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Canadian Child Welfare Law: Children, Families and the State, Nicholas Bala, Joseph P. Hornick and Robin Vogl, eds. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1991, 339 pp.

Panics over the existence and extent of child sexual abuse dominated child protection discourse in the 1980s. Debate focussed primarily on criminal law response (should child sex offenders be charged, how should child witnesses be accommodated, how should laws regulating child sex be revised) and, to a lesser extent, on definition, the powers of social workers, and general gatekeeping issues. Canadian child welfare law—a vast subset of legislation, procedure, evidence, policy, and agency structure—has not received the scrutiny it deserves. There are a number of reasons for this. First, U.S. and U.K. concerns about overand under-intervention (witch hunts, missed cases) and due process rights of parents fuelled Canadian reform. We pretty much assumed we had those problems too, and got to work on legislative reforms to incorporate such U.S. initiatives as mandatory reporting, due process rights, worker accountability, multiple approaches to family crisis support, cultural rights, and revised definitions of "child in need of protection." Many provinces had overhauled their legislation by the early to middle 1980s, contributing to the relative complacency of Canadian academics about the system's theoretical bases and presumptions. To further complicate the problem, child welfare is constitutionally a provincial concern, meaning that 12 jurisdictions (counting the Territories) must be studied to gain an understanding of the Canadian response. If Indian bands serviced by aboriginal agencies are viewed as separate jurisdictions (technically, they now fall under provincial jurisdiction), the number jumps even higher. The difficulty