Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me here today. I'm Dr. Patrick Smith, the national CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
CMHA/ACSM is a Canada-wide organization with divisions in every province and the Yukon territory, soon to be in the Northwest Territories. We provide direct services to more than 1.3 million Canadians in more than 330 bricks-and-mortar communities across the country. Those 330 bricks-and-mortar community footprints provide services far beyond their boundaries in rural and remote areas across Canada.
For today's remarks, I want to focus on the mental health needs of the people who feed our communities: our farmers, our ranchers and our agricultural producers.
Canadian farmers experience high rates of anxiety and depression. A 2016 survey from the University of Guelph found that 45% of producers across Canada reported experiencing high stress and emotional exhaustion and that one-third experienced anxiety.
One reason for the high prevalence of mental health problems is that farming is, as we've heard, a volatile occupation. Farmers must deal with not only the physical stressors of the farm environment, but also the regulatory frameworks of production, shifting trends in trade and volatile commodity markets, while managing the high financial burden of operating a farm.
Producers must also deal with the realities of crop and animal losses caused by weather, pest and disease. With climate change, extreme weather events are becoming more commonplace. Just over a month ago, we watched as Saskatchewan received a late-September snowfall, a psychologically stressful event for the farmers in the northwestern region, who woke up to discover their unharvested fields blanketed in snow. Although farmers have always contended with the stressors of unpredictable weather, the higher prevalence of extreme weather means that farming is a riskier business and that heightened risk will likely mean more psychological stress.
We also know that Canadian farmers are reluctant to seek help when they need it. The survey from the University of Guelph found that 40% fear the social stigma associated with accessing services and would feel uneasy about seeking help.
Gender is an important factor here. In Canada, men are more likely to die by suicide and are less likely to seek services, likely an effect of the social expectations for men to tough it out—and I'm from farming country myself—an ideology that is even more pronounced, I think, in the farming communities and farming industry.
We also cannot forget some of the most vulnerable and invisible members of this community: migrant farm workers. Every year, roughly 47,000 workers come to Canada to fill labour shortages in the agricultural industry. Migrant farm workers often live in poverty and have little control over their working conditions. They are exposed to occupational, social and environmental stressors that can negatively impact their physical and mental health.
In addition to the usual challenges associated with working in a rural area, migrant workers also experience stressors related to their precarious status as migrants, including social isolation, fear of deportation, language barriers, dislocation from family, limited access to health care and restrictive working conditions that prevent community integration.
In September, CMHA released a policy paper calling for the Government of Canada to introduce a mental health parity act, legislation that proposes to put mental health and the treatment of mental illness on a par with physical illness. Our proposal is rooted in the fact that many Canadians do not have access to the mental health services they need. Although we have a health care system that's considered universal, the basic primary mental health care provided by addiction counsellors, psychologists, social workers and specialized peer support workers is not accessible by most Canadians.
Other countries rely on these disciplines—I myself am a clinical psychologist—as the bedrock, the foundation of their mental health provision. In Canada we're mostly sitting on the sidelines of a publicly funded system. Collectively, we spend $950 million on counselling services each year, 30% spent out of pocket by Canadians.
For Canadians who don't have private insurance and cannot pay, lengthy wait-lists for publicly funded services mean that they may never access the mental health care they need. For rural and remote Canadians, including our farmers, the challenges to service access are even greater. A lack of services, high demand, the need for travel to receive treatment and stigma are often significant barriers. As a community-based organization with a long history of supporting people at a local level with mental health challenges, mental illness and addictions, CMHA knows from experience that providing the necessary supports early in the care of people can greatly change the course of their lives.
What we advocate for is greater investments in community-based services, which not only support people with mental health needs but also reduce their reliance on more expensive care delivered in hospitals, and prevent them from cycling through the acute care system, thus saving precious health care dollars.
CMHA offers a basket of services in the community, including an innovative program called Not Myself Today, which is designed to foster mentally healthy workplaces. Although farming and ranching often involve working outdoors, in what most Canadians might now consider a non-traditional setting, they are workplaces like any other. They require psychological wellness to enable the people who work there to do their jobs. Workplaces subscribed to Not Myself Today receive a tool kit for building a greater understanding of mental health in the workplace, reducing stigma and fostering safe and supportive work cultures.