Cardus publishes national overview of benefits available to adoptive families

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 27, 2024

OTTAWA, ON – Adopting children in Canada can be complex and expensive, looking different in every province and territory and leaving many families needing post-adoption support. Moreover, it can be difficult for those wishing to adopt a child to navigate the adoption system and find out about what benefits are available to them. Cardus has taken a step toward changing this situation by publishing Adoption Policies Across Canada – a full, national overview of the adoption benefits available to families at the federal, provincial, and territorial levels.

“Cardus aims to help simplify the process for families and policymakers just trying to find their way through the various adoption systems across the country,” says Peter Jon Mitchell, Family Program Director at Cardus. “By placing all available benefits in one easy-to-access document, we hope to make it easier for families to get the information they need. We also want to help governments and others dealing with adoption policy easily learn from jurisdictions other than their own.”

Adoption Policies Across Canada offers an overview of government benefits available to adoptive families at all levels as of April 2024. Benefits generally fall into three broad categories:

• Financial benefits, such as subsidies, tax credits, and deductions, to compensate for the costs of going through the adoption process
• Service support, including direct services or financial support for obtaining services during the adoption process or after it is complete
• Parental leave, which is primarily unpaid job-protected leave. Recipients may take this leave in conjunction with paid parental leave through the federal Employment Insurance program (or the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan in Quebec).

Information in Adoption Policies Across Canada comes primarily from open-source government publications and websites. Cardus also hosted a roundtable discussion with adoption specialists, family counsellors, and adoptive parents in April 2023 and conducted interviews with adoption specialists in April 2023 and March 2024. Adoption Policies Across Canada is freely available on the Cardus website.

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Daniel Proussalidis
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media@cardus.ca

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Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.