QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Jobs and Families
Support for Children and Youth
December 9, 2025
Welcome back to the Senate, Minister Hajdu.
Earlier this year, UNICEF Canada published their Report Card 19, which reported on the well-being of Canadian children compared to other wealthy countries. In the report, Canada ranks nineteenth out of 36 peer countries on the overall status of children. Progress for children in Canada has stalled since 2018. We are now ranking close to the bottom of our peer countries when it comes to adolescent suicide, child mortality and acquiring skills.
Minister, what is the Government of Canada’s current strategy to support children and youth in Canada?
Thank you very much, Senator Moodie. Thank you for your advocacy on behalf of children and youth. It’s always a pleasure to see you.
Your Honour, we have focused tremendously on children and youth over the last number of years, including through the Canada Child Benefit, which is estimated to have lifted well over 400,000 children out of poverty. Other social programs that were launched over the past few years have also helped families, including the national Canadian Dental Care Plan, which helped many families in my riding of Thunder Bay—Superior North; I hear that on a regular basis from families and individuals who have had their teeth looked at, sometimes for the first time.
The National School Food Program is another recent federal addition that supports provinces and territories regarding those healthy starts. The Early Learning and Child Care Plan, which is so linked to early learning development — it is well established that the ages 0 to 3 years are so essential to the development of healthy brains and bodies — is an immense improvement over no early learning and child care program.
Finally, Your Honour, this is a joint effort with provinces and territories. As you know, they have a lot of control over the outcomes for young Canadians through the way that they design their school boards and their own supports for families and, as we talked about, their supports for low-income families in particular.
Minister, the issue is that these policies and programs work independently of each other, and not all of them are advancing at the same pace, nor is the progress of these programs even being tracked. We also know that governments, provinces, territories, municipalities and Indigenous governments are all doing good work, but it is clear that there is no coordination amongst them.
Why is the Government of Canada without a national strategy for children and youth at this time?
Thank you very much, Your Honour. I know that this is something the senator is passionate about and working on. I have raised this with my colleague Anna Gainey, the Secretary of State for Children and Youth, and we’ll continue to be focused on what I talked about earlier, which is how we better coordinate as a federation with provinces and territories to track what we’re doing and the outcomes of our spending.
As I said as I reached the end of an earlier question, this is a particular priority of the Prime Minister as well. There is a very clear directive across ministerial portfolios that we must be able to better measure how we are spending the available resources of the Government of Canada and how our work is either complementing or not —
Thank you, minister.
