Ontario Child Deaths

June 11, 2007 permalink

The full Report of the Paediatric Death Review Committee and Deaths Under Five Committee (pdf) is now available online. It includes 83 deaths of children in 2006 with open CAS files. The only indication of the death rate in foster care is a note on page 22 that 19 of those deaths occurred in CAS care. For the 19035 foster children in Ontario in 2006, the reported death rate was 100 per hundred thousand, 3.5 times as dangerous as parental care. The best available data from Arizona and Saskatchewan suggests death rates of 147 and 266 per hundred thousand. Either Ontario has the world's safest foster care or some deaths have been omitted. The report does not claim to include all child deaths.

Addendum: Since the original report has been withdrawn from the web, here is our local copy (pdf).