CALGARY -- Sen. Murray Sinclair says if the child-welfare system existed in its current form when he was a boy, he would have been cut off from his family and cultural heritage.
The chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools and Manitoba's first Indigenous judge was raised by his grandparents just outside Winnipeg.
"We would have been apprehended by the child-welfare system if it had been organized as it is today," he told social workers, bureaucrats and academics at a national child welfare conference Friday.
He said his grandparents would have been deemed too old to have cared for him, had today's rules applied. Their house didn't have electricity or running water and was crowded.
"We sometimes didn't have enough to eat. We barely had enough wood in the winter time to keep the place warm, but we managed," he said.
"And we managed because of the strong-willed nature of my grandmother who insisted that everybody participate in the raising of those children, those little children who came into her life."
Sinclair said there are more children in Canada's child-welfare system today than there were at the height of residential schools, which housed Indigenous children forcibly taken from their communities in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said amounted to cultural genocide.
"The monster that was created in the residential schools moved into a new house," Sinclair said. "And that monster now lives in the child- welfare system."...https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/residential-school-monster-now-lives-in-child-welfare-system-sinclair-1.4151517
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