By
Laurie Monsebraaten
“I remember sitting in my room by myself the day I turned 21,” she says. “I had been alone a million times before, but I never felt alone like I did that day.”
After spending half of her young life as a Crown ward in the care of Children’s Aid, the province was cutting her loose.
“Leaving care for me was sudden and very scary,” she recalls. “It felt like a punishment for all my growth, success and achievement.”
Justine, 24, is one of an estimated 1 million Canadians who as children have been cared for by the state.
On Friday, Justine and other young people from foster care start a bold experiment never attempted before in Canada. With the support of the
Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, they are holding their own hearings at Queen’s Park in the hope of changing the system. They want the province to be a better mom and dad to the children in its care and make their transition into adulthood more secure.
The statistics are shocking.
Just 44 per cent of Ontario’s current 8,000 to 9,000 Crown wards will complete high school and fewer still will go on to post-secondary education.
They are more likely to live in poverty, experience unemployment and homelessness, struggle with mental health and become involved with the criminal justice system.
The young people organizing the hearings have already received 150 submissions and expect as many as 300 by the Jan. 3 deadline.
They will make recommendations to the legislature next spring.
Justine, Carlos, 27, and Shanna, 20, are three young people who have first-hand experience living and leaving foster care in Ontario.
All are playing different roles at the legislative hearings, which continue next Friday. The proceedings will be recorded in Hansard. But only first names will be used to protect the youth and respect the private and often harrowing nature of their tales.
Justine is one of 48 who will address the proceedings.
Carlos is one of 10 panellists who will run the hearings and listen to submissions.
Shanna is one of four organizers.
Despite their different roles, they all have the same goal: To make the Ontario government a more responsible parent.
In a room usually reserved for the political elite, scores of foster kids and former Crown wards will gather at Queen’s Park to tell their stories of heartbreak and hope.
Justine
Justine has struggled all her life to be heard. For her, the hearings mark a turning point.
She was born in a southeastern Ontario town to teenage parents.
As a child, no one seemed to be looking out for her, even when she asked for help. Her disappointment turned to anger, then rage by the time she turned 10. In the ensuing years in foster care, she became defiant, depressed and a danger to herself and others.
Today, she says landing in the care of the local Children’s Aid Society was the best thing that could have happened to her.
But the way Ontario’s child welfare system treats Crown wards when they become adults — kicking them out of foster homes at 18 and cutting off all financial and emotional support when they turn 21 — hurts.
As a university graduate with a full-time job in a profession she loves, Justine knows she has beat the odds.
Unlike most former foster kids, she completed her education. In fact, she excelled. She graduated high school as an Ontario Scholar. She completed a four-year honours degree in social work and women’s studies on a full academic scholarship and scored at the top of her class. Then she went on to earn a teaching degree.
In 2010, she took what she thought would be a short-term job with the Windsor-Essex Children’s Aid Society as a family service worker. Instead, the job has blossomed into a career and a passion to change the system in which she grew up.
The petite blond will tell the hearings she was not always the smiling, confident young woman she is today.
“I was once a very angry girl who wanted nothing more out of life than to drop out of school and
maybe become a bartender — that is if I
had to work,” she says.
Her goal was “to rock and roll all night and party every day” and aligned pretty closely to the lyrics of the ’70s teen anthem by Kiss.
“I had very little faith in myself or in anyone who ever tried to connect with me.”
She bounced in and out of foster homes every six to 12 months. When she wasn’t calling her CAS worker demanding to be moved, she was running away.
By age 14, she was dating a 20-year-old. She smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. She drank, used drugs and was flunking out of school until the director of children’s services from her agency read her the riot act: Smarten up now or there will be no turning back.
“For some reason, I don’t know why, he got to me. I listened,” she says. “I started trying again. I got them to move me to a new community where I didn’t have to be a bad ass.”
By that time, the CAS had given up trying to find an appropriate foster home for Justine. Since she was 16 and legally able to request it, the agency ended official guardianship.
She moved onto Extended Care Maintenance, a program for former Crown wards that provides some social support and up to $1,000 a month for rent and living expenses.
For the next two years, she completed high school while renting rooms in the homes of people she knew — a family where she babysat, her boyfriend’s house and, when they broke up, his aunt’s house.
With her 96 per cent Grade 12 average, Justine could attend any university of her choice.
She chose the University of Windsor because that was where the CAS director who helped turn her life around got his degree.
At university, Justine learned to fly solo. She never met her newly assigned CAS worker who mailed her cheques every month. Although she stayed in touch with her former worker, she could feel her support system unravelling. She began to dread her 21st birthday.
“At the ripe age of 21, I would be ditched. Dropped. Thrown out like yesterday’s news,” she says.
“Who would I call after a long day? What if I had good news? Who would I share it with? What about bad news? What if I was struggling one month? I had no safety net. I felt doomed.”
Halfway through her third year of university she was thrust into budgeting her pay from part-time jobs and applying for OSAP loans to make ends meet.
She had never learned how to budget or save money and her debt ballooned.
But the emotional toll was worse. She had few real friends and had always poured her heart out to CAS workers. Now when she was excited or sad about something, she didn’t feel there was anyone she could call.
Odd as it may sound, the CAS was her family. After losing so much as a child, now she was losing that too.
Three years on, Justine has found love and a new family. In the hearing room Friday, her fiancé, Stephen, as well as the CAS director from her hometown, will be in the audience cheering her on.
She knows she is one of the lucky ones.
But she’s challenging the province of Ontario, “or should I say Mom and Dad,” to be better parents for the majority who aren’t so fortunate.
“Let’s brainstorm a better, more humane solution to how we treat youth leaving care,” she says.
Carlos
Unlike Justine , Carlos, 27, one of the 10 panellists, knows what it is like to be a more typical child welfare statistic. He is a high-school dropout. He has been homeless, in jail and has contemplated suicide.
“I’ve been involved in some pretty bad stuff,” says the wiry former Crown ward.
Carlos isn’t telling his story at the hearing, although he will write a submission.
A charismatic young man used to commanding an audience with his easy smile, jet-black hair and dark eyes, Carlos is excited about what he calls his next adventure.
He was adopted from the Philippines by a Mississauga couple when he was 3.
“I had a lot of love and loyalty to both of them in my heart,” he says. “But what they did really messed me up.”
His adoptive father, a brilliant accountant of Scottish-Irish descent, was a taskmaster who named him Leif-Joseph, after the Viking explorer Leif Ericson. Carlos — who took his birth name as an adult — wore his adoptive name like armour against his father’s harsh discipline.
Sadly, the name had no power over his adoptive mother, a petite Filipina who Carlos believes never loved him.
“I don’t remember her ever hugging me,” he recalls.
Carlos turned his anger and confusion into aggression at school where he acted out in class and fought in the playground. When he was 8, a child and youth worker in the school “unlocked the hurt inside” and the truth tumbled out.
He was playing road hockey with his friends the day Children’s Aid came for him.
His father yelled at him to come inside where, he recalls, a blond woman in a red dress and red lipstick was waiting with a briefcase.
Carlos wondered what was going on. His clothes and favourite toys were packed in bags by the front door. No one hugged him or told him what was happening.
“I was just sent off with this lady.”
At age 11, Carlos became a Crown ward and was placed in foster care with a warm and outgoing couple of Italian-Polish descent who had two older children of their own and a large extended family. The couple fostered several other children over the years, but Carlos was the one they took on family vacations and treated as their own.
Still, Carlos couldn’t shake his anger. He struggled academically in high school and was drawn to the power of gangs. He lived in a world of drugs, petty crime, knives and guns.
His foster parents never gave up on him though, even when he was charged as a young offender for beating up a 10-year-old who looked at him the wrong way.
He pledged to quit the gangs. But it was a promise he couldn’t keep. At 18, his social worker recommended placement in a special transition home that teaches life skills.
While Carlos appreciated the support, he spent the next three years on his own going nowhere fast. By the time he turned 21, he had neither the maturity nor experience to succeed on his own.
At 24, he had become a father and turned his anger on the baby’s mother who he still considers to be the love of his life.
“Subconsciously I sabotaged the relationship. Deep down, I didn’t think I deserved to be happy. I destroyed her and me. It is my biggest regret.
“I was still arrogant. I lost my job. I wasn’t showing up for work. I lost the insurance on my car. I lost all my stuff because I had to sell it to pay rent. And then I lost my apartment.”
Although he resisted the urge to hurl himself off his 22nd floor balcony, his downward spiral continued.
Ironically, it was his involvement in organized crime that led to his salvation: He got caught.
Police laid 16 charges. No longer a young offender, Carlos was now looking at jail time. It terrified him.
“For the past 25 years, I had taken everything for granted. I had not valued anything. I had not appreciated the freedom to be able to make money, educate myself or feel the wind on my face or the grass beneath my feet.”
After three days in jail, his former foster parents showed up at court and bailed him out. Everything changed.
He was convicted, but sentenced to 100 hours of community service at the Gateway Centre for New Canadians in Mississauga where he worked as a janitor and helped out with programming. The centre taught him how to heal and he learned to forgive himself.
In January, Carlos enrolled at Humber College in the child and youth worker program as a mature student.
“With the knowledge and experience I have, I know I can make a difference working in a group home,” he says.
When he heard about the hearings he said: “That’s it. That’s how I will make a difference. Their goals are my goals.”
Reflecting on his life, he sees how the extracurricular activities he was enrolled in as a boy — sports teams, chess club, Boy Scouts — sustained him in his teen years. It was success he could fall back on when he faced obstacles.
Every child in care should be given those opportunities, he says.
He also credits his foster family — whom he calls his guardian angels — for their unconditional love. It is a message he hopes more foster parents hear because “they are the ones who are going to make a difference.”
Shanna
Twenty-year-old Shanna, one of four young organizers for the hearings, was not blessed with such unconditional love in foster care.
As a third-year university student who turns 21 in May, she is struggling with the imminent loss of the financial and emotional support that Justine experienced three years ago.
But for someone who has lost so much, her passion to give back is remarkable. It is probably why she was the first of four former Crown wards hired by the child advocate’s office last February to make the hearings happen.
In the past seven months, she has travelled the province speaking to youth, child welfare workers, foster parents and even newspaper editorial boards to spread the word.
“This is not just an event. It is a movement,” she says triumphantly, her brown eyes gleaming with excitement.
Shanna was born in Oregon, but moved to Canada at age 7 with her mother and two siblings after her parents split up.
Her mother, who was adopted, wanted to build a relationship with her birth father in Sarnia.
But it didn’t turn out the way Shanna’s mother had hoped and the family struggled.
Money was tight. Looking back, she remembers many things weren’t right. Later, teachers told her she often showed up in class with dirty hair and clothing. She was bullied at school and hated going.
One day when Shanna was in Grade 3, she was allowed to stay home and she and her younger sister had a bath with their mother.
The three of them were relaxing in the warm water, washing one another’s slippery, soapy skin when suddenly her mother’s eyes turned black and words that made no sense started tumbling out of her mouth.
Although Shanna didn’t know it at the time — and she’s not sure anyone else knew either — her mother was a schizophrenic. Shanna thinks her mother probably thought they were evil spirits. The sound of her mother’s sudden raving and Shanna’s struggle to catch her breath as she was being pushed under the water are still seared in her memory.
Somehow, her sister escaped. Her mother fainted. But Shanna’s arms were pinned under her mother’s leaden body and her lips were barely above water.
Shanna pushed her neck up the side of the tub and both she and her mother flopped onto the cold bathroom floor beside the toilet.
Her sister was screaming and crying: “What should we do? Should we kill her?” Shanna told her to “Call grandpa!” But her sister, just 5, forgot the number and called 911.
Naked and dripping wet, she remembers being embarrassed when the male officers arrived. They took her mother away in a straight-jacket.
Initially, the three siblings were sent to live with different family friends. By the time Shanna was in Grade 5, all three were living with the same friend but visiting their mother several times a week with the occasional sleepover.
Her mother was always saying she was sorry, that she wished she was healthier and that CAS was ruining her life. Shanna remembers feeling sad and angry.
Guilt was added to those troubling emotions the following year when Halloween fell on a Thursday, the day Shanna usually visited her mother. She wanted to go trick-or-treating with her friends instead.
The next morning, giddy from candy from the night before, Shanna and her brother and sister were suddenly told they didn’t have to go to school.
Their post-Halloween sugar rush crashed when two police officers and a social worker arrived. Their mother was dead.
She had been found on the rocky shore of the St. Clair River, a suspected suicide.
“I remember looking over at my brother. You blame yourself. Was she mad we didn’t go to visit her? I was confused. We didn’t understand. We were crying. My foster dad was crying. It was the weirdest, strangest day.”
The three children became Crown wards and they remained with their foster father. But it was a rocky relationship for Shanna.
“No parent is perfect. But I didn’t think a lot of things he did were right. He rarely said I love you. He never said good job when I got an A in school. He was the typical hard dad. I often felt alone and to this day, things still feel awkward.”
At 18, she left her foster home for Laurier University in Brantford where she enrolled in the concurrent education program. As she matured and studied psychology, her anger toward her foster father eased.
“I don’t blame him. He came from a harsh family and it is all he knew. I know he did everything he could and that if my mom was watching, she’d be thanking him for everything he did.”
For Shanna, school was her sanctuary. Teachers provided the adult support she missed in her foster home. She also had several Big Sisters who taught her about family and about being loved. Her friends’ parents also welcomed her into their homes.
She chose teaching so that she can help other kids in care and try to erase the stigma that too many of them feel.
About this time, Shanna met a CAS worker who saw her potential and linked her up with other former Crown wards at conferences and other events.
“Before, I was completely ashamed to be in care. I called my foster father my dad to my friends because I didn’t want them to know,” she says. “But I realized there are all these other people just like me and that I don’t need to hide or keep it a secret.”
Along the way, someone from the provincial child advocate’s office who had seen her speak at a conference, emailed about a new job posting.
Shanna wrote her application letter that night. She got the job in February, working part-time around her studies and then full-time during the summer. In July, three other youth were hired and together they have created a
website, trained volunteers and organized the hearings.
“It’s about creating awareness, inspiring people to advocate to the government.”
Shanna believes there needs to be more emphasis on adoption and unconditional love. For those who want to remain connected to their birth families, other legal ways are needed to give foster kids and former Crown wards families they can count on.
“We don’t want to live in families where the mileage meter on the car is on every time they drive you somewhere so they can expense it,” she says. “It makes us question everything and whether we’re ever worthy of being loved.”
She believes the option of receiving financial and emotional support until age 25, when most young people have completed college or university, would be huge.
OSAP is helpful, but it still leaves former Crown wards in debt. Shanna will have a $20,000 loan to pay starting six months after she graduates, whether she gets a job or not.
Foster kids and former Crown wards are uniquely situated to push for change, as they have shown they have the strength and perseverance to achieve it, she says.
“What I’ve learned from this process is that one voice can make a huge difference.”
