It’s an honour to rise today and speak on behalf of the motion brought forward by the Ontario NDP to increase mental health funding in this province by 8%, as asked for by the Canadian Mental Health Association.

I’m going to take a slightly different tack than my colleagues have taken. I want to talk about how this investment could save lives because of gun violence—gun violence is closely linked with mental health.

I want to thank One By One Movement, Communities for Zero Violence, Zero Gun Violence Movement, Keep6ix, Danforth families, and the many, many other organizations in this city and across this province who have been working to reduce gun violence. But today I want to focus on one other organization: Operation Prefrontal Cortex.

Research shows that poverty is the primary cause of gun violence. An OECD study shows that the greater the gap between rich and poor, the higher the level of gun violence.

If you look at a map of the city of Toronto, at the areas where there’s poverty, and you overlay a map of gun violence, they almost exactly intersect.

Operation Prefrontal Cortex was started by Director X a number of years ago after he was shot at a party that he was hosting. He asked himself, “Why did this person bring out a gun at this party where everyone was having a good time?” He did research, and what he found was that violent people have a smaller prefrontal cortex and an overactive amygdala. There’s a solution, though. He found that if you do mindfulness meditation, you can actually increase the size of your prefrontal cortex and reduce the action of your amygdala. This will allow a person to have better emotional regulation and better decision-making and to be less likely to be violent. They’ve done these programs in schools and correctional centres—he wants to move them into the police and into the community. It’s this kind of program that could increase the mental health in communities and that could reduce gun violence.

So I encourage the Conservatives on the other side of the House to support this call to increase mental health funding by 8%.