A three-part editorial witness on Canadian state-managed Indigenous family separation — and the financialised residential-care market on the English horizon. From residential schools to provincial child welfare, the Sixties Scoop, birth alerts, and the modern apprehension system. One structural project, rotating through institutional forms. The next rotation is already visible in England, in pounds.
The TRC closed the schools. The framework they expressed — child transfer, cultural severance, administrative authority over Indigenous family life — did not. It moved. The numbers, two decades into reconciliation, are still moving in the wrong direction.
Social workers are part of the carceral apparatus. The case for understanding Canadian child welfare as family policing — and why naming the role matters more than blaming the individuals inside it.
England has financialised what Canada has so far only proceduralised. Eighty-four percent of children's homes are privately owned; the top providers extract 22.6 percent margins on placements averaging £318,400 a year. The mechanism is visible there, in pounds. Canada is upstream — but only because the private capture is younger here, not because the underlying design is different.