In November 2025, the McGill School of Social Work published a study examining racial disparities in child welfare interventions across Canada, finding that Black children were investigated for maltreatment at 2.27 times the rate of white children. When researchers matched cases with similar clinical and socioeconomic profiles, out-of-home placement rates were twice as high for Black children as for their white counterparts.
Existing data has posited that the overrepresentation of Black families in child welfare interventions reflects structural inequalities. Researchers note that poverty and its associated factors are the primary drivers of out-of-home placement, and with Black Canadians experiencing disproportionately high rates of poverty, they argue that racial disparities in interventions merely reflect the impact of systemic racism on socioeconomic status. However, these disparities cannot be explained by poverty alone.
Child welfare practices have systematically targeted Black families through biased decision-making, over-policing, and heightened surveillance of Black families. Existing risk assessment tools have failed to account for differences in parenting styles between families, revealing a profound racial bias embedded within national child protection systems. Yet, these findings do not include Quebec, as the province does not collect or publicly release comparable race-based data on child welfare practices.
Quebec’s failure to make race-based data publicly available limits the province’s ability to identify and respond to potential disparities in its youth protection system. Without race-based data, the youth protection system is shielded from accountability, dangerously obscuring the racial inequities faced by Black children and their families.
In the context of a system that holds the power to separate families and inflict lasting trauma, race-based data is crucial to understanding the over-policing of Black families within our province’s youth protection systems. Quebec’s failure to collect accessible, race-based child welfare data has slowed down that initiative, forcing professionals and scholars to rely solely on data collected at the national level, namely, the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS). This negligence creates a significant and alarming information gap. The absence of disaggregated data on racialized communities makes it impossible to accurately assess how racial bias impacts the overrepresentation of Black youth in the Canadian child welfare system.
This is not the first time Quebec has demonstrated inconsistency in addressing race-based issues and youth protection. In 2021, the Quebec government conducted an evaluation of child welfare systems across the province, with its final report revealing that Black children account for approximately 30 per cent of children in the youth protection system, despite only representing 15 per cent of the population. The report emphasized that this statistical phenomenon could be attributed to social workers’ biases, calling upon the government to address racism within the system. However, years after the report was issued, most of its recommendations remained incomplete or inconsistently applied. Of the report’s 65 recommendations, the Commission spéciale sur les droits des enfants et la protection de la jeunesse found that only one has been fully implemented.
Addressing how over-policing shapes youth protection interventions involving Black families requires more than collecting and releasing disaggregated child welfare data. It also requires the acknowledgment of systemic racism in youth protection and responses through concrete reforms. These measures may include meaningful partnerships and collaborations with community organizations to better understand the lived experiences of the targeted families, instituting anti-bias training for social workers, and implementing the recommendations from expert committees such as Quebec’s Commission spéciale.
Until Quebec fully confronts systemic racism as a central driver of Black children’s overrepresentation in the youth protection system and starts collecting and disaggregating data at the provincial level, it cannot credibly claim a commitment to addressing structural racial inequities. Meaningful action must be informed by transparent data and guided by the experiences of the communities most affected.
