Care and custody
Canada holds 78,292 data points about young people it places in custody, going back to 1997, broken down by sex, sentence length and whether the custody was secure or open. It holds 120 about children it places in out-of-home care. Both are the state removing a child from home. One of them has an instrument.
The two files
What each subject is measured with, as held in this warehouse
| Subject | Cells | Measures | Periods | Span |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Youth admissions by sentence length and sex | 74,152 | 216 | 27 | 1997/1998 to 2023/2024 |
| Young persons in correctional services, counts | 4,140 | 12 | 27 | 1997/1998 to 2023/2024 |
| Children in out-of-home care, national | 120 | 6 | 9 | 2013/2014 to 2021/2022 |
That is a ratio of 652 to 1 in cells and 38 to 1 in distinct measures. The custody series runs eighteen years longer.
The six measures in the care file are: children in out-of-home care as a point-in-time count, the same as a rate, the population used as the denominator for that rate, and three variants of the same. It is not a poor file. It is a careful national estimate assembled from provincial administrative data by the Public Health Agency of Canada, and it is the best single national picture that exists. It is 120 numbers.
A comparison closer to home
British Columbia publishes 64,823 data points about child care facilities and spaces, meaning daycare: how many licensed centres, how many seats, over time. That is one province, one subject, 64,823 numbers.
Against the national out-of-home care file, that is 540 to 1. One province counts its daycare seats five hundred and forty times more finely than the country counts the children in its care.
This is not an argument against counting daycare seats. Child care capacity is a live policy question and the data is well kept. It is a statement about what happens when one subject gets an administrative reporting system and another does not.
What is missing is not the same as what is unknown
Provinces do hold this data. Every province and territory runs a child protection system that records, for each child, when they came into care, why, where they were placed, and when they left. The information exists in case management systems across the country.
What does not exist is a national instrument that collects it on a common basis and publishes it. This warehouse holds fragments that show the shape of the gap: Saskatchewan's child welfare statistics, British Columbia's child protection case data, Alberta's child intervention summary, Newfoundland and Labrador's staffing counts for its child, youth and family services department. Most are a few dozen numbers, and most carry licences that permit them to be read but not redistributed.
Alongside them sit three audits. The Auditor General of Canada has reported on child and family services in Yukon and the Northwest Territories, and issued a follow-up on Nunavut. Audits are what a system gets instead of measurement.
Why the ratio matters
Measurement is not neutral about outcomes. A subject with 27 years of disaggregated data can support a question like whether a policy change in 2011 moved admissions for girls differently than for boys. A subject with six measures over nine years cannot support that question, or most others.
The consequence is asymmetric in a specific direction. The custody system can be studied, criticised, defended and reformed with evidence. The care system, at the national level, largely cannot. When an argument about children in care has to be made, it gets made with an audit, an inquest, a coroner's report or a memoir, because those are the instruments available.
The children in the two files are not different children. The relationship between having been in care and later contact with the justice system is one of the most consistently reported findings in the field, and the country measures one end of it in fine detail and the other end barely at all.
What would change it
Not a study. A reporting standard, and the obligation that goes with it. The custody numbers exist because provinces and territories report to a national survey on a common basis every year. Nothing about child protection data is technically harder. The difference is that one has a standing collection and the other does not.
The measurable version of that ask is on this page. It is the ratio, and it is checkable by anyone, and it will move if the collection changes. That is the point of publishing it as a number rather than as a complaint.