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I'd like everyone to know this article was published five years ago... since then the number of niggers in foster care has GROWN.

Note: I've cut out most of the crap, it's an old article but I heard something similar on the radio today.

A disproportionate number of Toronto-area children in foster and group-home care are black. Advocates are blaming poverty, cultural misunderstanding and racism.

In the Toronto area, black children are being taken from their families and placed into foster and group-home care at much higher rates than white children.

Numbers obtained by the Star indicate that 41 per cent of the children and youth in the care of the Children's Aid Society of Toronto are black. Yet only 8.2 per cent of Toronto's population under the age of 18 is black.

Other figures obtained by the Star indicate the overrepresentation is province-wide.

"The gross overrepresentation of black kids in the CAS is like a modern-day residential schools system," says Margaret Parsons, executive director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, which advocates on behalf of the province's 590,000 black residents.

"This is another form of racial profiling," she says. "They're profiling black parents in a very negative way."

Patricia knows first-hand how cultural misunderstandings can lead to black children being removed from their homes.

She was shocked when police and a Toronto children's aid worker came to her tidy bungalow two years ago to say her granddaughters were being taken into care.

They were living a comfortable life in Toronto. "For the little one, I was the only mother she ever knew," says the soft-spoken woman.

That all changed in 2012. Her teenage granddaughter, facing suspension at school, told the principal she would be beaten with a baseball bat if her grandmother found out.

"She told them I was going to kill her," says Patricia, who admits she disciplined her granddaughters with a slap now and then[.]

Patricia was charged with numerous counts of assault with a weapon, involving multiple incidents. A landed immigrant, she says she was advised by her legal aid lawyer to plead guilty to some charges to avoid possible deportation.

Of children in care in Toronto, 31 per cent were born to black parents. A further 9.8 per cent of children in care had one parent who is black.

The data also showed that many of the black children in care were of Jamaican heritage.

Lawyers, black community leaders and child advocates say the overrepresentation of black children is due to cultural misunderstandings and stress and neglect created by poverty. They also believe systemic racism in the child protection system, and within the police and schools, is at play.

Everton Gordon, executive director of the Jamaican Canadian Association, believes police go into black homes with the same bias that results in black youth being racially profiled on the street.

"These institutions have problems with black people to begin with," Gordon says, referring to police and schools. "The minute it's a black family it sets off alarm bells."

A recent provincial survey of about 7,000 Ontario children who have been in care for more than one year shows that about 12 per cent are of African or Caribbean descent. Meanwhile, only about 5 per cent of Ontario's children under age 18 are from those communities.

A 2012 report by a provincial commission into child welfare found that "the system was not responding effectively to the diversity of Ontario's population."

Paul Chapman, 23, who works in the provincial child advocate's office, was 9 years old when he and his six siblings were taken from their struggling single mother. He was placed with white foster parents. On Sundays, he missed big breakfasts with Caribbean dishes, and going to church.

He recalls one dinner when his foster parents served him perogies.

"I had no idea what the hell a perogy was. I said I'm not eating that," says Chapman.

"I think a lot of (black) youth struggle," he says.

"It's because they don't know who they are. They don't know what to do. They kind of lose themselves. They lose their identity."

The Spanish interbred with their colonies natives and the Dutch... well they kinda sorta did? I'm not quite sure what the hell the Dutch did, they went halfway on a lot of things.
What Australia needed was Belgians

What are some good and effective way that folks here have tried to do that?

Putting up posters and putting little flyers in cars while they're parked are good methods.

The Canadian dollar hit an 11-year low Monday as oil prices fell more than 6 per cent and global markets tanked in the wake of China's stock rout.

As of mid-morning Monday, the loonie was trading at around 75.6 cents U.S., having bounced back from around 75.2 cents, the lowest level for the Canadian dollar since 2004.

"There's certainly some panic out there," Karl Schamotta, director of FX Strategy at Cambridge Global Payments, told the Wall Street Journal. "The reality is that we are looking at a global economy suffering widespread disinflationary conditions."

The Canadian dollar typically follows the price of oil and other commodities. Bloomberg reported Monday that commodity prices are at a 16-year low.

Prices for Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, were down 6 per cent as of mid-morning Monday, at six-and-a-half-year lows, Reuters reported. A barrel of Brent crude was trading at $42.51 U.S.

North American oil prices have been doing just as badly, trading at around $39 U.S. a barrel Monday, having fallen below the $40 mark, to six-year lows, last week.

The collapse in commodity prices reflects concerns about the strength of China's economy, the world's largest buyer of raw materials. The Shanghai composite stock index fell 8.5 per cent Monday in what traders there are now calling "Black Monday."

"Today's falls are not about oil market fundamentals. It's all about China," Carsten Fritsch, senior oil analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, told the Reuters Global Oil Forum. "The fear is of a hard landing and that things get out of the control of the Chinese authorities."

China's stock market soared last year and in the early months of this year, largely as a result of government policies designed to help ordinary Chinese citizens into the stock market and prop up stock prices.

But in a classic bubble pattern, the market turned downwards in the second quarter of the year, and has lost 38 per cent from its June peak.

Despite extraordinary measures by the Chinese government to prop up stock prices — including cash injections, a ban on IPOs and an order forbidding some insiders from selling for six months — Chinese stock prices have continued to fall.

The bad news in China darkens the prospects for an economic recovery in Canada, which likely fell into recession in the first half of this year on the back of falling oil prices.

With stock and commodity prices sliding, analysts are seeing a higher chance of another rate cut from the Bank of Canada this year. Some now also expect the U.S. Federal Reserve to delay an expected interest rate hike in September, which could help to keep global interest rates low.