Access and Equity: Evaluating Linguistic Disproportionality in Child Protection Services
Background: For Canada’s Linguistic minority communities’ social service access can be hindered by public policy (Pocock, 2012; Bowen, 2015). Quebec in particular has unique challenges after the merger of social services and health care services into one conglomeration called the Centre Intégré Universitaire de Santé et de Services Sociaux (CUISSS) in 2016 and the current ongoing merger of all public social and health services into Sante Quebec (CityNews Montreal, 2023). These cost-saving mergers has been highly criticized and may have disproportionately affected certain cultural communities more than others. This project seeks to explore the differences between English and French child welfare services in Quebec, focusing on disparities in available placements, available types of placements, signalments, retained signalments, and delays between important clinical decisions.
Objectives: Comparative Analysis: Examine the differences in available placements, signalments (child protection alerts), time between signalment and investigations, and clinical decisions (for e.g., substantiation of maltreatment, referral for services, placement in out-of-home care), and finally adoptions between Montreal-based Anglophone and Francophone child welfare agencies.
Provincial Trends: Understand how these differences vary across regions within Quebec over the last five years of services, including both pre-and post-pandemic periods.
Policy Implications: Primarily we are focused on identifying service gaps and making recommendations to promote equity in child welfare service delivery both between linguistic groups, but we will also be able to share insights about service gaps between urban and rural communities.
Method: Data Source: The project will use administrative data from the AS480, which provides a comprehensive overview of child protection signalments, available placements and delays between services in all regions of Quebec. Key variables: Number of placements, signalments, retained signalment, delays between youth protection service points, and finalized adoptions.
Data Analysis Plan: After extracting 4 years’ worth of data, we will use child population levels to examine differential incidence rates per 1,000 children in the province. We will further use paired t-tests to compare and contrast child welfare practices across Anglophone and Francophone agencies. Comparing as an example the number of signalments per 1000 children between linguistic groups. We will also use ANOVA strategies to compare means across all regions of Quebec. We can only compare French to English services in Montreal with these data sets but being able to compare our points of interests across rural and urban settings will help to provide some clarity.
Knowledge Dissemination Plan: We will use this information to create reports and presentations that can be shared across both Quebec and Canada. We will partner with CHSSN and present these findings in Fall 2025 at their youth conference for social service professionals. We will prepare policy briefs for the Quebec government.