Thank you very much.

Supplementary question?

The final supplementary?

The Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions.

To reply, the government House leader.

The Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions.

The minister has a couple more seconds to finish his response.

I’ve often asked myself, “What will it take to get progress on mental health and wellness?” And somebody back home said, “Joel, it’s going to take a hurricane of honesty.” And I think that happened this afternoon in this chamber, Speaker. I think that happened with people bravely sharing their hurt and their pain.

It leads me to want to talk in the time I have to the need for mental health support for our neighbours struggling with addictions. It leads me to a song written by the great Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails called Hurt. It goes:

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real

The needle tears a hole

The old familiar sting

Try to kill it all away

But I remember everything....

And when I’ve thought about addiction and learned from neighbours at home who work with folks who have addictions or who themselves have lived experience about addictions and the need for mental health, I think about that last line—that so many people right now are trying to forget the trauma that has happened to them in their life, likely in childhood.

When we think about where addiction comes from and the need to get mental health supports to our neighbours struggling with addictions, there are so many immediate answers that are put before us. Is it just about our genes? That’s not what the research actually suggests. Is it about our bad choices? No, it’s much more complicated than that.

Addiction is not a choice. Addiction is a product of our environment, more often than not a product of our past. When I’ve had occasion, sadly, to see people in our community at home or in this great city of Toronto struggling openly with addiction, I don’t see addiction; I see pain. And I ask myself, “What can we do as a Legislature to help people with their pain?”

When I think about what this $24 million could do in our own community of Ottawa Centre, I think about the Somerset West Community Health Centre, I think about fantastic harm reduction workers like Sophia, who I spoke to on the train ride down here yesterday, who told me we are losing people who make their way through the harm reduction facility with safe use because they get placed in supportive housing in an apartment—and I know in Ottawa, we’re lucky to have some of that—but then they’re left alone. They’re back on their own, not surrounded by that love and that community, because—what I’m hearing—they’re missing that support.

We need to make sure that support is available. We need to make sure people like Sophia can support our neighbours struggling with pain, struggling with harm. If we all agree, let’s vote to empower the change-makers in the community that are making people available, dealing with their pain and taking that big step toward wellness.