Since 2021, a network of CFS liaison workers operating out of Winnipeg family resource centres has helped 480 families stay together. One hundred and sixty-six children were prevented from entering the child welfare system. Forty-one were reunited with their families. These are not projections or targets — they are documented outcomes from United Way Winnipeg’s For Every Family initiative, and Manitoba just bet $2 million that the program can do more.
But here’s the other number: 9,172. That’s how many children and youth were in care in Manitoba during the 2024-25 fiscal year — a 3% increase from the year before and the first increase the province has posted in years. Ninety-one percent of those children are Indigenous, up from 87% a decade ago.
Two realities, same province. A prevention program that’s producing measurable results, and a child welfare system where the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. The question isn’t whether prevention works. The question is whether Manitoba is investing in it fast enough.
What 480 Families Actually Looks Like
The CFS liaison model is straightforward. Workers are embedded in family resource centres — community spaces where families already go for parenting programs, food banks, and drop-in support. When a family is at the point where a CFS referral might happen, the liaison steps in. Not as an investigator. As a navigator.
They help families access housing, addictions support, mental health services, and cultural programming before a crisis escalates to apprehension. The approach is preventive rather than reactive, and the numbers suggest it’s working. According to ChrisD.ca, the province’s $2 million commitment over three years will expand the program from its current footprint to cover all nine of United Way Winnipeg’s family resource centres, adding six new CFS liaison positions.
That expansion matters because the current reach is limited. Nine centres across Winnipeg is a start, but families in rural and northern Manitoba — where some of the highest rates of child welfare involvement exist — have no access to this model at all.
Why the Overall Numbers Are Still Climbing
If prevention is working, why did the number of children in care go up? The short answer: scale. Four hundred and eighty families is significant for the individuals involved, but it barely dents a system that had more than 9,000 children in its care last year.
The deeper issue is structural. Southern Chiefs’ Organization Grand Chief Jerry Daniels has been vocal about the province’s funding model, calling children in care "underserved and discarded" under the current single-envelope system. That model ties funding to the number of children in care — not to the number of families supported, crises prevented, or reunifications achieved. It has never been meaningfully reviewed, despite repeated commitments from successive governments to do so.
When the financial incentive structure rewards apprehension over prevention, even successful programs like For Every Family are swimming against the current.
Meanwhile, Manitoba lost 88 licensed foster homes in the 2024-25 year. The number of children placed in "non-pay care living arrangements" — a bureaucratic term that includes health care facilities and, in some cases, youth incarceration settings — nearly doubled from 73 to 129. The system isn’t just growing. It’s running out of places to put the children it already has.
The Research Behind the Crisis
The overrepresentation of Indigenous children in Manitoba’s welfare system isn’t new, but the scale is still staggering when researchers quantify it. A University of Manitoba study conducted through the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy found that one in three First Nations infants in the province had an open CFS file. One in 12 were removed from their families before their first birthday. One in 20 became permanent wards by age five.
A follow-up study published in 2025 widened the lens further: half of all First Nations parents in Manitoba had a CFS file opened on them between 1998 and 2019. That’s almost four times the rate of non-First Nations parents. As The Globe and Mail noted in its coverage, this isn’t a story about individual families making bad decisions. It’s a systemic pattern driven by poverty, housing instability, intergenerational trauma from residential schools, and a surveillance apparatus that scrutinizes Indigenous families at rates that would be unthinkable for non-Indigenous communities.
These are the upstream conditions that create the need for programs like For Every Family — and the downstream reality that organizations working with young people who have already aged out of care, including independent living programs on Treaty 1 Territory, navigate every day.
Prevention vs. the Status Quo
The federal government has signaled a shift toward prevention through the First Nations Child and Family Services Program, moving away from a protection-only focus toward early intervention and culturally appropriate services. Bill C-92, which affirms Indigenous jurisdiction over child welfare, is still being implemented province by province. But at the ground level in Manitoba, the tension between prevention rhetoric and prevention funding remains sharp.
Two million dollars over three years sounds like a commitment. But consider the context: Manitoba spent $534 million on child welfare in 2024-25. The For Every Family expansion represents roughly 0.1% of that budget. If the CFS liaison model can keep 480 families together on its current resources, the obvious question is what it could do with real investment.
There’s also the question of who does prevention work and how. The most effective prevention programs aren’t run by government agencies — they’re run by communities. They’re the Elders who check in on young parents. They’re the cultural mentors who help young people connect with their identity before a crisis forces them into a system that too often severs those connections. They’re the organizations that meet young people where they are, with wraparound support that addresses housing, education, employment, and cultural connection simultaneously.
What Comes Next
Manitoba’s children’s advocate, Sherry Gott, has called the current number of children in care "unacceptably high." That language matters. It signals that the province’s own oversight body sees the status quo as a failure, not a baseline.
The six new CFS liaison positions are expected to be in place across all nine Winnipeg family resource centres by the end of 2026. If they produce results at the same rate as the existing positions, hundreds more families could stay intact over the next three years. That matters enormously for those families — and for the young people who won’t have to navigate the complex process of aging out or fight to understand their rights within the system.
But prevention alone won’t fix a funding model that still incentivizes apprehension. It won’t close the gap between 480 families helped and 9,172 children in care. And it won’t address the root causes — poverty, housing, intergenerational trauma — that the UofM research has documented in unflinching detail.
Four hundred and eighty families is proof that keeping children with their families works. Nine thousand, one hundred and seventy-two is proof that Manitoba hasn’t decided to make it a priority yet. The gap between those two numbers is where the real work — and the real political will — needs to show up.
