Thank you, Madam Chair and honourable members.
Thank you to Mégane for her courage and bravery today, and to many young people like her who are speaking up asking for help.
Far too often we see that when young people do have the bravery to ask for help, they simply don't have that help available to them. In the province of Ontario, for instance, kids can be on wait-lists up to two and a half years waiting for mental health supports. When we think about the issues and the gravity of things like self-harm, substance use disorders and suicide, to expect a young person to wait for so long for mental health supports is unacceptable. This is partly why we see such a rise in young people seeking mental health supports in emergency rooms. They need to know that they can go there if they're in crisis, but they should be receiving supports within a clinical setting within their communities and within their schools.
We are proud to have been able to launch the young Canadians' parliament at the very beginning of the pandemic to provide young people with a platform to be heard by parliamentarians and to be able to speak up for themselves in decisions that were being made in real time throughout the pandemic. However, we are dismayed at how slow it has been for funding to flow, and funding that has been announced has not often been directed to young children and adolescents. There has been funding for organizations like Kids Help Phone, which is very important and we have commended those efforts, but other funding has been slow to flow. We continue to call for designated funding for children and youth to start in the early years, to start with prevention, but of course also to provide the crisis support that's needed for children.
I urge and reiterate the point that was made around data collection, that we don't have systematic data collection at the federal level from coast to coast to coast, so we're often operating on limited information around different provinces or territories or municipal-level studies, so—