Thank you to the member for Mississauga Centre for her question.

Since 2019, we’ve invested $570 million into child and youth mental health supports across the province of Ontario.

In June 2021, we dedicated another $31 million to reducing wait times and improving access to mental health services.

Expanded alongside these services are our youth wellness hubs. These are one-stop shops for mental health and addictions treatment, primary care services and early intervention programming for youth aged 12 to 25. Available on a walk-in basis, they offer a safe space for youth and a warm hand-off to other community-based care providers, assuring children who are in need of help that there is no wrong door. We now have 22 of them in the province of Ontario, and we’ve green-lit another eight.

I’m looking forward, in my supplemental, to talking a little bit about the work of Joanna Henderson at CAMH and the great work, when we collaborate, that we can do as a province and—

Thank you again for that question.

This Monday, Dr. Henderson and I got together to announce an exciting pan-Canadian initiative called the Integrated Youth Services Net, the IYS-Net. As many of you here today have heard me say over and over again, if we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it. The IYS-Net will connect every youth hub across Canada through a shared data infrastructure, easing collaboration between researchers and policy-makers. Imagine that, Mr. Speaker: mental health practice informed by real-time data exchanges that optimize service delivery and treatment outcomes, learning from youth and proactively adapting to their needs. This is an unprecedented opportunity for us to be creative and collaborative and to make catalytic change.

Together with our provincial and territorial allies, we’re building a system centred around the values of justice, diversity, inclusion, and the lived experience of young people all across Ontario. This is what we’re focused on, and we will build that system in collaboration with all our partners.

We know that there is an opioid crisis in the province of Ontario that predated the pandemic and was only aggravated by the pandemic.

Our government has made historical investments in addiction treatment and mental wellness. Those investments now total $525 million in annualized investments. In addition to those investments, because of the pandemic, we created an addiction recovery fund—another $90 million—that created 400 treatment beds and 7,000 new treatment spots that are all over the province of Ontario. Those investments are being made where they’re needed most; the focus was on jurisdictions, on cities and towns where those were needed the most, where we have the highest rates of overdoses. Investments were made in Sioux Lookout—40 beds; in Thunder Bay—35; in Sudbury—15; in Timmins—10; and 54 at Canadore College in North Bay. Why were those investments made? Because we are going to build a continuum of care. We’re going to look after individuals from the time that they require withdrawal management, through addiction, through supports, all the way to providing them with supportive housing, because that’s what we need to do—

Thank you for that great question.

When you stop and think about the amount of supports and services that we need in the province of Ontario—we all know, or we should know, that that treatment should be in the communities. It should be delivered in a way that is measured, so that we know that the outcomes we are getting are the ones that are the best for the people of the province of Ontario. We also know that we need to do more to ensure we have low-barrier access points, to be able to get them into a system to get the supports that are necessary.

When you talk about mobile crisis intervention teams—I support them, and we support them, as a government. We have expanded them throughout the province and will continue to do so, because we know that it’s a way to get individuals the help they need. That’s the key point here.

We have to get people to treatment, which is why those 400 beds were created and why we have 7,000 additional treatment spots.

And yes, we will deliver services at the same standard and level across the province of Ontario—because that’s what every Ontarian deserves to have in their community.