With just a few clicks on the keyboard and a send to the printer, I held the document that promises to unlock some of the mysteries in my life.

A three-page form, newly created by Ontario government legislation, now allows me to access my own adoption records.

I don't expect to find anything startlingly new in these documents. I probably know more than most adopted children about my origins. But now I will at least have a better understanding of how government bureaucrats go about finding a safe home for a vulnerable child.

Openness, transparency and access are, as of June 1, new-found rights for those of us, among the 250,000, who were adopted in Ontario since 1921.

Celebrities like Madonna, shown here with her adopted son David Banda in Milawi, in March 2009, have helped focus attention on foreign adoptions while the number of Canadian children on the waiting list grows. Over the last decade, Canadian parents have adopted roughly 2,000 children a year from overseas and about the same number annually from provincial agencies. (Associated Press)

But if we think about it for a bit, we should see that these aren't just rights for adoptees.

When it comes to adoption, this new openness holds the potential to unlock so many other things hidden from our view.

For once we start talking about this subject in a serious way, we just might crack open our moral conscience and see the 30,717 children in this country, according to the Adoption Council of Canada, who are waiting for the right to a home.

That shocking number, a staggering record of hidden pain, should move us to say we can't keep this problem under wraps any longer.

Good intentions, but

Until now, the highest advertising campaign on behalf of adopted children was the one on the friendly placemats at certain Wendy's franchises in 2007, which showed the faces and told the stories of kids needing a home.

I remember grabbing one at a rest stop on the 401 highway and wondering why Wendy's was doing this.

It turns out that the company's late founder, Dave Thomas, an adoptee himself, had formed a partnership with the Adoption Council of Canada to pitch this extraordinary challenge to ordinary families on the fast-food circuit.

At the time, Thomas and the ACC also sponsored an Ipsos Reid survey that showed almost 90 per cent of Canadians felt favourably about adoption, with 14 per cent saying they were seriously considering it.

But the numbers don't add up. How can so many Canadians be contemplating adoption, yet we cannot find homes for the 30,717 children on the waiting list?

Each province has its own disconnect with the numbers. In Ontario, for example, 2,500 children were available for adoption in 2007; 1,400 families were approved, but only 800 children were placed in new homes.

Some of the breakdown happens over the age of the children and the abuse that they may have already suffered.

When a newborn was found in the stairwell of a Toronto parking lot on a freezing January night in 2008, almost 150 families rushed forward to try to adopt her.

But older adoptable children who have physical and emotional baggage accumulated after years, sometimes a decade, of being left behind have no prospective parents clamouring to take them.

What to do?

This week hundreds of child and family service workers from across Ontario gathered in Toronto to learn how to break down that prejudice and find permanency for these kids. Almost half of the children in their records are over the age of 13.

We should be ashamed of that statistic. And, in this new spirit of openness and transparency, if we were to dig deeper into the lives these vulnerable children are living, we would probably be sick at what we find.

In Ontario alone, "on any given day, there are 27,000 children in care," observes Virginia Rowden, director of social policy at the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies.

The bottom line is that kids are falling through the cracks of societal apathy.

Every day thousands of them are left to wonder how long their current foster home will last, each step of their future becoming more fractured as they face the daunting task of having to be independent by the age of 18.

Think of how often you've bounced home for support after that age and ask if you can imagine 30,000 currently unadoptable kids surviving a future without such a safety net.

'Missionary zeal'

I understand that many prospective parents are fearful about adopting a so-called high-risk child from a physically or emotionally damaged background. But are these concerns really any different from the health and other fears that all parents constantly live with as their children develop.

I have also heard from those who have tried to adopt, only to have found the endless red tape that wore them out.

Adoption stories can be messy, but if we keep them shrouded from public view, the numbers of Canadian children needing homes will likely only grow.

The situation is a far cry from the late 1960s when, as historian Veronica Strong-Boag described it, there was almost "a missionary like zeal for adoption" on the part of the Canadian media.

Then, Canadians seemed appalled that 9,700 children needed adopting. Today, the numbers have tripled and yet there is no public outcry for these kids.

The need is so obviously great that we might want to revise the creative approaches that both government and media took following the Second World War.

As Strong-Boag pointed out, the transparency then was in the storytelling. The Globe and Mail, for one, publicized the plight of war orphans and was able to brag that its efforts meant 181 homes had been found.

Not to be outdone, the Toronto Telegram started putting Helen Allen's "Today's Child" column on its front page, with its heart-wrenching details of the needs of these kids.

Hers was a column that was circulated free around the country and, by 1966, she boasted the column had found homes for 6,000 of 9,700 adoptable children. It would eventually spawn a TV show.

So, yes, let's go on talking about how nice it is that people like me can get into our old adoption records finally.

But the real story here is that at least 30,717 Canadian children need more than a paper trail of their lives, they need a home.