I thank you for this opportunity. I see it as an honour. As a citizen of Portage and on behalf of the board and staff of CMHA Central Region, I welcome you here to Portage la Prairie.
I also want to say that I don't sit here alone; I sit here with the Manitoba division and the national division, so together our voices are echoing throughout the country.
The story goes that NFL coach Vince Lombardi always began his season the same way. He would walk into the dressing room of his players, men who had played football all their lives, and say, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”
What I present to you today is so fundamental to Canada that it's the same kind of message, and there's not a hope of Canada going forward without this issue being dealt with. I say to you today, ladies and gentlemen, that a pan-Canadian mental health strategy is the football.
In the CMHA Central document we submitted to you, we made four recommendations. I just want to focus in on one: the need for a pan-Canadian mental health strategy. I'm not going to spend any time trying to describe it, because Senator Michael Kirby, in his report Out of the Shadows at Last: Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada, has articulated the values and directions better than I can. I just wanted to suggest the need for one. It is a shame to us that Canada is the only G8 country without a national mental health strategy.
Also, the need for a strategy grows when you think about the numbers. A diagnosis of mental illness is going to be given to one in five Canadians, or 20% of us, during our lives. That means that around this table here, three to five of us are going to experience it. Nearly every Canadian is going to be affected by it. That means the rest of us, who do not have a mental illness, are going to be affected by it. Just think about that for a second.
More important than any sense of wanting to keep up with the Joneses or just reciting statistics is the importance of hearing the voices. I want to quote from Kim, who said before the Kirby commission:
Broken. Lonely. Hopeless. Ashamed. Rejected. Isolated. Afraid. Unsupported. Lost. Anxious. Disbelieved. Overwhelmed. Embarrassed. Dark. Pained. Desperate. Fading. I'm a 31-year-old Canadian woman who's been fighting the disease of Depression since my late teenage years. The words above are words that come to my mind when I think of what it's like to live as a Canadian in Canada with Mental Illness. It's pretty sad when you sit around wishing you had any (literally ANY) other disease other than a Mental Illness.
Jan, a mom from right here in central Manitoba, when speaking of her daughter's suicide, said:
In some ways I feel it's better that she took her life, because the road to recovery is hell, and I don't think she would have made it in this system.
Can you hear the voices? This is only two of the millions of Canadians who are struggling and calling out in the wilderness for a pan-Canadian mental health strategy.
There are two significant questions you must be asking. The first one is what the first step is.
Ladies and gentlemen, the good news is that the genesis of the first step has already happened: an agreement in principle of a Canadian mental health commission. The primary goal of this commission is to articulate the strategies; we simply ask that you enable to commission to do its job by giving it a proper mandate and by funding it appropriately.
The second question is how much all this will cost. According to Senator Kirby's report, the cost of the commission would be $17 million per year. This amount is less than one-tenth of one per cent of the $30 billion cost of mental illness to the Canadian economy per year. It's less than one-tenth of one per cent of mental illness in Canada.
Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, my message today is so essential to Canada it can no longer be ignored. Like Coach Lombardi, I stand before you with football in hand, calling for something fundamental to Canada: taking care of each other.
In closing, Mr. Pallister, I ask that you accept this football as a gift from us at CMHA Central, and I ask that as you guys are making decisions about the budget, you bring it out and play with it a bit, and you remember the need for a pan-Canadian mental health strategy.
Honoured members of the committee, this is a football. Thank you.