Laurent Commission: just under half of recommendations implemented after 5 years

Less than half of of the Laurent Commission report recommendations have been implemented in the past five years, but the Quebec government is hoping much more progress will be made in the near future.

Of the 65 recommendations from the 2021 Special Commission on Children’s Rights and Youth Protection (CSDEPJ), chaired by Régine Laurent, 29 have been implemented or largely implemented, according to the five-year review of implementation released Tuesday.

Another 27 recommendations are currently “the subject of sustained efforts, require consolidation, or are partially implemented,” and eight recommendations are either incomplete or have not yet been implemented.

To present the summary of achievements, the minister responsible for social services, Lionel Carmant, and the national director of youth protection and assistant deputy minister, Lesley Hill, held a press conference in Montreal.

“Hopefully within the next couple of years things, the basis will be in place,” Carmant said. “You have to realize when we talk about youth protection, whatever the recommendation is, we still will always need to go further. Even prevention, there’ll never be enough prevention for our kids.”

The Laurent Commission was established in 2019 following the death of a seven-year-old girl in Granby. The recommendations issued by the experts aimed to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

Among its achievements, the government invested in certain prevention and frontline programs; amended the Youth Protection Act; and enhanced the programme de qualification des jeunes (PQJ), which has grown from 850 to 1,462 places in just a few years, and which supported 2,286 young people in 2024-25. This was one of the preliminary recommendations of the Laurent Commission in 2019.

Quebec also created the position of national director of youth protection, and appointed its first commissioner for the welfare and rights of children, Marie-Ève ​​Brunet-Kitchen, about a year ago. She published her first report last week, urging elected officials to adopt a Quebec charter of children’s rights, which is one of the commission’s ongoing recommendations.

“Major investments made in prevention, in first-line services, to try and swing things around so that we’re giving as much help to families as we can in communities before we use the Youth Protection Act,” said Hill.

The appointments of Hill and Brunet-Kitchen show a willingness to “transform the system in a meaningful and positive way,” according to the International Bureau for Children’s Rights (IBCR).

But the group says concrete changes on the ground have only been partial.

“Despite these advances, what remains most urgent is the tangible impact on children’s actual ability to see their rights realized in practice,” the IBCR said in a statement. “Ensuring that rights are not only recognized but concretely experienced by children must be the primary priority. This requires sustained efforts that must go beyond legislative and structural reforms: it calls for a broader shift in perspective about the place we are willing to give to children in our society.

“Ultimately, the challenge is not only to strengthen legal and institutional frameworks but to transform the underlying paradigms that shape how children are heard, considered and included in decisions that affect them.”

Officials recognized improvements can be made concerning outdated facilities, better adapting interventions to the context of cultural diversity and more work on foster families.

“Foster families are extremely important to youth protection because the first thing we’re going to try to do is keep kids at home. And we do follow about half of our children at home,” Hill explained.

“Nevertheless, when you need a home, a person to open their arms to a child who’s in need, we need those resources, those people to be available.

“There’s a lack of resources in that area, so recruitment’s really important, training and support to foster families as well.”

Sun Youth, an organization that provides sports programs for vulnerable children and a food bank for families, says more financial support could be provided by the Quebec government.

“A lot of our programs for low-income families, which are very often affected by youth protection because it’s a question sometimes of neglect and not being able to take care of your children, a lot of the programs that we offer, parents pay as little as 10 per cent for the programs that we offer,” said Marina Boulos-Winton, Sun Youth’s executive director.

“But on a budget, let’s say of $11 million, only seven per cent is government funding and for our provincial funding, we receive $154,000.”

–With files from La Presse Canadienne

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