The system did not end.
It changed shape.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that Canada's residential school system constituted cultural genocide¹. The schools closed. The framework they expressed — child transfer, cultural severance, administrative authority over Indigenous family life — did not. It moved into other institutions and other paperwork. The numbers, two decades into the era of reconciliation, are still moving in the wrong direction.

In the 2021 census, Indigenous children made up 7.7 percent of children under fifteen in Canada and 53.8 percent of children in foster care². A decade earlier, in 2011, that second figure was 47.8 percent. In 2016 it was 51.7. The trajectory across three census periods is not toward reconciliation. The disparity is widening².

The continuity

The argument advanced by Indigenous scholars, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and child welfare researchers is not that residential schools and modern child welfare are identical. It is that they are continuous — that they belong to one structural project that has rotated through institutional forms while preserving its function: the administrative separation of Indigenous children from Indigenous communities³.

The trajectory is widening

Canada's stated commitment to reducing the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in care goes back to at least 2015, when the TRC issued its 94 Calls to Action¹. Bill C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, came into force on January 1, 2020, affirming Indigenous jurisdiction over child welfare⁴. The census data spans this entire period.

Over the same decade, the Indigenous share of the under-15 population rose only modestly — from 6.9 percent to 7.6 percent². The overrepresentation in foster care grew faster than the population. The system is producing more disparity, not less.

Birth alerts: how the most explicit form ended

Birth alerts were the most legible mechanism of the continuity argument because they made the structure visible. A hospital, sometimes flagged weeks before delivery by a social worker, would notify staff that an expectant mother was considered high-risk. The criteria were broad: previous involvement with child welfare, having been in foster care herself, poverty, addiction, frequent moves. Apprehension could follow within hours of birth.

Following the 2019 final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which demanded an immediate end to the practice³, provinces moved one by one.

Quebec was the last to abolish the practice, four years after British Columbia⁶. In November 2025, British Columbia reached a proposed $66 million class action settlement with women subjected to its birth alert system, the first such resolution in Canada⁷. Court documents from that case showed that between January 2018 and September 2019, B.C. issued 423 birth alerts; in 54 percent of those cases the mother identified as Indigenous⁷.

The drop, and what didn't drop

Newborn apprehensions in regions that ended birth alerts fell sharply. Freedom-of-information data analyzed by the Canadian Press showed a 52 percent decline — from 1,034 newborns apprehended in 2018 to 496 in 2021⁵. Some provinces did better than the average. British Columbia recorded a 51.4 percent decline. Ontario saw a 45 percent decline year-over-year around its ban.

But apprehensions of children twelve months and younger dropped only 36 percent — from 2,957 to 1,881⁵. The system did not lose 36 percent of its capacity to remove infants from Indigenous families. It lost one specific mechanism. The rest of the structure continued to function.

The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society's Cindy Blackstock, whose organization has spent two decades on this file, has been direct: ending birth alerts on their own risks becoming, in her phrase, a kind of red herring — visible reform that leaves the underlying apparatus largely intact⁵.

The structural argument

The case that residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and modern child welfare are stages of a single colonial process rests on five claims, advanced over decades by Indigenous scholars, advocates, and the formal inquiries Canada commissioned itself.

What 2026 looks like

Reconciliation, as the federal vocabulary frames it, treats the residential school era as a closed chapter — a historical wrong now subject to apology, compensation, and Calls to Action. The continuity argument does not dispute the apologies. It points at the numbers, the timeline, and asks what they show.

What they show is a system that closed one set of buildings and kept the function. Schools became scoops. Scoops became foster care. Foster care became birth alerts. Birth alerts became, in eleven provinces and territories, formally prohibited — and the apprehension rate for infants did not match the size of the reform.

For the families involved, the question is not whether the institution wears a different name than it did in 1960, or 1990, or 2018. The question is whether their child is still in the room with them.

The 2026 reading of the situation, then, depends on what is being asked. If the question is whether overt residential schools have been replaced with something more humane, the answer is yes. If the question is whether the state still removes Indigenous children from Indigenous communities at rates that have no parallel in the non-Indigenous population, and whether that rate is widening rather than closing, the data is clear and the answer is also yes.

Critics of the continuity framing argue that current child welfare practice, however flawed, is responsive to real and documented harm to children, and that the comparison to residential schools obscures meaningful differences in intent, oversight, and recourse. That argument is not without merit. But it does not contend with the trend line — and the trend line is the heart of the continuity claim.

A system that genuinely sought to reduce Indigenous family separation would, after a decade of reform, be producing falling rates of overrepresentation. Canada is producing rising ones.