t stay in the area.

“They basically removed them from our home and put them somewhere else against our wishes and the children’s wishes,” Carter said.

Simon ended up at another foster home, though she couldn’t remember where it was when speaking to Global News, because she was so young.

Carter said she never knew where Simon went next.

Both Simon and Carter said they were permitted to send letters but couldn’t include much information, like where they were and what they were doing.

“It just became so impersonal. There wasn’t a point in sending them any longer,” she said.

“It just wasn’t showing that we loved them.”

Carter and Simon said they eventually stopped writing.

Shortly thereafter, a Saskatchewan family adopted Simon.

Simon said moving so far away and being separated from her extended family and foster parents, with whom she enjoyed living, was disorienting.

“You’re just a new person. Like, I couldn’t even write my last name on my first day of school,” she recalled.

She told Global News that school projects about families and backgrounds served to highlight what she didn’t know about herself.

“(Biographical information) was always just made up for me. I didn’t actually know,” she said.

One of the key details she was missing about her own life was the fact she is First Nations. She said she was told she was Métis.

She accessed her adoption records when she became an adult. Many names and locations are redacted but one document, viewed by Global News, stated that “Cierra Simon… (is) of unknown faith and yet to be determined Native Status.”

A child welfare advocate said that lack of information is hard to fix because Canada does not have a national database of children in care — despite a Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action for published monthly reports on the number of Indigenous children in care.

“I think not having that data is a huge disservice to these families and to these kids, because without the information, we can’t design the appropriate mechanisms to be able to intervene and really help families,” said Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, who spoke to Global News from Ottawa.

She has spent more than a decade fighting the Canadian Government in court to ensure equitable child care is provided for Indigenous children.

According to 2016 census data and a government report on Indigenous children in care, Indigenous children account for 7.7 per cent of all Canadians under the age of 14 but 52.2 per cent of children of that same age group in foster care.

And census data and Truth and Reconciliation reports show there were more Indigenous children in foster care in 2016 than there were in residential schools at the height of the system in 1953.

Blackstock explained that overrepresentation is driven by historic inequalities and rigid guidelines that do not take those inequities into account.

“Take, for example, not having clean water in your home,” she said.

“How often would you be able to do laundry or bathe your children?”

Blackstock said issues that are beyond parents’ control, like them dealing with intergenerational trauma, should not be codified as parental deficits. Instead, Canada should focus on providing more equitable access to amenities.

She said the statistics don’t prove foster care is better or worse than residential schools, only that there is an unnecessary continuation of state-based removal of children.

If something doesn’t change, she said, “future generations of children (will be) looking back at people like you and I and saying, ‘What were you thinking?’”

Global News reached out to Ontario Minister of Social Services Merrilee Fullerton, Saskatchewan Minister of Social Services Lori Carr and the Indigenous Services Canada Minister Marc Miller.

Provincial ministries are responsible for foster care and adoption services in their own province while Indigenous child welfare falls under federal jurisdiction.

Staff from Fullerton’s office acknowledged Global News’ request for comment but did not provide a statement by our deadline.

A spokesperson for Miller said Indigenous children belong at home “where they can be with their relatives and Elders, where they can learn their Nation’s culture, language and traditions, and where they can be given back all that was taken away from their parents and grandparents.”

Marie-Emmanuelle Cadieux heralded the recent child care funding agreement with Cowessess First Nation, which makes Cowessess the first First Nation in the country to assume authority over local child welfare systems.

Her statement said the government has dedicated $615 million to help Indigenous communities build capacity to establish their own child and family services.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Saskatchewan Government said it also works with Indigenous groups to help keep families together.

“Children are not placed for adoption outside of Saskatchewan unless it is with birth family or with a family to which the child has an attachment,” Tobie Eberhardt, an executive director for Child and Family Service Delivery in the province, said.

The statement said the ministry takes a child’s physical and emotional needs, level of development and culture and heritage into account. It also said children are not placed for adoption outside the province unless with a birth family or with a family to whom the child has an attachment.

Global News also asked the respective ministries to provide the number of children in foster care in their jurisdictions.

In Saskatchewan, 3,643 children are in the care of social services, 868 of whom are in foster care as of July 31. Sixty children were in out-of-province placements in 2019 and 49 were in 2020. As of July 31, 2021, 56 children are in out-of-province placements.

ISC and the Ontario Ministry did not provide numbers by deadline.

Simon said she hopes those numbers get even lower.

Declining to go into too many details, she said that things didn’t go well in her adopted home in Prince Albert, Sask. She left as soon as she could, at age 16, and became homeless.

“I just kept making it work,” she said, “until I got pregnant with my son.”

“And then that’s when things really changed for me.”

That was more than a decade ago. Since then Simon returned to school to improve her grades.

She’s now an emergency room nurse and newly married.

She said she’s excited to continue building her family with her husband and son.

But she said she still wonders about what could have been different if she wasn’t taken so far away, if she had been allowed to stay with people she knew and if there was a local solution to the challenges she faced as a child.

She said she struggles constantly with the effects of adoption and isolation, whether it’s trusting someone else or showing affection, and that sometimes she has to remind herself not to be so guarded and withdrawn.

She said she doesn’t know whether she’ll ever break the cycle within herself, she said. “It will never be the same.”

She said the long-term consequences, the loss of culture, “and everything that comes along with moving a person out of province is not worth it.”

— With files from Emerald Bensadoun