Foster Care Records Canada is a website dedicated to providing information and assistance to adoptees and former crown wards (Fostered Adults) toward locating their birth parents and/or siblings and to assisting them to retrieve their own rightful records from the Children’s Aid Societies and other child-welfare agencies. The process of obtaining one's information is often an onerous undertaking due to a lack of recourse and misapplication of legislation. For those who were adopted or who placed a child for adoption, there are numerous other avenues to explore which I will gladly direct you to.

We, Fostered Adults are not -- for some unexplained reason -- under the purview of either the existing Federal or Provincial privacy legislation, nor are we covered by the Record part and provisions of the Child and Family Services Act as those provisions of the Act have never been proclaimed or brought into force as of yet.

It is because of these exemptions that we are on our own in trying to obtain any of our own personal information to which we have a right as clearly stated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In Ontario on June 1, 2009 Bill 12, The Access to Adoption Records Act and came into effect. What does this mean for you as an adoptee or a birth parent? As a fostered adult it will mean nothing as yet we don't have any official right to our history file.

Adoptees: You will be able to request a copy of your original birth registration which should show your full name and your birthmother's name at birth. If your birthfather was named, you should also get that provided that the birth father signed a declaration and gave it to the Children's Aid Society or whoever arranged the adoption that he wanted his name listed. Even this did not guarantee that it would be.

Birthparents: You wil also be able to request your child's new name at the time of their adoption, if you were named on the registration of birth.

A big problem is that the information you will receive is as old as the adoption and names change due to marriage etc. and you will not be given that information.

NO OTHER FAMILY members ie brothers, sisters, grandparents etc has the right to this information and no member of the public will be given this information. If there is a Disclosure Veto then this will effectively block the release of the personal information.

UPDATED JANUARY 9, 2010

As of December 2009 there were * 1,568 No-contact notices
* 2,276 Contact preferences (method of contact)
* 6,600 Disclosure vetoes
* 8,743 Requests for information from adoptees and birthparents

The Registrar General's Office in Thunder Bay are processing the back-log of no-contact notices, contact preferences and disclosure vetoes first before working on the back-log of requests for birth and adoption
information.