Veronica Strong-Boag

“Children of Adversity”: Disabilities and Child Welfare in Canada from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

The needs of particularly vulnerable children and youth have long tested Canadian parents and communities. Youngsters with mental and physical impairments have historically experienced a wide range of conditions that are always negotiated in the context of cultural assumptions, existing social supports and barriers, and available technologies. Both institutionalization and inadequate domestic substitutes have a long history, like birth families everywhere, of devastating youngsters beyond their original impairments. The construction of that predicament and its relationship to the use of institutions, fostering, and adoption in Canadian child welfare practices is the concern here. This article begins with a review of the commonplace evaluation of disabled youngsters in English-speaking Canada, next considers the vulnerability of families, and turns finally to institutional and domestic alternatives to birth family care. Although the story in each case is mixed, youngsters with disabilities remained vulnerable into the twenty-first century.

Saving, Kidnapping, or Something of Both? Canada and the Vietnam/Cambodia Babylift, Spring 1975

In the spring of 1975 Canada supplied one chapter in the Vietnam “Babylift.” Canadians disagreed about the Babylifts meaning for themselves and their nation. For some, it offered the opportunity to rescue child casualties of war and to confirm a multicultural country; for others, it constituted kidnapping and evidence of Western imperialism. This dual response is explored in four parts in this article. First, there is a brief history of Canadian adoption, which grew gradually more inclusive after World War II to include youngsters of Asian origin. Second, it describes public, especially newspaper, responses to the US war in Vietnam and the place of children in this. Third, it introduces adults engaged in the Babylift and their approach to international adoption more generally. And finally, it profiles the children involved and examines what rescue or kidnapping might have entailed for them.