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Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology

Issue No. 38 - Evidence - March 20, 2018

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OTTAWA, Tuesday, March 20, 2018

The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 7:01 p.m. to examine issues relating to social affairs, science and technology generally (topic: Canada’s post-war adoption mandate for unmarried mothers).

Senator Art Eggleton (Chair) in the chair.

[Translation]

The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.

[English]

I am Art Eggleton, a senator from Toronto, chair of the committee. I’ll ask my colleagues to introduce themselves.

Senator Seidman: Judith Seidman from Montreal. I’m deputy chair of the committee.

Senator Dean: Tony Dean, representing Ontario.

[Translation]

Senator Poirier: Rose-May Poirier from New Brunswick.

[English]

Senator Duffy: Mike Duffy from Prince Edward Island.

The Chair: Senator Duffy is replacing Senator Omidvar tonight.

[Translation]

Senator Mégie: Marie-Françoise Mégie from Quebec.

Senator Petitclerc: Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.

[English]

The Chair: Tonight we are starting a three-meeting week on the question of Canada’s post-war adoption mandate for unmarried mothers. Tomorrow and Thursday we will hold our regularly scheduled meetings, and that will complete our study.

We have several witnesses here tonight, many of whom are noted on the agenda as mothers. There are three organizations I want to briefly mention.

Origins Canada is an organization that helps to reunite individuals separated by adoption. It offers support to those individuals affected, seeks acknowledgment of and accountability for unethical adoption practices, and works with government to reform adoption policies through research and education.

Parent Finders Canada was founded in 1976. It’s a national community-based organization of volunteers whose mission it is to assist and support all members of the adoption community who are seeking reunion with family members.

Then Adoption Support Kinship, which comes out as the acronym ASK, is a Toronto-based organization that provides search and reunion assistance for individuals seeking their biological family.

I’ll ask Valerie Andrews, Executive Director of Origins Canada, to start.

Valerie Andrews, Executive Director, Origins Canada: I want to thank the senators for conducting this study and for being here this evening.

I’m the Executive Director of Origins Canada, a federal non-profit organization providing support, resources, research and education to those separated by adoption. We also assist governments and provide educational workshops for mental health professionals about adoption trauma. Origins was founded in Australia in 1995.

In addition to my own experiences and those of all the courageous mothers and adoptees of Origins, my thesis on this topic informs the following:

This is for Brian, Jennifer and Janet. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states that, “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance,” but that did not apply to the unmarried mother and her baby in post-war Canada. Many Canadians are unaware that in the immediate post-war decades, federal and provincial governments funded draconian adoption policies and practices that impacted unmarried mothers across Canada. This is being referred to by some scholars as the “adoption mandate.”

My research shows that the mandate impacted over 300,000 unmarried mothers in Canada, many who were systematically and often violently separated from their babies by adoption.

In post-war Canada, over 60 church-run and government-funded homes for unwed mothers were operated by mainstream Christian religions, including Catholic, Salvation Army, Anglican, United and Presbyterian. Having to register with a social service agency prior to admittance, mothers were put on the adoption track. These were quasi-incarceral settings where unmarried mothers were subjected to coercive psychological persuasion.

Thaler Singer indicates that six systemic practices are required for the success of coercive psychological systems: a sense of powerless, control environment and time, keep a person unaware, use rewards and punishment to inhibit behaviour reflecting former identity, and the same to promote the group’s beliefs.

Thus was the charged atmosphere of the maternity home in post-war Canada. Once placed there, it was unlikely that an unmarried mother would leave the experience with her baby.

My research shows that in these facilities adoption rates were about 95 per cent. Surrender rates outside of these homes were also high, about 74 per cent. This is in contrast to today where unmarried mothers surrender their babies for adoption at the rate of approximately 2 per cent.

In addition to the psychologically coercive environment, women confined in these homes report being subjected to sexual, verbal and emotional abuse. It is important to note that not all unmarried mothers resided in maternity homes. Some were sent to wage homes or had other arrangements.

In Canadian hospitals, unmarried mothers report being subjected to verbal, physical, psychological abuse, punitive and harsh treatment.

Most Canadian hospitals had protocols for the unmarried mother that were instigated upon her admittance. Mothers were left to labour alone. Some were over-medicated with psychotropic medications while others were given no medications. Mothers were segregated from married mothers. The clean-break protocol meant that babies were taken away while mothers were still in the final stages of delivery. Eye contact between mother and baby was prevented by use of sheets, pillows, aversion of mirrors or other means. Some mothers reported screaming and trying to run after their babies. Others reported the use of restraints.

Mothers were routinely denied their right to see, hold or feed their babies. Without prior consent, mother’s breasts were bound and lactation suppressants administered. Male babies were routinely circumcised without parental consent. Some mothers were even told their babies died, only to learn years later their child had been adopted. There are still some mothers who do not know whether they delivered a boy or a girl, being told, “Well, that’s none of your affair.”

Current social work curricula embrace anti-oppressive policies, whereas my research reveals the profession as an unregulated and less than anti-oppressive body with respect to the unwed mother in post-war Canada.

The “realistic plan,” a social work euphemism for adoption, was the casework solution for unmarried mothers. Mothers report the use of threats, fear, duress, lies, trickery, pressure and even physical force to obtain uninformed consents with no legal counsel, most signing alone with perhaps a social worker or two in attendance.

Mothers were purposefully kept unaware of their legal rights as mothers. They were routinely not given a copy of any paper signed and usually not informed of their right of revocation. Social workers routinely withheld information about resources that might assist them in mothering, even to those who explicitly stated a desire to mother.

Mothers were routinely told, “You will forget about this baby.” One mother in Origins was told by a social worker that it would be like losing a puppy.

Mothers were returned to the community immediately after birth, still recovering from childbirth, in shock and traumatized from the harsh treatment and loss of their usually firstborn baby. They were told to keep the secret and provided no counselling or aftercare.

Then these mothers were constructed as uncaring abandoners who chose adoption, unnatural mothers with no maternal sentiments who gave away their own babies. These powerless, unsupported, resourceless, coerced mothers had no choice.

I asked the mothers what they wanted me to say today. One said, “We weren’t given options or choices.” Another, “I lost the only child I ever gave birth to and I never recovered.” Another said, “I want my daughter to know she was always loved and wanted.”

It is the hope of many mothers and adoptees in Canada that this study will serve to illuminate, acknowledge, validate and provide justice to those impacted by these adoption policies and practices, many of which were clearly illegal, unethical and constituted human rights abuses at the time and not simply through the retrospect of the lens of today.

Thank you very much for listening.

The Chair: Thank you very much. That gives us a lot to start with.

We will now go to Ms. Jarvie.

Sandra Jarvie, Mother, Origins Canada: Thank you, senators of this committee, for this study and for being here tonight.

I was pregnant, 20 years old, marriage was off, and my parents refused to have my baby and me at home. I’d been self-supporting from 17 years old. Although many girls and women became pregnant before marriage, only those unsupported and not married were labelled negatively in social work theory, their sexuality and relationships under scrutiny.

The trauma of an unsupported pregnancy for many young mothers disempowered them, leaving them vulnerable and defenceless against familial, systemic and societal oppression, exploitation and coercion.

In April 1965, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson promised $25 million a year to needy mothers and their children through the Canada Assistance Plan.

The social worker assured me I would have my baby, but when she knew I didn’t have parental support, she began the process for adoption. I tried to explain my circumstances. She said I must put the baby first. I was silenced. Unknown to me at the time, she withheld the resources available to me that would have enabled me to keep my baby with me.

I was asked to pay, in 1968, to stay in a maternity home. At the time, unknown to me, it was government funded for unmarried mothers. The homes were isolating and mirrored the authority that existed within the family, the church, social services and society. Patriarchal authority was reenacted by the residence authority, male or female.

Although many mothers had been attending school or university, or had been in the workforce starting careers, the homes offered little more than an emphasis on domestic servitude.

By the 1960s, most maternity homes had some arrangement for studies. I wasn’t allowed to continue my correspondence courses, being told I was too old for school. Household chores, work in the kitchen, laundry, and bingo with seniors once a week.

There were meetings with social workers. Mothers reported being kept unaware of their rights and choices concerning their pregnancy. Also, they were given little information about labour, delivery, child welfare services, specifically resources that would assist them in mothering.

For me, there was very little talk beyond birth control, illegitimacy and the benefits of adoption for my baby.

Illegitimacy and the idealization of adoptive parents were two key components in promoting adoption to mothers. The best interests of the baby meant the baby was better off in an adoptive family. Social workers did not see unmarried mothers and their babies as a family but as separate units. Unmarried mothers were seen as unfit to be mothers, and the baby would be given a chance in an adoptive family.

Dr. Geoff Rickarby, from Australia, stated that the use of idealization of adoptive families in the best interests of the baby was pivotal to eliciting consents to adoption.

I was told, without proof, it was best for my baby to have a mother and father. I wouldn’t be able to educate him, he would be illegitimate, ridiculed at school and raised by a babysitter, intimating that my baby would be better off without me. We were selfish to want our babies; they deserved a better life. We were expected to make the unselfish sacrifice for our babies to have the perfect life with the waiting adoptive parents. Adoptive parents could provide opportunities in life, illegitimacy erased. If we loved our babies, we would put our babies first.

In the homes, we were living in a vacuum, cut off from the outside world. We were hearing truths from the social workers and the sisters without proof.

Heather Carlini stated that ex-social workers had made statements at adoption conferences such as, “If you mothers out there think that you were coerced into giving up your babies years ago, it’s true, you were. They talk of quotas they had to meet to keep their jobs, of coercion used to meet those goals, and of the shame they feel for their part in separating mothers and their newborns.”

We could choose our baby’s religion but the social worker might say, as was said to me, “You don’t want to limit your baby’s chances of a good home, do you?”

The unsupported mothers deliberated about adoption with no alternative to compare it with. There was only adoption offered. The social workers knew. We were trapped.

Anne Petrie’s research and interviews for unwed mothers’ homes did not find one mother with a positive hospital experience. I wasn’t given any medication. I spent my labour alone in an empty four-bed ward.

In the delivery room before my doctor arrived, a nurse self-righteously berated me, letting me know her cruel opinion. I was powerless in the final stages of labour. My newborn baby was taken away at birth. He now belonged to both social services and the hospital.

I was holding my baby when the social worker arrived. Angry, she told me I had not been able to make a decision from the beginning. I was to meet her in the office in two days. Angrily, she said, “You’d better not disappear.”

There were two social workers waiting for me with no one there to defend me against them. As I walked into the room, all I saw was their shoes and the hems of their garments.

Unmarried mothers were unable to defend themselves against the power of those in authority and in positions of supposed expertise, while the mothers were in a diminished capacity brought on by the physical crisis of labour, their dependency and any extenuating circumstances of birth, the immediate loss of their babies, and any drugs used prior to, during and after birth.

Prior to meeting with the social worker, there had been no information or preparation for what was to take place. During, there was little information given.

The social worker handed me a blank lined form. I was told to write why I was surrendering my baby. I was stunned. They had taken my baby. Only they knew where he was now.

Two or three forms were slipped to me to sign without explanation. I only saw the place to sign. At that point, I didn’t have the life experience to know what they were doing was wrong. I was totally numb. My baby was gone.

The social worker stood in front of me. Coldly, she said, “You will never see your baby again as long as you live. If you search for the baby, you’ll destroy his life and the lives of the adoptive parents.”

The Chair: Thank you, Sandra.

Next we have Ms. Powell, also a mother.

Eugenia Powell, Mother, Origins Canada: Thank you to the committee for inviting me here today.

In 1963, at the age of 17, I was pregnant and unmarried. At the advice of our priest, I was sent to Humewood House, a home for unwed mothers in Toronto. While there, I was told not to disclose my surname, not to name the father of my baby. I recall feeling like a nonentity like I was invisible. I had no support and felt very lonely and frightened. Shame and sadness were constant companions.

Upon receiving my files a few years ago from the Children’s Aid Society, it stated clearly that I had expressed a desire to mother my baby. This was no surprise to me. However, I was told in the home and by social workers that if I loved my baby, the best thing would be to surrender my baby to a married couple who would provide a better life. I was told that I would eventually get married and forget about my baby. How does a mother forget her baby?

The same thing was told to so many women during this time by social workers and the maternity home matrons. This was pointed out by Michele Landsberg in a 1963 Toronto Star article where she states:

At every maternity home and agency, one point is hammered home from the start: the baby must be given up for adoption.

No one told me about the lifelong profound trauma I would suffer, even though, as I later learned, social workers and maternity home matrons knew, at the time, that I would most likely suffer for the rest of my life. Social worker Diane Kemp stated at a conference of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies in 1966 that “mothers would most likely mourn a lifetime.”

Many similar statements were made by maternity home matrons and social workers during that period, which are included in your package.

When I left the home I was returned to society, told to keep the secret and carry on as if nothing had happened. There was no counselling or assistance provided to me. I was still recovering from birth and had just left hospital without my firstborn baby, having to pretend it never happened. The majority of mothers report that no counselling or aftercare was given to them. The Australian Senate inquiry found that the majority of mothers suffered from some form of mental health disorder following surrender.

Studies show that over 82 per cent of mothers suffered a major depression in their life. Many suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, pathological grief and other mental health disorders. Some mothers, unable to cope, turned to substance abuse to assuage their pain and suffering. Others lost their life to suicide.

In Logan, 1996, it was found that 21 per cent of mothers had made attempts on their lives. Over 30 per cent of mothers suffer from secondary infertility, some mothers reporting that they did not feel worthy to be a mother after the shame of losing their child to adoption, while others were simply too traumatized to revisit pregnancy and childbirth.

Like so many other mothers, to the outside world it may have appeared that I had gone on with my life, and in some ways I did. I became a registered nurse, got married and had three more children. However, the profound pain and grief of losing my firstborn baby never left and often surfaced in the form of depression, anger, feelings of emptiness, and anxiety that affected those closest to me, including my raised children. I became overprotective of my children and afraid to lose them.

I continue to experience a deep emptiness in my life, and keeping the secret, as I was told to do, took its toll. I have simply never recovered from the trauma of losing my baby. I unconsciously disassociated from these events in order to function. I continue to have a difficult time trusting others. I also suffer from pathological grief, having continually grieved the loss of my firstborn my whole life. At 73 years old, I have come to realize that this pain will most likely stay with me for the rest of my life. My experience of lifelong pain and sadness is typical of mothers of adoption loss.

The trauma suffered is also intergenerational. I am Ukrainian, and that heritage is important to me. My child was placed with evangelical Christian parents. My child lost her culture, her language, her ethnicity, and the difference in our religious views have complicated our reunion relationship. Even though I reunited with my daughter 26 years ago and it seemed in the early years that we had formed a close relationship, I was never given the title grandmother, although I often took care of my grandchildren when they were young. These are my only grandchildren, and it hurts to the core of my being that I am not acknowledged as their grandmother.

In November of last year, my first great-grandchild was born. I have seen her only once and am relegated to the margins of her life, always hoping for a picture or a visit, and remain unacknowledged as a family member. I keep hoping that with time this will change but increasingly have come to accept that it most probably won’t. The pain and suffering continues anew as I now try to follow my great-grand baby’s life.

There are very few therapists that understand the issues of adoption trauma. Many mothers and adoptees report that they have to educate their therapists about this issue, and it is extremely difficult to find appropriate mental health services. The Australian Senate inquiry recommended that specialized counselling be provided to those impacted. At the very least, we ask this committee to recommend that funding be provided to further educate mental health professionals and to provide specialized counselling to those separated by adoption across Canada, something that was denied to us all those many years ago. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Eugenie.

Next is Monica Byrne from Parent Finders.

Monica Byrne, Director and Mother, Parent Finders: Good evening. I’m National Director of Parent Finders of Canada. You see here four of us who are mothers. These are the women that I have dealt with for many, many years, and an adoptee at this end.

The Parent Finders organization began in 1974 in Vancouver as a group of adult adoptees. By the 1990s, there were more than 26 branches in the country. In almost every large town, there was a Parent Finder group. The world of adoption was private, secret, closed and unacknowledged. Searching for origins was a new phenomenon. Birth parents and relatives soon joined our membership in every province. Adoption records were closed all across the country, and little information was available.

Adoption is part of the very tapestry of Canadian life. It crosses all social and cultural lines. Most families are touched by adoption somewhere. Adoption can and should be a good and loving solution to the historic social problem of children who need to be parented. Adoption was seen as the perfect win-win situation and solution for the problems of all members of the adoption triangle. But many of our practices in Canada have been downright negative, in particular for mothers— the mothers of these babies.

I joined Parent Finders in 1986 when I learned that adoption records were closed. I had been listening to Peter Gzowski on the radio interviewing P.D. James, the murder mystery writer, and she was talking about how records in England were open. He said, “I don’t think they are open here.” I remember this very clearly, at 9 o’clock in the morning. This ran totally contrary to what I had been told by social workers in 1966 when, as an unwed mother of 20, I was forced to relinquish my daughter. I was assured that when she was 18, I could find her again. Until then, I was told that I should go home, get on with my life and be a good girl. I remember the judge saying that to me in the court: “Be a good girl.”

In 1986, now married with three young children, I went to children’s aid in Ottawa to ask about a reunion, and, of course, I was told this was absolutely not possible. I was then forced to play private detective on my own and find my daughter. We have had an excellent reunion. That’s going back 30 years. She has two families that love her. This has been normal.

I reached out to Parent Finders for help and have since volunteered with them for the last 32 years. During these many years, I have been involved both directly and indirectly with approximately 3,000 family reunions, between birth parents and their adopted adult children, between siblings, and even between grandparents and grandchildren. Many people contact Parent Finders for search, support and advice. They receive all sorts of help and information, go on their way, and we never hear of the outcome of their search. Others keep in touch for years and years.

I have people phoning and they will say, “Do you remember me? I called you in 1991.” This is constant. I talk on the phone at least four or five times every day to adopted people and birth parents searching. It’s a continuous thing.

Many cases involve interprovincial adoptions. In Ottawa, for example, it was quite common for babies who were born in Ottawa to be adopted in Hull — now Gatineau — meaning two provinces with two different sets of adoption laws; two sets of chaotic situations. Much complexity.

Requests for assistance come from international social services of Canada, from social service agencies in other countries, from Indigenous Canadians, from the baby-scoop era, and from people who were born in Canada but were adopted in the U.S.A. That was very common in the past. Cases date, for us, from the 1930s to the present day.

In the past, many social workers and psychologists had thought that digging into one’s origins if you were adopted, or wanting to know about one’s relinquished child, showed a pathology, an obsessive inability to let go of the past. In some families, the need for professional care was recommended. I have brochures given to adoptive parents from the 1960s saying, “If your child wants to know his origins, you may wish to seek professional advice about this,” that this is not normal behaviour.

The effects of reunion: I have been overwhelmed by the ultimate injustice of the system and the cruel and harsh treatment, particularly toward mothers. Not only did their families not support them but neither did the agencies from which they sought help. In many cases, the treatment was downright punitive.

The most common effect for the mothers is what I call the “deep-freeze effect,” the shutting down of all memory and emotion about the birth and the relinquishment. It is usually only much later, after a reunion with the lost person, that the mothers realize what has happened to them, and, like the #MeToo movement, they come forward long after the fact. They recognize that the treatment they received at the hands of the government agencies, social workers and family courts and their own lifelong emotional damage should no longer be hidden.

For many women, the reunion with the long-lost child, now adult, is an awakening. All speak of the hole that has been filled somewhere in their heart. They stop searching for the lost child, a common preoccupation for mothers. They finally sleep at night. Reunions can remove the heavy emotional burden of guilt and lead to self-forgiveness. For many, it allows them to break the silence and talk with family. For many, there were no more children. This was their only firstborn. As already pointed out, the percentage of women not conceiving again is between 30 and 36 per cent, very high.

Very few therapists are trained to deal with birth mothers. All we mothers were told, “You will forget the child,” as we mentioned. “Go home, get married and have other children or, if not, get a puppy to cuddle.” That is what I was told. “Get a puppy.” Always puppies.

The reunion is a brief, one-time event. The reconnection can take years before a normal relationship is formed. Sometimes this never happens. We don’t always get along with all of our relatives. Reconnection is a very complicated procedure of counselling, support, advice and just plain time. This is where we at Parent Finders spend most of our energy and time. I can honestly say that I have never had anyone tell me they regretted embarking on this journey. They have found the truth, and that is what the journey was all about.

In conclusion, I entered into this subject because the injustice of closed records and sealed files was abhorrent to me, but, as I have dealt with all of the players in this movement — the adoptees, the social workers, family members — one group has stood out as being the most hurt by this system, the mothers. They are a silent group, unwilling or unable to speak easily about their experiences, too closely attached to their shame and their pain.

The reunion experience, like everything else in life, varies greatly. It is these stories that have empowered me, for a very long time, to do reunions and bring these women comfort and healing and, now, recognition. That harsh treatment and process these mothers endured was completely unacceptable by any standards ever, and a full recognition must be made to them. I attest and was witness to all of it. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much for those very powerful statements.

Finally, we have Wendy Rowney , who is a representative of Adoption, Support, Kinship.

Wendy Rowney, President, Adoption, Support, Kinship (ASK): Thank you for inviting me here today to speak to you about closed, secret adoption and how it impacts the person at its centre, the adoptee. I have spent the last two decades listening to adopted adults talk about adoption and how it has impacted their lives. I served on the boards of Adoption Council of Ontario, the American Adoption Congress, and the Coalition for Open Adoption Records and as Vice-President of the Adoption Council of Canada for almost a decade.

Since the year 2000, I have provided support to adult adoptees and their parents by facilitating a Toronto-based support group. Adoption, Support, Kinship, or ASK, has met monthly for the last 18 years, and, over that time, hundreds and hundreds of adoptees have walked through our doors seeking assistance, help and reassurance. These are the children who were born to unmarried parents when this was socially unacceptable and then adopted as infants in an era of absolute secrecy. They are all grown up now, mostly in their 40s and 50s. They have careers. They have families. They have well-rounded lives. And they also carry great pain and sadness with them.

They speak of the absolute bewilderment that comes with never seeing themselves reflected in the people around them, of never knowing their ancestry. Mostly, however, they talk about loss — the loss of their families, their names, their ethnicities, their very identities. Adults weep as they mourn the loss of their mothers, young women who held them once and let them go, and the relationship they will never have with her.

They also speak of deep love for their adoptive families, for the parents who loved them, raised them and continue to provide them with emotional support. Everyone agrees that growing up in a loving home has no impact on their need to know their ancestry and the woman who gave them birth. You can love your parents and still need to know who you are.

These are the issues that adoptees talk about when they are alone together. Not everyone feels all of these things, of course, and, of those who do, their feelings change over time as the relationship with their families and adoption grows and stretches. Adoptees talk about these issues, and I listen. I listen and I understand because I, too, am adopted.

My mother was sent far away from her home when her family learned she was pregnant. She gave birth to me on a cold December day three weeks before her eighteenth birthday. I saw her briefly, I am told, in the delivery room and then through a glass window, when she identified me as the child she was reluctantly surrendering to adoption. She never held me, she said, because she knew that, if she did, she could never have let me go.

I went to a different home, where I grew up with loving parents, but I thought about her all the time, this other mother whose absence was ever-present in my life. I wondered about my ancestry: Who were these people whose blood flowed through my veins?

I don’t know how to explain to you what it is like not to know. I can tell you that this absence of knowledge is not a trivial thing. It is not something you get over or forget about. I longed to know who my ancestors were and who my mother was. Was she like me? Was she different? Did she want me?

When the mother of an infant dies, other adults gather around the grieving child and talk about the missing parent. Over time, they point out similarities between the two. They share stories and keep the mother alive in a child’s memory. When a child loses a mother to adoption, the exact opposite occurs. No one mentions the missing mother. Her importance to the child goes unrecognized. From the child’s point of view, however, both losses have a similar outcome. The mother is gone.

In one instance, we expect the child to feel loss. In the other, we suggest there is something wrong with the child if she feels the absence of her missing mother. I can’t think of another instance in which we expect the loss of a mother to be met with total indifference.

Trying to reconcile the deep feelings of loss with the societal expectation that their original family is irrelevant creates a sense of profound confusion in many adoptees. They feel one way but know they aren’t supposed to. This confusion can create a sense of isolation. “Why am I the only adoptee to feel this way,” they ask themselves. In turn, this often leads to guilt: “I shouldn’t feel this way; I should be grateful for what I have.”

At the centre of all of these mixed-up feelings, however, is loss— loss of family, loss of name, loss of ethnicity, loss of identity.

When we stop and think about it, we realize that loss is an appropriate reaction in this instance. When humans lose something important, they experience loss. For some adoptees, this sense of loss permeated their childhood. For others, it is not something they feel until they meet their lost family. Still, other adoptees experience none of this. Not everyone has the same reaction to a similar series of events. Some adoptees do not experience genetic bewilderment or feel a sense of loss, but this neither negates nor invalidates the experience of those who do. After two decades of listening to adoptees, it is clear to me that there are many, many, many Canadians whose lived experience reflects what I have been describing today.

Unfortunately, these are little known facts outside of the adoption community. It seems to me that there are a lot of assumptions about adoption. In our society, we believe adoption builds families, but we ignore the fact that, first, another family needs to be destroyed. We trust that the adopted child blends into the family so completely that they never question their past, but we forget that thousands of genealogists wonder about their own ancestors.

We say that adoptees don’t feel the loss of original mothers, but we overlook the fact that this rule about whom humans can or cannot miss only applies to adoption. We assume adoptees are grateful to be adopted into a loving home and feel indifferent about receiving a new name and identity, but we never ask them how they feel.

I am here today to say that we are not indifferent; we care very deeply. Many of us will say that we love the parents who raised us, but we grieve the loss of the parents who created us. We will say that we recognize our place on our adoptive family trees but know that we have our own tree, and we need that to be accepted too.

I urge you to listen carefully to what adoptees are saying and understand that adoption is not a one-time event in the life of an adoptee; it is something that impacts and influences our entire lives. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much to all of you for these presentations. Now, committee members will ask questions. I will start with the deputy chair.

Senator Seidman: I have to thank you all so very much for coming here tonight and sharing your stories with us. It’s clear that those stories are not easy for you to present to us. The emotion is very evident. I think we are responding with an emotional response, because I can feel it in the room. It’s tough, and we all appreciate your courage in coming and sharing with us.

Ms. Byrne, I think you said in your presentation that you are overwhelmed by the ultimate injustice of the system, and the cruel and harsh treatment, particularly toward the mothers. I must say I’m rather overwhelmed myself. I grew up in an era where I do recall hearing whispers of young girls in school with me who would just disappear and never return.

But listening to all of you this evening, I’m struck by a sense of a systemic conspiracy. I’m trying to understand that, and I’m wondering why. There are governments involved in providing money to adoption agencies.

I wonder, Ms. Byrne or Ms. Powell, if you can help me understand how this dreadful thing happened.

The Chair: Since you mentioned Ms. Byrne and Ms. Powell, we’ll start with them. Then anybody else who wants to come in who has something to add, please put your hand up and let me know.

Ms. Byrne: It’s very hard to put oneself back in another time and mindset. We know there were certain practices— we don’t flog people anymore and we don’t do all sorts of nasty things, but this was a little different. There was something around how the mothers were treated. It was as though this had gone beyond the pale, the pale being the palisade around society, and they had sinned.

I know for a fact that in the province of Quebec, there was a great deal of stuff around sin, and good Catholic girls didn’t get pregnant. If they did, there was a habit in Quebec of changing the names of the children and giving them a nom fictif, which was a fictitious name. Many babies born on a Monday would be Laplante, on Tuesday Laporte. They would give the mother a fake name and the baby would be born under a fake name, which is unthinkable by today’s standards.

In answer to your question, I don’t know how people justified it, other than making it somehow a matter of sin or of how we viewed an unwed mother, a “fallen woman.” We called these babies bastards. We called them illegitimate. We called the women fallen women. We had names for them. It was a punitive kind of behaviour toward these women.

The trouble is that it doesn’t go away. All of us can attest that the effects are lifelong. This is why it needs to be recognized that this was not a good pattern of behaviour. It may have been the way it was. I used to say to people that we wore stockings with seams up the back. We wore girdles and had different lifestyles. People talked about stealing a kiss, and now with the #MeToo generation, you try that and see what happens. It wouldn’t happen.

Nevertheless, the behaviour is abhorrent, and it should be recognized.

Ms. Powell: What I recall is that there was just so much shame around me being pregnant. I was sent away. I can recall that shame to this day. I can recall how my mother reacted. It was just unreal. When she found out I was pregnant, she beat me. I can’t imagine doing that. It was just beyond anything. I was sent away.

At that time, a lot of people wanted to adopt babies — white, blond, blue-eyed babies. Only my baby had brown hair. But there were a lot of people out there who wanted to adopt babies, so there was a supply and a demand. That’s what happened.

Ms. Andrews: My thesis is entitled White, Unwed Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada. I look at it as a perfect storm of things that happened post-World War II. It was a time of the mother imperative. The women who had been working in the war were sent back to the home. They were to be mothers. We were in the baby boom. Those kinds of things were happening. That mother imperative affected those women who could not have children as well.

Sociological ideals were coming forth post-World War II about attachment to children, like Bowlby’s attachment theory, Lorenz and all those different theories coming out at that time about children and attachment. There were the psychoanalytical theories, such as the unwed mother was ill. The most important thing we need to know is that at that time the unwed mother was considered psychologically ill in the vein of “What woman would do that? She has to be sick.”

I have tremendous amounts of research and quotations, which I’ve given you in your packages. If you just read the quotations in your packages, you will get a very good sense of what the experts were thinking at the time: We were sick, we were ill and we didn’t deserve to have our babies. We were unfit by virtue of the fact that we were unwed.

A lot of people get it mixed up with child welfare and losing a child to that and “something must be there.” No, this was simply because we were unmarried. It was not that we posed any harm to our children — of course not. We were unwed and therefore unfit. We were ill.

Because of these sociological, psychoanalytical theories and this post-war mother imperative coming together with new ways to separate babies from their mothers, like baby formula, there were a lot of things going on at that time which I say created this perfect storm where we saw mothers surrendering babies for adoption en masse.

The governments liked it because they wouldn’t have to support and help mothers and babies. Once a child is adopted, they are off the welfare rolls or off the government purse, and that was all part of it as well. The mother imperative was a big factor.

Ms. Jarvie: I was 20 or 21 when my baby was born. When I went to social services, she knew what my circumstances had been. She did not want to hear anything after that.

They withheld money I didn’t know was there. I was in a situation where I was temporarily without money, and of course being pregnant, I was not going to be working much longer. They started the adoption process. I didn’t know there were resources at all and they started the process right away. When I went into the home, if a social worker came, it was to talk about illegitimacy and adoption and what was best for my baby, right from the top. I had no idea and no way of knowing — there was no Internet or anything — that there were resources.

The only reason I was there was that I had been abandoned by my family and I didn’t know there were any resources. I had no money, so I couldn’t leave. I was trapped in there.

When it came down to the surrender, I thought they were taking my baby because I didn’t have any money. When I went into the office the last time, they switched. Now, I’m telling you this, but I didn’t know at the time; I was shocked that I was now signing a paper. I didn’t think I had anything to do with it.

What they did was a set-up as far as I’m concerned.

Ms. Byrne: About the mothers not being thought to be mentally fit, many agencies in the 1950s and 1960s psychologically tested the mothers before the children were placed for adoption in case this woman had had a baby out of wedlock; she may not be normal. The children were tested as well. They reported this to me, the mothers, that they were psychologically tested.

You asked before how this could happen. How could it happen that a woman would be asked to deliver a baby with a bag over her head, lest she see the child? I don’t understand it, to be quite honest, except to say it was disgraceful.

[Translation]

Senator Petitclerc: Thank you for generously sharing those stories that are troubling but that provide essential and important testimony.

I’m trying to understand. My questions will follow on Senator Seidman’s questions, but I will try to take a step further to better understand.

Quite frankly, when I started reading about it and reading all your stories, my first impression was that I was dealing with isolated stories that were part of an era, culture, or religion.

Ms. Andrews, in all your research and from what you’ve learned and researched, was government involvement limited to observation? Was it deliberate, coordinated or organized? I’m trying to understand the role and the responsibility of the governments of the day.

[English]

Ms. Andrews: Yes, governments were involved and certainly in the funding of maternity homes through the Canada Assistance Plan. They are specifically named that they should be funded by the Canada Assistance Plan and provincial governments, obviously, because adoption generally is handed down through the provinces. But certainly provincial governments were involved.

In fact, in my research I have an interesting piece showing that the adoption coordinator of the Province of Ontario was in one of these maternity homes and said, “These women don’t seem to know anything about anything. Should we make a booklet for their rights?” And the ministry responded, “Absolutely not.” So, yes, governments were very much involved and understood what was going on.

In fact, many children left Canada, lost their citizenship and were adopted out of the country. Federal government agencies provided their passports and looked after all of that. In other governments, at every level, and certainly in municipal governments, we saw that.

As far as social workers are concerned, depending on the province, of course, like Ontario, there are 50 different Children’s Aid Societies that hand down these services, whereas in B.C. it’s done directly by the government.

But certainly, whichever province you were in, these were the social work policies and the social workers were the employees of various provincial governments. They were the child welfare people. They were in a conflict of interest because they were handling not only facilitating the adoptions but getting the babies from the mothers.

I know it sounds like a conspiratorial thing, but when you look at the actual research, you see that is exactly what was going on.

Senator Petitclerc: I think I did know the answer to that question, but I just wanted it on the record.

Listening to your stories, the mothers were obviously very vulnerable in a time in their lives when they needed all the support they could get, whether the family, the social worker or anyone involved. There was a lot of isolation.

The way I read it and heard it is there was no help when you were signing those papers. Clearly, they didn’t call your parents to ask for the father or anyone. It’s just a small detail, but I find it very wrong. I want to make sure I understood correctly that you did not have anyone helping you make that decision or not make that decision.

Ms. Byrne: I can speak to that. I went to Family Court here in Ottawa at the corner of Sunnyside and Bronson. I was 20 years old, so under 21. When I walked in the door, I was told by the social worker, “You have to have a legal guardian. We have given you a legal guardian.” I had never met this man in my life.

I was taken into a side room. I remember him sitting in front of me, and he said, “You have no options. You need to sign these papers. I am your guardian and I am telling you what you have to do.” And that was it.

I went into court and the judge looked at me over his glasses. I remember Judge Good. He said, “What is a nice young girl like you doing in a court like this?” Then he said to go home and be a good girl. That was the end. That was me signing the papers. I was not told that I could change my mind. I was not told my legal rights, none of that.

The Chair: I think you were all pretty well saying that.

Ms. Andrews: Most women did not have to go to court. Most were signing in social service agencies, in an office, maybe with a social worker or two present, with no legal counsel. I haven’t met any mothers that were given copies of anything they signed. They came away with no piece of paper to even say this happened to them. So they had no proof of the event.

Mothers were not apprised of their right of revocation. In different provinces, it was either 30 days or 20 or 21 days where you had a right to change your mind. Mothers were not apprised of that.

I was in a room with three social workers, and I was very reluctant because I had expressed a desire to mother my baby. They said, “Go ahead; it will be better for him.” It was always using your love for your baby to coerce a mother: “Well, if you love your baby, then . . . .” That was the message.

For myself, that’s where I was, a 17-year-old girl with three social workers, no legal counsel and, of course, parents were not included. Even at 14 and 15 years of age, even today, a mother is legally able to sign those papers without any kind of legal counsel or assistance.

[Translation]

Senator Mégie: I will ask my question in French. Thank you for your very touching presentations. I know you’ve all been told that you would not see your children again for the rest of your lives. When did you decide to start looking for your children? What was the trigger?

[English]

Ms. Powell: It was in the early 1990s. I had lived in what I call a fog because that was the only way I could cope through my life. My raised daughter was about 14 or 15 years old and there were some issues that surfaced. I went to see a counsellor. Somehow, and I don’t know how this counsellor knew, she must have sensed that I had lost a baby to adoption. That’s what started me on the path of searching.

I looked and I looked, and somehow I had a good idea of where to look. I went to the museum in that small community and saw the adoption notice in the paper, and that was the puzzle piece that fit. I found her in 1992. But I just started coming out of this fog slowly, slowly. But it was a real process and a painful process.

Then I had to tell my children that I raised that I had this baby, and I didn’t know how I was going to do that, but I did it. They just gave me a hug. So it was like coming out of a fog.

The Chair: Let me bring Wendy Rowney into this from the standpoint of the adoptees and the process of trying to find the birth mother. Could you tell me about the experiences that you or others have had and how difficult it is and what the challenges are? Are they better today than they were back then?

Ms. Rowney: How long do we have?

Many provinces in Canada have made changes to adoption disclosure legislation which has allowed both adopted adults and their parents by birth to access limited identifying information about the other person. This has made some changes in terms of how one can go about finding the other party. But any documents you do get are, by definition, at least 18, 19 years old. It doesn’t come with an address and an invitation to dinner.

So there are the mechanics of finding each other. When they begin this search, many adoptees are very focused on the mechanics. What they don’t realize is that there is an emotional side to this as well. Finding your mother or your father or your brothers and sisters is life-altering. It changes your perception of who you are and why you are the way that you are.

Unlike some of the others here, my mother didn’t look for me. I found her. She said to me that she knew any daughter of hers would come looking. And she was right.

When I found her, I had expected to find someone who looked like me. That was what I had longed for all my life. I only knew about four things about my parents when I was growing up. I knew mother was of Irish background. I knew she was in high school. I knew she loved my father, and I knew she had long, dark brown hair. It was not a lot to form an identity around. So I really wanted to find someone who looked like me.

When I met her, she didn’t look anything like me, but we had a number of similarities that I had not anticipated. We liked the same food. We liked the same leisure activities. We had similar political ideology. We had the same china in our homes. It had never occurred to me to think that these things were inherited, and it turns out they are.

I grew up in a loving home where obviously nobody was related to anybody else. I had always thought that people are the way they are because that’s just who you are. It had never occurred to me that in many ways people are the way they are because of things that they have inherited from the people that come before them. When you learn that and when you see that, it changes how you think about yourself and who you are and the person you want to be.

Senator Duffy: Thank you, witnesses, for your great courage in coming here and telling us your stories: “If you love your baby, you will give your baby up.”

About 40 years ago, I was at a conference. As sometimes happens in the evening, when people are at a conference they have a few cocktails. One of the participants there was a very rich — I’m talking millions of dollars — six-foot tall big man. He dominated the conference I was attending at this university.

That evening we chatted, and he started to cry. He was an American and this was in the States. He didn’t know me. I thought, “What is all this about?” He said, “Do you think I’m any good?” I said, “Well, you’re the keynote speaker. You have made millions of dollars. You employ thousands of employees. Of course you’re good. You have accomplished so much. Why would you have any doubt about whether you are any good?” He said, “Well, one winter day, in a little church in Maine, a baby was put in a basket on the church steps.” I thought this is too bizarre to be true. This is like something out of a book. He said, “That little baby was me. I have no idea where I came from or why I am six feet three,” or whatever it was.

You can have all of the success in the world, but if you don’t know from where you have come, you are missing a huge chunk of your life. I didn’t know what to say. “Gee, that’s too bad,” or whatever.

One of the good things that have happened since my appointment to the Senate is that now, all of a sudden, you get people calling you, writing you, emailing you, saying, “I need some help. I think I have a connection to P.E.I. and I need to find my birth parents.”

I have discovered that P.E.I. is one of the places where it’s more difficult — one of the most difficult in Canada — to solve that riddle.

Ms. Andrews, you have written about this in the Toronto Star. What can you tell us not just about P.E.I. but about all of the provinces where they still keep this information secret?

Ms. Andrews: Thank you for your question. Right now, adoption records in Canada are semi-open in eight provinces. “Semi-open” means that an adoptee can file a paper and say they want to know the identifying information of their mother. Unless there has been a veto placed, then that adoptee would get that information and vice versa with the mother.

Senator Duffy: How would you know which province, or do people apply to all of the provinces looking for the parents?

Ms. Andrews: It’s the province where the adoption took place. If the adoption took place in Ontario, then you would apply in Ontario and so on.

As Monica said, there are a lot of difficulties between interprovincial adoptions where one province will be open or semi-open, like Ontario, and with a closed province, like Nova Scotia, if the baby was sent over there, then we can’t get the information, even though the adoption was finalized here.

Right now, we still have Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Quebec on the edge of trying to open some records there.

In terms of P.E.I. specifically, there are huge problems because a lot of babies left P.E.I. They were adopted into the States. They were adopted out of the country. A lot of mothers who came to P.E.I., to the maternity homes in those areas, came from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In Eastern Canada, there was a lot of that to hide the shame and hide the identity.

Within P.E.I. itself, I think there are about 4,500 adoptions in that 30-year period.

Right now, the situation in P.E.I. is that a petition has been put forward to the legislature. They are in the process of a public consultation, which I think is just finishing right now. It is my understanding that draft legislation will be coming forward in the fall session to open the adoption records.

With vetoes, although they talk about being able to protect privacy, they are mostly blaming us, the mothers, that we were promised privacy. Well, we weren’t promised anything because we were nobody and nothing. Yet, we’re the ones being used by governments. I see it in the States; I see it all over: “Well, the mothers were given confidentiality.” No mother was ever given a paper or anything to say that this was confidential or that she would have that kind of promise. It’s always about us.

I am here to say that, no, I’m not aware of any woman in Canada who was given that. They may have been given assurance by social workers of some kind, but certainly not a legal paper or anything like that.

Senator Duffy: How can we help? What can do to help right this terrible wrong?

Ms. Andrews: I know the Australian Senate inquiry recommended — hopefully you’ll be able to speak with them or hear them out tomorrow — that there be transparency in all adoption records, not only the ones held by the states but those held by maternity homes, and others, so that people can get their records and understand what happened to themselves in order to promote healing.

I think the recommendation of transparency in records across the land is good. There’s no downside to open records. Wherever they have been opened there has been no particular downside. They opened in Ontario in 2009. Everyone thought the sky would fall. Well, the sky didn’t fall and everything was fine. People are now getting their records within a couple of weeks. We hope to see the same across the country. Many of us have worked very hard on that. They are opening in New Brunswick on April 1. That will be a big thing that opens up the East as well. Newfoundland has been open for a very long time. It’s just P.E.I., Nova Scotia and Quebec that are really the sticklers.

There are a lot of secrets there, too, in terms of a lot of babies left the land and with the maternity homes and the Catholic system. A lot of horror stories come out of that area, unfortunately. We all know about the Butterbox Babies and things like that.

Ms. Byrne: We worry a lot about Quebec because of the difficulty.

The Chair: We are going to have somebody coming in from Quebec on Thursday.

Senator Bernard: Let me start, with full disclosure, by saying that I’m a social worker, a retired educator, who just happens to be a senator.

Let me also say for the record that in my practice and teaching of social work, I used to draw a line in the sand. I would say there was a group of social workers who saw the practice of social work as being about social control, and there was a group that saw the practice of social work as being about social justice. Let me assure you that I’ve been on the side of social justice. But I also want to assure you that clearly your experiences are all on the side of social control.

I want to acknowledge the trauma and the pain of the truth of your experiences. I want to thank you for coming and sharing with us and helping to inform us of your reality.

We know of the Sixties Scoop. One of you mentioned it. We know what happened with Indigenous children who were placed for adoption. As you folks are speaking, you’re telling truth that has been buried for so many years.

My daughter is also a social worker, now retired. Her first job was in adoption disclosure in Nova Scotia. We would have lots of talks about adoption reunions. It was absolutely wonderful when they worked and not so wonderful when they didn’t. Part of the problem was not enough resources to handle — and I think, Wendy, you talked about the emotional side of this, which really has not even been acknowledged. Clearly, your experiences as mothers who were forced to give up your children and the emotional side of that loss was never discussed with you.

I want to ask a couple of things. I’m getting to a question, but is very emotional, actually.

The Chair: Part one and part two of a single question.

Senator Bernard: Thank you for the indulgence. I think I’m the only social worker here, so they’re giving me a little indulgence here.

One of you mentioned the fact that there was high demand particularly for blonde, blue-eyed babies. In the work that you have done from your respective organizations and personal journeys, do you know what happened to the babies who weren’t blonde and blue-eyed, the babies who looked a bit like me?

Ms. Andrews: Babies of colour in post-war Canada were considered — I have them in some social work files as handicapped and many other labels were attached to them, such as unadoptable or unwanted. There were all kinds of labels attached to babies of colour.

Mothers of colour were given the resources in most cases to mother their babies because their babies were not “blue-ribbon babies” — the White, cute, blue-eyed, blonde girl babies. Unfortunately, I always say it’s probably the only time in history when a woman of colour got a better deal because she got the resources to mother her baby, where our babies were considered valuable and her baby was not considered valuable. In light of that, she got the resources to mother.

Some children of colour were sent out of the country as far as France. I have articles of children being sent to France and the United States to find homes for them because there weren’t that many babies of colour in the system at the time. Many went to foster homes and, of course, were never adopted. They were labelled unadoptable.

For the most part, I think also from the legacy of slavery, all of those things, I think the Black community surrounded those mothers more than maybe our community did for us. That’s basically what my research is showing.

Senator Poirier: I have to say I’m shocked to hear a lot of what you have been saying. I really want to thank you for sharing these emotional stories with us. I am very grateful that that shameful practice has been stopped and that at least we’re not dealing with that any longer today as women.

From my understanding, from what I have heard, it was not only done in Canada; it was done in other countries such as Australia, as you talked about a while ago, New Zealand, the U.K., the United States and different areas. If I understand correctly, it seems like it was organized and controlled by churches and governments, provincial and federal, at all levels during that time.

What justification has government offered, if any at all at this point, on this shameful practice that happened then? And have you had a chance to meet with cabinet members or MPs of the existing governments of today to begin a dialogue on this shameful practice? Where can we go from here?

Ms. Andrews: Yes, we have had many meetings here on the Hill. The last one we had I think was last year. We had about 50 MPs, some senators and two representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office. I did a PowerPoint showing the maternity homes and the women in the homes from my research. Images are good because people can see the women right there.

We have had a lot of support from MPs and MPPs on this issue. Every time we come, everybody is well on board and understands what happened back then and understands they were, in many cases, illegal acts, unethical for sure, particularly in social work and, as you’re saying, on that side of social control.

Certainly there were human rights abuses. We had women sexually abused in maternity homes, where the priest would come to give the girls their weekly communion and would fondle them. It goes back to all of these old institutions that we had in Canada. You haven’t heard about maternity homes because we were silenced. It was secretive. It was secret knowledge. We were told to be quiet and not to tell. So that’s why I think people are just learning about it now. We’re getting up there and we’re saying we have to talk about this now.

Senator Poirier: I understand that the Australian government has given an apology

Ms. Andrews: Yes.

Senator Poirier: Following what has happened in Australia, is there something you would like to see the Canadian government do differently? Is there anything else that you would like to share with us that you, as a group, would like to see happen?

Ms. Andrews: Well, they did a pretty good job. I think the women of Origins Australia were extremely pleased and had a lot of input into the wording of the apology and the other things they did. They have a permanent installation at the archives. They did funding for mental health issues. For the most part, they did go through with the recommendations that were put out by the inquiry. We were actually very pleased with the way it was handled.

You’re not always pleased with what governments are doing. As a group, we were, in general, very pleased, because they also identified some of the practices as illegal. They were named in the apology. If you ever get an opportunity to look at the first five minutes of that apology, you’ll see the emotion in it. It was given by Julia Gillard when she was prime minister.

Senator Poirier: My heart goes out to you all. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing what you have today.

The Chair: Ms. Andrews, you said that 95 per cent of the children in maternity homes were put up for adoption, whereas today, adoption is about 2 per cent. So, obviously, things have changed.

Is there any lingering of the old practices, or is it pretty much all different now? And what is different?

Ms. Andrews: That’s a really good question. Before the adoption mandate, maternity homes were actually mother-baby homes. Babies were in those homes. In your package you will see a picture of some of those homes with the cribs right there.

When the mother imperative and all these other things came together, and the babies were out of the homes and this clean break came in, even today most of the adoption practices are informed by the mandate, such as the clean break and the bonding when they have adoptive parents in delivery rooms. Many of the practices are still informed by the mandate. They are different from the mandate.

I think young, middle-class women are not choosing adoption, per se. They may be choosing abortion or choosing to mother more than they are choosing adoption. That’s certainly one of the changes.

We’re not hiding away these young girls. We’re not putting them in isolation and in quasi-incarceral settings where they are being really programmed to do a certain thing. I think that’s a big change.

Senator Munson: Thank you very much for being here. It is emotional testimony. We can’t erase the past, but we can talk about the present and the future.

I would like to follow up on Senator Poirier’s question. I don’t think there has been a specific answer to that. Should this government and provincial governments, and religious organizations that have been part of this whole process, apologize publicly and should reparations be involved? We can’t erase the past, but we can help give light to the future.

Ms. Andrews: The answer is yes.

The Chair: Does anybody else want to start an answer just to engage everybody else in the conversation? You can defer to Ms. Andrews if you want.

Ms. Powell: An apology would be wonderful, and funding for mental health professionals and for mothers. We have mothers who have a hard time providing for therapy for themselves because certain types of therapy are very expensive.

One of the therapies that is the gold standard is called EMDR and it’s just not affordable for many people. So funding would be a big thing.

The Chair: What does that stand for?

Ms. Powell: It’s a type of therapy that takes you back to the situation and redefines it for you, reworks it. It’s very effective.

Ms. Byrne: One of the places that I feel really sad about are schools of social work. Very few social workers have any training in adoption reunion so we get inundated with people who have nowhere else to go but to the volunteer sector where I, a housewife in my early seventies, am trying to support them. There are very few therapists who understand the issues of adoption. There are all sorts of issues, such as post-adoption, pre-adoption, pre-reunion, post-reunion.

There are a lot of psychologists. I say interview him or her first if you are going to a therapist, and find out if they know anything about the subject of what you’re going to embark on. It’s not well covered. Education is a very important factor.

I used to go to Carleton University and knew someone in the school of social work. I would do a thing every year on search and reunion, what it’s about, why you would want to do it and what it entails.

Ms. Rowney: I think that what we’re looking for in many ways is recognition that this happened and that in a slightly different format continues to happen, and recognition that whether you’re a mother, whether you are a father who surrendered a child to adoption — and we have not talked much about them. They were systematically excluded from the process in the years we are talking about. Even when the parents were a couple and the father wanted to be involved, he was usually not allowed to be. So whether you’re a mother, whether you’re a father or whether you are the adoptee, this is something that impacts their lives on a day-to-day basis.

In some ways, for many adoptees, there were great benefits but those need to be balanced with the great losses that every adoptee experiences. We need to have recognition that this is something that impacts people’s lives.

Part of that recognition is recognizing people’s right to know each other. We’re not a special breed of person. We don’t need special laws that are created for our own protection.

I don’t need a law that tells me who it is I can or cannot know, particularly when that person is someone who gave birth to me. It doesn’t mean I’m going to have a great relationship with her or a relationship at all. All it means is recognition on the part of Canada that all people have a right to know who they are and that parents have a right to know who their children are.

The Chair: Well said.

Ms. Jarvie: I think the importance of an apology is that all our sons and daughters know they were wanted because what has come out of that is that they were abandoned by us, and that isn’t the truth. That’s important in the apology and for their lives as well.

Ms. Andrews: From the question about this government, yes, 100 per cent they should acknowledge it and validate that these things took place.

Reparations could be in any form. With the mothers that I spoke to, I asked what they want. We did a poll. “What do you want from churches and government?” I think Ms. Rowney hit it: Most want acknowledgement and validation. These are shocking things. People sometimes don’t believe that these things actually took place and they really did.

So that’s why we do the research to prove it. We use the Australian Senate inquiry to give the credibility that it did happen.

Yes, the acknowledgement of validation and certainly reparations for mothers. I don’t know any mothers who are specifically looking for money, but they are certainly looking for help with mental health issues. That’s one of things we hear a lot. EMDR or other kinds of trauma therapy are available.

Yes, this government should act the way Australia acted.

Senator Munson: How many mothers are we talking about? We talk about residential school survivors. When we talk of residential schools and the apology, we have numbers. I would like to have numbers.

Ms. Andrews: My research shows between 1940 and 1970 in Canada, over 300,000 mothers were impacted by these policies and practices that were illegal, unethical and human rights abuses. That does not mean that 300,000 women agree. Some women say, “I did that and I think that was best for my baby.” We can’t say “all,” but we do know that 300,000 women were impacted by the policies.

Those children were adopted. Those are the adoption numbers from 1940 to 1970 in Canada from unmarried mothers. Many provinces broke out those numbers separately, Senator Munson. If you go into the Ontario records you will see adoptions from unmarried mothers. You can go in year by year and add them up.

Senator Dean: To follow up on the theme at the end of this first round of questions, I want to add my voice to that of my colleagues about coming here to share these stories with us. It’s painful, and I hope it’s cathartic, but these are tough stories to listen to. It’s important that we have both mothers and a daughter here.

We have heard the personal stories, and they are painful and dramatic. We’ve also heard from you, Ms. Andrews, a contextual story. It was in the context of a particular post-war period, historically specific although perhaps not unusual at the time. It was partly driven by morality, partly driven by religion. As Senator Seidman asked, was it systemic? It seemed to be systemic for all of those reasons. It was certainly unethical, and we have heard that it may have gone considerably beyond that.

We hear about the importance of an acknowledgement. We hear about the importance of supporting those affected and living with the outcomes of these practices.

We will be listening to our Australian colleagues, and that will be important. We hear you when you say that we should listen to them.

I want to follow up on the notion of an apology that’s inclusive. We can certainly hear from our Australian colleagues about what steps they took to make that apology inclusive. While you are here, and because things are culturally and personally specific, it would be important for us to know what inclusivity means to you. If you are not ready to provide that advice, we would invite you to provide it to us later. That seems to be vitally important in situations of this sort, and we are hearing it is very important to you. What would inclusivity feel like?

The Chair: You can always respond to that later, if you wish.

Is that all, Senator Dean?

Senator Dean: Yes.

The Chair: We will go to the second round now.

Senator Petitclerc: My question has been mostly answered. I was concerned on the wrong that was historically made by not being recognized when it comes to caring and healing. I think you have expressed that the healing process and the support you need for the healing process, whether it is funding or just plain recognition of this specific trauma, it’s not happening the way I believe it should. That was my question, but you have pretty much answered it. Perhaps you could just say if I’m right in assuming that.

Also, maybe because we haven’t talked about it, and so we can have it on the record, what is your impression on the fathers in that whole situation? Or is it completely separate and you don’t really have that conversation in the groups that you represent? Are they organized? We haven’t really read about that. No matter what happened, if they disappeared, as I have read in some testimony — I’m sure there are some consequences for them as well. I don’t know if it is something that you can answer.

Ms. Byrne: In my experience, birth fathers were not informed often; they didn’t know they were birth fathers. If the mother was single and she put the father’s name on the birth registration, it was expunged in Ontario. It was removed and she was not permitted to name a birth father if she was a single woman.

If she was married, her husband’s automatically was on that document, even if he was not the father, because any child born to a married woman in those years was automatically her husband’s child. Who else’s would it be?

We have always complained about the expunging of information from a legal document that was signed and stamped. That is highly irregular to me.

We have difficulty with fathers because they were systematically excluded from many of these discussions. Many didn’t turn up. They were always called on the documents the PF, the putative father, because the mother gave information. When you get those old backgrounds, they said, “The PF didn’t turn up, didn’t come to the meeting. All the information we have is from the mother.” These fathers were encouraged not to attend, and the mother was encouraged not to involve him in any way.

I married the birth father much later. My husband was at university in Nova Scotia at the time. He went to the social services there to tell them that his girlfriend was pregnant and ask what he should do. He was told by the good social worker, who was a nun, that it was not his affair and not his business, that it was my problem and he should keep out of it. That was the end of the story.

He did come back, because I lived in Ottawa, and went with me to social services. All of his information was given to the social worker at the time. When he applied to Thunder Bay, to Vital Statistics, to get the new amended registration of our daughter’s birth, he was refused it, because he had never been offered the registration of birth to sign.

These fathers are not part of the story very much, only because they were kept away.

Ms. Rowney: I have been talking with a lot of fathers recently. In many ways their stories mirror that of young mothers in that they felt very powerless. They were excluded and they felt excluded from the system. They weren’t sure what to do. How many 17- or 18-year-old boys are going to stand up to or know the questions to ask to figure out what their rights are in that situation?

Many of them speak of feeling emasculated over the years because they were unable to protect their child and the woman they loved. In our society, certainly in those years, that was perceived to be a man’s role. Because they were unable to do that at a very difficult time in their lives, they have continued for 40, 50 or 60 years to feel that they are a very unworthy individual and not a contributing member of society.

Most of them have been silent for most of these decades, because it’s very embarrassing. Some are also embarrassed that they didn’t stand up, come forward and protect their girlfriends.

The women here are talking about how there was an absence of choice for them. There was also an absence of choice for the fathers. In order for something to be a choice, you have to be able to choose between two things. There is nothing to choose between, something is not a choice; it just happens to you. Yet they felt they ought to have done something differently than they did, even though at the time there was no other avenue open to them.

As a result of this, they have been even more reluctant than mothers to come forward to support groups to seek out information. If they try to find information about their child, they often can’t, as Monica was saying, because their names are not on the original birth certificates, which means the government and Children’s Aid Societies will not recognize their right to information.

Senator Bernard: I’d like to come back to the statement I think you made, Ms. Andrews, in response to a question I was asking. You said that racialized mothers have the resources to mother. I don’t know if your research extended to Nova Scotia, but certainly with the racialized mothers, children, adult adoptees and foster children I have worked with over the years, they would see that differently. Could you say a bit more about that, please?

Also, how are mixed raced children seen, children who may have been born to a White mother, for example, and a Black father?

Ms. Andrews: What I was trying to say is that we’re talking about the period mostly from the 1940s to 1960s. I don’t know what cohort you were working with.

I have done some research in Nova Scotia. Most of these homes for unwed mothers were pretty well filled with middle-class White girls. If you look at the demographics of those homes at the time and ask any of the mothers that were there, there were no women of colour in these homes.

In Nova Scotia, we did have a couple of private homes, to my knowledge. I am talking about maternity homes in the 1960s. There were some private homes.

Now, of course, we know that the child-welfare system is extremely racialized, and that those children and Indigenous children represent huge numbers in the system. At that time in Canada, too, in other provinces — not so much Nova Scotia — the Black population was not as high. But from the research I have seen, they were maybe not coerced the way we were because they weren’t in those homes and weren’t put in that system to surrender their children for adoption.

Did you find that they were?

Senator Bernard: Yes.

Ms. Andrews: That’s very interesting to me. In the same period?

Senator Bernard: Certainly the 1960s, late 1950s.

Are you familiar with the Association of Black Social Workers?

Ms. Andrews: Yes.

Senator Bernard: I’m one of the founding members of that organization.

Ms. Andrews: I know that. I also know that the Black social workers in the States were actually asking, “Why don’t we have maternity hospitals for Black women?” They wanted the same thing. Unfortunately, they weren’t places where people wanted to be, unfortunately, because you would lose your baby if you were in such a home. I’m certainly open to looking at that more.

I’m no expert on Nova Scotia social welfare systems, but my research did not bring that up. In fact, I had one piece of research, a government document from Nova Scotia, that said they were surprised to find there was, in the wording of the time, a “negro girl” in the home. So that was brought out in the government reports.

It seemed to be an anomaly to me, but my research is limited and I just found one or two things. Those are the kinds of things I found.

The Chair: We will have two more questions. I will ask that the questions be put first and then get the answers from the panel.

Senator Poirier: First, we talked about looking for an apology, recognition, from the government regarding the practice that was going on in those years. Have you approached the churches for the same kind of recognition?

Second, given all the mothers that this has happened to, do you have an idea of how many have been able to reunite with their sons or daughters that they have found?

Senator Duffy: I want to say thank you to all of our witnesses tonight. Part of what we’ve learned here, and hopefully the viewers through CPAC, which will broadcast this meeting, is the shame felt by people who have been adoptees and mothers who have not met their children.

I had two people call my office. They reached out and spoke to their birth mothers and were rejected. What we’ve heard here tonight gives us a deeper appreciation — and I hope those adoptees across the country have a deeper appreciation — of the shame that was put on their mothers by the institutions, which they carry with them to this day. I believe, in these two young people who called me, that shame was the reason for their rejection, because the birth mother had been deeply damaged and was not able to come to grips. It underscores the point that you are making here and which this committee has been so sympathetic to.

The Chair: To Senator Poirier’s two-part question, responses?

Ms. Byrne: May I answer Senator Duffy?

The Chair: You may answer him, too. I didn’t think he had a question, but he had a comment.

Ms. Byrne: Very briefly, I just did two reunions with two 91-year-old mothers. Both had declared they did not wish to be contacted through their provincial social services because their kids didn’t know. The kids were in their seventies. Nevertheless, the two adoptees found these two mothers separately and contacted them. Both the mothers said, “I’m so glad you found me, just don’t tell the kids; I don’t want them to know.” The shame had followed them until they were 91.

So, yes, there are reasons why mothers refuse contact, and it’s not because they don’t love their children.

The Chair: I don’t want to lose sight of Senator Poirier’s questions. One was: You said what you want from government, but what about the churches? We do have the United Church coming on Thursday.

The second question was: What number or what percentage of the people that you have been in contact with actually do connect?

Ms. Andrews: In terms of churches, Origins Canada had a historic meeting with mothers as a panel similar to this, with the Presbyterian, Salvation Army, Catholic, United and Anglican churches. All sent top-level representatives to our meeting to listen to the stories of the mothers. We had mothers who represented those religious and who had been in their maternity homes.

The churches have been very good in terms of listening but not so much in terms of doing, with the exception of the United Church, which has actually put quite a few things together for us and at least has been working with us and acknowledging and validating these things with us.

So, yes, we have reached out to the churches. We are very disappointed that the churches that were contacted to come to the study, with the exception of the United Church, declined to be here.

The Chair: I might also add that federal and the provincial governments contacted also declined, but we will have the Ontario Children’s Aid Society. The Mouvement Retrouvailles from Quebec will be coming on Thursday, and tomorrow will be Australia.

Before I thank our witnesses, I want to point out to committee members that I will be putting a motion before the Senate. Bill C-45, the cannabis bill, will occupy a lot of our time for the next couple of months after we finish this subject. We will need to hold some special meetings, so I will put a motion before the Senate. You have heard these motions many times, asking us to meet, notwithstanding that the Senate may be sitting.

We are looking at a couple of Monday meeting prospects and a couple of extensions of the Wednesday and Thursday meetings by an additional hour to get through our consideration of Bill C-45.

Senator Poirier: What about the second part of my question?

The Chair: That’s true. You have one minute.

Ms. Byrne: We have no idea, because as I said, we hear from people and they ask a million questions. They go away and do their own thing, and we never know. Sometimes I’ll chase them down and ask whatever happened. But I do that all the time. I’m going back 25 or 30 years. I phone them, and they say, “Yes, I found my daughter 20 years ago.” “Thanks for letting me know.” So the file is still open in my drawer.

The Chair: Let me say that the five of you have been of great value to us in the consideration of this matter. You’ve told us personal stories. You’ve told us about a lot of the research you’ve done. It has been very valuable as we start this study.

(The committee adjourned.)