For Indigenous kids' welfare, our government knows better; it just needs to do better

This week, the story of a newborn baby removed from her family in Manitoba added to a litany of reports about the over-representation of First Nations children in child-welfare care. The number and persistence of these stories lead many to believe this is a problem without a solution. But real answers have been on the books for decades – governments just need to implement them.

In 1967, social worker George Caldwell observed that 80 per cent of the children placed in residential schools in Saskatchewan were there as child-welfare placements. He called upon Indian Affairs to put more emphasis on services to support families and to ensure services were culturally appropriate.

In the succeeding decades, his recommendations were never properly implemented and a plethora of provincial and federal reports followed, finding the same problem and recommending the same solutions. These reports suffered the same fate as Mr. Caldwell’s recommendations: piecemeal government implementation or being flat out ignored.