CCWS Statement on Bill33

With the recent passage of Bill 33, our province has taken a deeply troubling step away from the welfare of youth in Ontario, particularly against the well-being of marginalized youth. Since 2021, CCWS has been supporting and advocating for children and youth in the child welfare system, largely in response to the current government’s neglect of their explicit needs. Today, this government continues to push bills that not only disregard the issues we have raised repeatedly, but intensify the very conditions that endanger the young people we are mandated to protect. In solidarity, we continue to speak out to reaffirm our stance against this government’s austerity measures including Bill 33, and to call for meaningful alternatives that genuinely reflect the lived expertise of our communities.

The amendments made to the Child, Youth and Family Services Act through Bill 33 aim to centralize power within the provincial government by allowing it greater control over school boards, mandate police presence in schools, further regulate post-secondary institutions, and expand oversight of children's aid societies. These changes claim to improve effectiveness within education and child service systems, but are in reality an intentional distraction from what is actually needed to better support children and families experiencing family policing. As the bill relates to child welfare, or what we call family policing, the bill neglects the needs and challenges of youth-in-care by emphasizing the intangible bureaucratic services of the Ombudsman office. More grossly, it explicitly intensifies dangerous conditions by mandating police in schools, which has been repeatedly shown to disproportionately harm racialized youth vulnerable to systemic bias and family separation. 

Youth-in-care often look to schools as sanctuary from the practices of confinement and control that they often experience in foster care, but what we already see is classrooms becoming extensions of the child protection and policing system. Children are constantly surveilled and regularly punished for “non-compliance” and policed for trauma responses, and instead of receiving trauma-informed support, police are often deployed as a form of behavioural management and control for conflict resolution or emotional expression. These institutional “protection” approaches are deeply carceral, reinforcing cycles of punishment rather than support, psychologically constraining youth into cycles of survival. Bill 33’s reinstitution of police in Ontario schools normalizes policing as a response to everyday challenges in the maximum sense. At the very least, it psychologically perpetuates carceral trauma for children-in-care and racialized youth through threatening surveillance, restraint and punishment instead of care, understanding, or support. More explicitly, it habituates vulnerable youth to cycles of criminalization in their formative years and pushes them to disengage from education for many years. 

The bill also emphasizes providing youth with information about the Ombudsman’s Office, but it fails to acknowledge that while the Office is positioned as an accountability mechanism, it is often inaccessible to young people. When youth-in-care attempt to engage it, they are often unable to follow through with the inaccessible demands and tasks required of them. Even if a complaint is filed, it does not prevent harm, but only documents it, contributing nothing to prevent these situations in the first place. This measure simply places the labor and emotional weight on those who are already in crisis, and provides no follow up when they age out of care, leaving them to navigate trauma from institutionalization and abuse while facing an inadequate and inaccessible society that does not meet their needs. Effectively, it adultifies children while stripping away their sense of agency and autonomy by rerouting them into bureaucratic funnels that provide little comfort and prevent no harm. 

What Bill 33 does NOT address, is the direct issues that youth-in-care and survivors are regularly dealing with: racial disproportionality of apprehensions, poverty based interventions, use of police by CAS workers, harmful surveillance practices, family separation, quality of placements, abuse in foster and group care, lack of tangible support for kinship families, adequate mental health supports, housing supports for youth transitioning out, and accountability for CAS workers. 

Instead, it perpetuates these issues through colonial, capitalistic, and carceral tactics that will continue to cause harm. Bill 33’s normalization of police and bureaucratic involvement in everyday “care” practices only embeds criminalization into the school systems. It extends the harms of the carceral environments that racialized and youth-in-care are already subjected to, into an environment that they look for safety in. At best, Bill 33 is a clear indication of an administration that is deeply out of touch with the needs of our communities. At worst, and more accurately, it is an intentional act of diverting resources away from what would actually create safer learning environments, in order to reinforce a system of anti-Black violence that keeps marginalized communities trapped within this nexus. 

For years, those same youth who are supposed to be served by these measures have done the work of calling for legislative changes that would actually support them and their kin. As they continue to be neglected and ostracized by the exponential harms of counterproductive measures like Bill 33, many of them are no longer with us. Their absence is a testament to the urgency of this fight, so we persevere in condemning Bill 33 on their behalf, and on behalf of youth-in-care across Ontario. We urgently call the Ontario government to reverse these measures and switch course from wasting resources on policing and bureaucracy that act against us, to directing those resources towards community rooted and driven support that is directly informed by the needs of the people who are impacted.