You're absolutely right. During the last fiscal year, we had budgeted over $6 million specifically for mental health. We overspent our budget by over $8 million, and that's just scratching the surface.
As you know, I declared suicide a crisis a few years ago. We set up a secretariat to deal specifically with mental health. Again, that just scratches the surface, and we do need extra help to deal with that terrible situation we face. We have small communities that are extremely expensive to get to. It's very difficult for us to bring in professional people to help us out, psychologists and other health care professionals, when it to comes to that.
It does put a lot of pressure on our budget. At this point, we're just barely scratching the surface, and we need a lot of help from our federal partners to alleviate that, which in a sense would benefit other jurisdictions. We have to send our patients to other jurisdictions—Ontario, Alberta, and Manitoba—for help, which we appreciate, but we need some extra help when it comes to federal funding.