Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
I want to start by telling you who Kids Help Phone is, because we are a national charity that most people know in Canada, but many people think of us as we were in 1989.
For almost 30 years, Kids Help Phone has been, as I said, a national charity and a global leader, known for our expertise in improving the mental health and well-being of young people across Canada. We are the only national help line for young people. We provide a lifeline of support in English and in French by providing counselling, information, and referral services, and we also have online tools and resources. Last year, we provided counselling to 70,000 young people across Canada, and over a million young people visited our websites to find relevant information and content, as well as support. We are also one of the only help lines in the world to conduct evaluations so that we are able to demonstrate our impact and show that young people are better off for having reached out and spoken to a counsellor.
Today I will talk a bit about the impact on productivity of mental illness and mental health in Canada. I'll start with some numbers. Although numbers are often boring, they're important, particularly in the finance committee.
We know that one in five Canadians experiences a mental health condition in any given year, compared to one in 25 for heart disease. We know that the annual economic burden of mental illness in Canada, including health care costs, lost productivity, and reductions in quality of life, is $51 billion. In any given week, 500,000 employed Canadians are unable to work due to mental health problems.
We focus on youth. We know that 70% of mental health problems have their onset in childhood and adolescence; 77% of young people with mental health problems have missed out on education, and 12% have just stopped education altogether.
We know the economic fallout of this data, and there's a lot more data that could be shared with you on the economic impact of mental illness. It provides a compelling argument for addressing these issues effectively and that we have to have a long-term view of how we support individuals, families, communities, and businesses.
We have five recommendations that I'm going to very quickly go through today.
One is that we would like to support the creation of Canada's first national commissioner for children and youth. There is more detail on this in our submission. We believe this role would provide the federal government with a visible and effective leadership voice to the Canadian public and ensure that the rights of children and youth are fully addressed and integrated across all areas within federal jurisdiction. This proposal came from the National Alliance for Children and Youth of which Kids Help Phone is a member.
Our second recommendation is to address the challenges of mental illness and suicide on Canadian post-secondary campuses. Kids Help Phone has run a service in Ontario for many years called Good2Talk or Allo J'écoute. It is a 24-7 help line that has been fully evaluated and shown to be effective. We know that 75% of mental health disorders in young people develop by the age of 24 and that suicide is the second-leading cause of death for young people in Canada. We have a proven solution in Ontario that is working, that we believe needs to go nationwide to meet the needs of post-secondary students regardless of where they are.
Third, we'd like to help young people by supporting innovative services that use technology to support them in the way they prefer. Anybody who has a young person in their life knows that they do not like to call and use their voice. In 2012, Kids Help Phone developed a live chat service that has proven to be very effective, is used by young people with high-risk mental health conditions, and is in incredibly high demand, a demand that we are not able to match with our current budget.
We also know that we have to do more. We need to start texting. We need to start using artificial intelligence. We need to have a plan for rolling out services that meet the needs of young people. Therefore, we have developed and are launching Canada's first and only nationwide 24-7 texting service for youth. There is a scheduled service pilot in Manitoba this year, with a national rollout planned for 2018, if we are able to get the funds.
Our fourth recommendation is to create a national registry of emergency service contacts in Canada. We don't think about this a lot, because if any of us is in a crisis, we dial 911. But when you run a 24-7 crisis line for any young person in Canada, you cannot dial 911 in the jurisdiction where the young person is located.
In addition, many of the local police, fire, and ambulance centres are not staffed 24-7, so services such as Kids Help Phone require a national registry of emergency service contacts to be able to quickly get help out to a young person regardless of where they are in Canada. We believe without the support of the government for this registry, it will not happen and the safety of young people accessing help will be compromised.
Our final recommendation is to support the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's call to action to redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation. As you all know, the commission published 94 calls to action to change policies and programs in a concerted effort to repair the harm caused by residential schools and move forward with reconciliation. Kids Help Phone supports this work. We understand that as a non-indigenous organization, our work must be rooted in reconciliation, but we also recognize we cannot do this work alone. We urge the Canadian government to support indigenous and non-indigenous organizations to come together to support this truly required and necessary work.
In conclusion, we believe the federal government has an essential role to play in enabling Canadian businesses to be more productive and competitive. We believe those companies that make a priority of investing in positive mental health outcomes for their employees and their families have great potential to make us all more productive. We believe our recommendations will have a positive, long-lasting effect, supporting the significant reduction in the $6-billion cost experienced by businesses as the result of absenteeism and presenteeism associated with personal and family mental health problems.
I thank you for your time and for continuing to be an ally for young people in Canada. My final request is that all of you walk away today taking into consideration the recommendations we have presented, but also making sure to tell the young people in your lives that it is okay to ask for help, that we all experience challenges, and if they don't know where to start, the Kids Help Phone is always there for them.
Thank you.