Here is a number that should stop a meeting. In 2021, Indigenous children made up 7.7 percent of all children under fifteen in Canada, and 53.8 percent of all children in foster care. An Indigenous child was about fourteen times more likely to be in care than a non-Indigenous child. More than half the children the state has removed from their families are Indigenous, in a country where they are fewer than one in twelve children.
It is not improving on its own. The Indigenous share of children in foster care rose from 47.8 percent in 2011 to 51.7 percent in 2016 to 53.8 percent in 2021. In Manitoba, the province with the highest rate, roughly nine in ten children in care are Indigenous. Advocates have made the comparison that lands hardest of all: there are more Indigenous children in state care today than there were in residential schools at their peak.
A system that removes children from poverty more often than it protects them from harm is not broken by accident; it is working as designed, and the design can change.
The drivers are not a mystery, and they are not the children or their families. They are colonialism and its long aftermath, the chronic underfunding that a human rights tribunal called discriminatory, discriminatory practice, and poverty, because a great deal of what gets recorded as "neglect" is the material hardship that money would solve. The system is, too often, removing children from poverty rather than protecting them from harm, and those are not the same thing.
This is the backdrop for everything else in the field: for Bill C-92 and the move to Indigenous jurisdiction, for Jordan's Principle, for every evaluation and program design done in this space. A framework that treats this context as someone else's concern does not stay neutral; it quietly reproduces the very pattern it declines to see. The first honest act of any work here is to start from these numbers, and to refuse to look away from them.