Why has the government changed Ontario’s adoption information disclosure laws?
The government believes that Ontarians should be able to learn as much as possible about their personal history. For this to happen, we needed to modernize Ontario’s adoption disclosure laws to open information to adopted adults and birth parents. Ontario began sealing birth and adoption records over eighty years ago, in 1927. Since then, society has changed a lot. We now understand that people involved with an adoption want to have the same ability as non-adopted people to learn about their past. Ontario’s adoption information disclosure law, the Access to Adoption Records Act, 2008, allows most adopted adults and birth parents to get personal information that had been unavailable for years in their adoption records. This law also helps them protect the privacy of their information.
