I’m very happy to be able to welcome members of the Ontario Autism Coalition—families, even some young people here today, but especially Kate Dudley-Logue and Tony Stravato, who are both vice-presidents of the Ontario Autism Coalition, and Bruce McIntosh, who is also vice-president and founding president.

I’m also happy to welcome so many members of chambers from across this province and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce for their advocacy day today and especially CEO and president, Rocco Rossi.

Finally, last but not least, I’m very happy to welcome all of those representatives from the OPSEU corrections division who are here today, including OPSEU president, JP Hornick.

Good morning, Speaker. This question is for the Premier. Today, the public galleries are full of people who have come here to advocate for core services for autistic kids. They have come here to remind the government that right now, there are over 60,000 autistic children on the growing wait-list. They have come to hold the government to its promise to clear the backlog.

Speaker, my question is to the Premier. Will this government finally provide the funding needed to get these kids off the wait-list and into the services they need?

Interjections.

Back to the Premier: You promised to fix the autism program. Will you make good on your promise and clear the wait-list?

You want to know the real story? Here’s the real story: By last August, this government had registered fewer than 900 kids for support. At this rate, it’s going to take 66 years just to clear the existing backlog. None of us are going to be here in 66 years. The families here today have come to Queen’s Park from across the province to tell their stories, to be heard, to demand change after this government’s shocking failure to support autistic children. They deserve real accountability. But only one Conservative MPP has agreed to meet with them. Thank you, Speaker.

My question is to the Premier and to his government. Will you meet with these families?

Under this government’s watch, the mental health crisis facing Ontario has also only gotten worse. We’ve proposed a solution that would make a real difference in people’s lives: reduce the wait-list for children’s mental health care, invest in improved crisis response, expand therapy access and boost community mental health care. We’ve put forward an opposition motion for debate this afternoon for an 8% emergency stabilization investment in community mental health care.

My question is to the Premier: Will he support our motion?

The minister talks about the Roadmap to Wellness. It’s a road map to nowhere right now, I’ll tell you. We are in a mental health crisis in every community in this province, but in Indigenous, northern and rural communities, the government is not even trying to pretend; they’re just failing, miserably. We’ve got epidemic rates of suicide, homelessness, addiction.

The Canadian Mental Health Association shows skyrocketing demand for their services, but in Algoma they’re only getting a 2% increase in base funding over the past 10 years—2%. In Kenora, they got just 2% over the last 22 years. They need an 8% emergency stabilization investment today.

My question, again to the Premier—you’re sitting on $6.4 billion, unspent—will he support our motion this afternoon to provide that 8% emergency funding?

Mental health care is life-changing. It’s also a cost savings. It frees up hospital beds. You have less 911 calls, and do you know what? It saves lives. That’s why today we are going to go all out on this issue: because people in Ontario cannot wait any longer, and I’m sure there’s not one of us in this entire room that hasn’t seen the impact on our families and in our communities. So let’s do it: 8% emergency stabilization investment into CMHA. That’s $24 million.

My question to the Premier today: Premier, please, will you take just half a per cent of that $6.4 billion that has been squirrelled away unspent, to help people get the mental health care they so desperately need today?

I move the following motion:

Whereas there is a mental health crisis in Ontario; and

Whereas demand for services provided by the Canadian Mental Health Association has significantly increased, including demand for Assertive Community Treatment teams, court diversion services, and behavioural support services for seniors; and

Whereas base funding for the Canadian Mental Health Association has fallen significantly behind the rate of inflation since 2014; and

Whereas the Canadian Mental Health Association is experiencing high staff turnover and staff vacancy rates due to uncompetitive salaries, staff burnout, and wage suppression under Bill 124, Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019;

Therefore the Legislative Assembly calls on the government to increase the base funding for each branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association by 8% as an immediate emergency stabilization investment.

It’s long overdue that we recognize mental health care as part of health care, that we make it part of medicare. Right now, anyone seeking mental health supports is met with few affordable options, long wait times, underfunded community health organizations, and underpaid, burnt-out staff. The reality is even more stark in northern Ontario, in Indigenous and rural communities. Stagnant operational funding over the last decade prevented community mental health and addictions organizations from keeping up with demand for those services.

We’ve all seen in our families and in our communities the impact of the pandemic on mental health, on kids and youth particularly, but we also know that BIPOC folks were deeply and differently impacted.

CAMH, in a 2022 survey, found that more than half of young Ontarians reported feeling depressed about the future. Some 39% said the pandemic had made their mental health worse. And 18% reported they were seriously contemplating suicide in the past year. That’s one in five young people saying that. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s difficult to hear.

As a result of all of this, more and more Ontarians are seeking out those mental health supports—in fact, one in four Ontarians today. Requests for mental health support have increased over 50% for adults and over 100% for children since the pandemic began.

Years of underfunding have decimated the mental health sector. They are struggling to meet the growing demand for services and supports, and they are losing staff to exhaustion and burnout. Everything that we hear about this government’s wage-suppression legislation for pay and about working conditions pushing health care staff away is also true about the mental health sector. In fact, over the last two years, those Bill 124 salary-based issues resulted in 66% of resignations at CMHA Ontario, resulting in nearly 250 community mental health and addictions jobs left unfilled.

Staffing issues have devastated the community mental health care sector. I heard first-hand about this just a couple of days ago, when I was in London–Fanshawe, from nurses working on the front line in community mental health. And I’ve heard it in Sault St. Marie and in Timmins and in Hamilton and in Toronto and in Welland and in Ottawa—in every part of this province.

We know that addressing the staffing crisis is absolutely key to providing adequate patient care and community support, and that people seeking support for mental health don’t want to be shuffled between staff members, which means often reliving trauma or repeating their personal stories to new people multiple times. We know that permanent, full-time staff can offer continuity and improve overall quality of care.

We know that mental health care is life-changing, but it’s also costly. So I want to mention this to this government, because it’s a concern of theirs: I want them to remember that mental health care in our community—community supports free up hospital beds. They mean less 911 calls. And, ultimately, it saves lives.

People in Ontario can’t wait any longer. The impact of this crisis on our families and our communities is devastating.

This government needs to wake up and open their eyes to the suffering that’s happening around them. They’re sitting on, again, $6.4 billion in unspent funding—unspent dollars that were supposed to go to education, health care, mental health, and all kinds of things that public money was supposed to be spent on. Instead, they’re squirrelling it away. Our motion calls for something very, very small and simple, to be honest, and that is an investment that would come to only $24 million for the Canadian Mental Health Association. That’s just 0.375% of that unspent funding—just to give you a sense of that. It would dramatically improve Ontarians’ access to mental health care now.

Again, I want to call on the Premier and the government to support this motion, to increase funding for community mental health and addictions organizations, to make up for the decades and decades of underfunding for mental health, to provide better pay and working conditions for staff, and to give people the services they so desperately need.

Honestly, Speaker, how can we expect Ontario to thrive and progress if this government continues to abandon a growing group of people who are suffering from poor mental health?

I wanted to start by thanking all of the members here today from all sides who spoke in response to this motion. I think it’s so important that when we are sharing our own experiences, we’re listening, we’re learning. And then I really do appreciate that so many of the members spoke about their own experience, their family’s experience, what’s happening in their communities, and raised so many examples.

I started off by saying I really hope that this government will support the motion that’s before us, because I believe it’s very reasonable. We’ve talked a lot about our mental health and addictions plan for Ontario, but we intentionally chose a very specific ask today, because we think it’s something that any government should be able to agree to, especially in this moment. It’s so achievable. We’re talking about $24 million, which really, in this day and age and in this moment, given the size of this crisis, how many people it’s affecting and how broadly—really, there’s an opportunity here for the government to do the right thing. It is achievable.

We know that the kind of work that the Canadian Mental Health Association does in our communities is so critical. It reaches so many people. But it is just one little piece, and so I will add by saying that I just came out of meetings, like so many of us here today, with some of our correctional officers. I will say that many years ago—oh gosh, it was almost 20 years ago now. I was working with Peter Kormos at the time, a former MPP here. I’ve mentioned this to others before. We went and did one of these inspections of a correctional facility, and the reason we went in was to look and see who was in solitary confinement. Everyone in solitary confinement was under suicide watch. Every single one of those people was some-body who actually needed mental health support and had not received it in the community and had not received it again and again and again. Talking with the correctional officers at that time, 20 years ago now, it really struck me how we were failing so many in our communities.

Well, today the crisis is deeper and wider, but the solutions are still not there. What we’re seeing in our correctional facilities, what we’re seeing in our hospitals, what we’re seeing all throughout our communities is something that we could fix. There is a fix. We need to give people the support they need.

I’ll just go back, because I’m running out of time. I just want to say I would really implore the government to support our motion. We don’t have many opportunities in this House, in this place, where we get a chance to work together to do something truly transformational. That $24 million is less than half a per cent of what this government has put aside—has not spent, let’s just say—in money that was already allocated. That would go a long way. It won’t solve everything, but it will help to solve some of the problems that we’re facing right now in our community.

I thank everyone for joining in this conversation today, and thank you, Speaker, for the opportunity to speak again.