As we celebrate Nursing Week in Ontario, I’d like to take a moment to thank the hard-working nurses of Ottawa West–Nepean and all across Ontario, including the amazing nurses of ONA Local 83 at the Ottawa Hospital, Local 84 at the Queensway Carleton Hospital and the wonderful RPNs of CUPE 4000 and CUPE 2875. Their dedication and unwavering commitment to patient care has supported so many of us through so many difficult, challenging, heartbreaking and life-affirming moments of the past few years, and they have done all of this incredible work in spite of the very challenging conditions they’ve had to work in and the serious disrespect with which they have been treated by this government.

A sincere and heartfelt thank you for all of the work that you do and keep on doing.

Now it’s time for us to have your back. It’s time for the government to negotiate a fair contract, to stop fighting the court’s decision on Bill 124. It’s time to stop the privatization agenda that is pulling nurses out of the public health care system, leaving public hospitals short-staffed and contributing to longer wait times and frustrated patients. It’s time to stop the temp agency insanity that puts profits in the pockets of investors while treating nurses on the public payroll unfairly. It’s time for the government to show nurses the respect you so deserve so that you can keep on doing the job you love.

I’m happy to have the opportunity to rise in the House today to speak to this motion put forward by the member for Brampton East, which deals with mental health in education. This is a subject which I know concerns many people in Ontario: parents, teachers, education workers, administrators and mental health professionals are all raising the alarm about the need to address the mental health crisis among our children.

It’s one of the top things I hear as the education critic for the official opposition. Wherever I go in the province, people are telling me about how kids are not okay, how they’re dealing with high levels of anxiety and depression. My inbox is full of stories.

We know from a report earlier this year by People for Education that 59% of our students in Ontario are depressed about the future and 39% report that the pandemic has made their mental health worse. This is something I also have personal experience with. All three of my children experienced mental health challenges during the last three years and one of them is still dealing with very high levels of anxiety.

Mental health is something we should all be talking about much more. It wasn’t discussed at all when I was a child, within my family or at school. I grew up in a Dutch Calvinist family and community, and as I’m sure the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane would agree, Dutch people can be very, very blunt. But that was not true when it came to expressing our emotions. We were expected to stiff-upper-lip our way through everything. Depression and anxiety were never things that were acknowledged, let alone mental illness.

And that’s despite the fact that anxiety is something I’ve struggled with my whole life. I’ve had to put in a lot work as an adult to learn to identify the signs and symptoms of anxiety and strategies for dealing with it.

Thankfully things are pretty different now than when I was growing up. One of the interesting things about virtual school—which my children participated in for a full year—is that, as parents, we actually got a glimpse into what happens during the school day, and my husband and I could see how every single day, the teachers incorporated mental health and wellness information and activities into the day, including having children identify their emotions and talking about strategies for coping with various feelings.

Last week, there was an open house at my youngest kids’ school for Education Week and I got to visit their classrooms. And I noticed that in both rooms there was a space set up for self-regulation.

In my son’s class, it was called the “chill zone” and there were little canvas chairs to hang out in, a stack of books and some posters on the wall with information on self-regulation and strategies for grounding; the “nervous thermometer” to identify how anxious you’re feeling and various options for coping skills with options for movement, like squeezing something, shredding something or using a fidget toy; sensory options like a soft blanket or sitting in a bean bag chair; and processing options like writing in a journal, drawing or talking to someone you trust.

My daughter’s classroom had lists on the wall of coping skills with different options for at home, like calling a friend, listening to songs or hanging out with your pet, and options for school like deep breathing, taking a minute to go to your happy place or chatting with your teacher or another trusted adult.

I was so glad to see these, Speaker, and I’m so grateful for the work that teachers and education workers do every single day to support our kids, to help them to understand their mental health, and help them to cope with challenges.

I am happy to support anything that makes it easier for teachers and education workers in this important work of supporting our kids, whether it’s more instruction on children’s mental health in teachers’ college, professional development for teachers and education workers, or resources provided by local public health units.

But I think it’s also important to acknowledge in this House, Speaker, that talking about mental health and teaching and encouraging kids to adopt strategies is only step one. There are often times when mental health requires more than just self-awareness, more than just coping strategies, and more than just talking to a teacher or a friend. There are also times when mental health requires dedicated mental health support from a professional.

And this is where I find myself incredibly frustrated as a parent. As I mentioned, I have a child who is currently experiencing mental health challenges. I’m going to try to talk about this in a way that doesn’t breach my child’s privacy or right to confidentiality, but last week, my child was in a state of crisis, experiencing incredibly high anxiety and stress. And I sat with them, reminding them to try all of the strategies that we’ve learned, and nothing was helping, Speaker.

My child is experiencing a mental health challenge that simple deep breathing won’t fix, but unfortunately, we have been entirely on our own as parents to find and fight for help for this child. And I know as well that despite my frustration at being forced to fight for my child, my partner and I are pretty privileged in the resources that we have when it comes to fighting for our child. My child and other children in Ontario deserve support.

It is important to talk about mental health with kids, it is important to give them strategies, but it is also absolutely imperative that we provide them with the necessary supports and resources around them to help them when they need it. And sadly, that is just not happening in Ontario right now. We are failing our kids. Half of schools have no access to mental health resources, and less than one in 10 have regularly scheduled access.

After three years of historic disruptions on a global scale, we are only spending 27 cents per day per child on supports for children’s mental health. That’s not enough, and it’s leaving our kids with nowhere to turn. We need to at least make sure that every single school in the province has regularly scheduled access to at least one qualified mental health professional.

Le problème est plus sévère pour les écoles francophones qui ont, en plus, la difficulté de trouver des professionnels en santé mentale francophones, surtout quand les salaires sont plus bas pour des professionnels qui travaillent au sein de nos conseils scolaires francophones. Le Conseil des écoles catholiques du Centre-Est a un seul psychologue et six positions qui sont vacantes. Une des positions a été vacante depuis sept ans. Il faut absolument que le gouvernement mette en place des solutions pour adresser la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre dans le système d’éducation francophone.

It’s also important to acknowledge, Speaker, that the mental health of teachers and education workers is suffering. I hear regularly about the toll that the pandemic and the working conditions within our schools, along with the disrespect shown by the government with Bill 124, is taking on our teachers and education workers. They are experiencing incredibly high levels of burnout and stress. Many teachers and education workers are ending up on long-term leaves due to stress, anxiety and depression. We’re seeing an increase in the number of resignations and early retirements.

The Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario would normally have three resignations in a school year. This year, they’ve had 28 so far, and there are still two months in the school year. In the Peel District School Board, there have been more resignations than retirements this year for the first time ever.

If we want to make sure that there are caring adults in the classroom and in our schools to support our kids, then we need to look after the mental health of workers as well. And that means that we have to look at the question of why everyone’s mental health is struggling, Speaker. Because yes, mental health challenges are a constant feature of human life and a normal one that we should talk about and work to address all the time. But we are also in a moment where the mental health of our students, teachers and education workers is particularly struggling, and we also need to ask why that is.

There’s a parable that’s often attributed to Desmond Tutu, although I don’t know whether he actually told it or not, about a village where a child is seen floating by in the water, struggling to breathe. The villagers rush in to save the child and provide artificial respiration. While they’re doing that, there are another two children in the water, and so they rush to save those ones too. And as they’re saving those children, there are more and more children coming, and it’s all hands on deck to save the children. And finally, one villager stops to ask, “Why are these children in the river? We need to go upstream to figure that out.”

When we ask that question, we discover that many of the factors that are contributing to mental health challenges among kids, teachers and education workers are actually within our control as legislators:

—crowded classrooms;

—the lack of focused attention from teachers who are trying to juggle 35 or more students in one classroom;

—seven or more teachers in a single year, because there aren’t enough full-time teachers and occasional teachers;

—kids with disabilities or special education needs who aren’t getting the supports they need, the supports that they’ve been promised

—barriers to accessibility that prevent some kids from participating fully;

—exclusions that prevent some kids from participating at all;

—high levels of violence in schools that result from kids lashing out because of the lack of support.

For teachers and education workers, it’s the moral injury of doing your best every day to meet the needs of the children you look after, but falling short because the expectations and conditions are unreasonable. It’s the expectation of handling a grade 4 class with 20 kids, 13 of whom have an IEP, and two of whom have severe autism, all by yourself, with no support personnel, as happened to one Ottawa teacher who is now on leave. It’s being the only full-time EA in a school of 800 kids, running from room to room all day, triaging who has the greatest emergency, like an EA in Toronto last month. It’s being sent to school in Kevlar as the solution to violence.

Looking beyond the education system, it’s going to school hungry because your mom, on ODSP, can’t afford food. It’s sleeping in a hotel or shelter night after night because you can’t find affordable housing, and then trying to focus in school. It’s kids absorbing the stress of parents worrying about the cost of living, low wages and long waits for health care.

If we truly want to look after and protect the well-being and mental health of our children, then we need to start investing in our public education system, providing affordable housing, livable incomes and good health care, so that our province is a place where everyone can thrive and where everyone gets the mental health care they need, when they need it.