SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
May 6, 2024 10:15AM

I listened to the member for Brampton East just now and during his remarks talk about access to mental health supports. I heard him talk to my colleague about cherry-picking things out of bills, and the funny thing is, is the government side cherry-picks what they want the public to hear. They don’t want to hear the criticism. They don’t want to hear from the people that came to committee and raised huge alarm bells about this bill.

But I’m going to talk specifically about the mental health piece. Because you can talk about mental health supports all you want, you can pass on that responsibility—which is what you’re doing—to the post-secondary education institutions, but you are not properly funding those institutions to be able to provide those supports and services.

You are grossly underfunding community mental health and addictions supports, to the point where they’re laying off workers, at the detriment to the community. There are months-long or years-long wait-lists for mental health supports in communities all around this province.

So my question to the member opposite is: Rather than just talking about what we are doing, what are you actually doing to fix the funding problems and to address the root causes of mental health and addictions, to ensure people actually have those connected supports?

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