Thank you, Madam Chair.
As the committee will know, mental health is a complex multi-faceted problem that is the concern of all governments in Canada and I would say the concern of lots of other folks in Canada.
I think the Mental Health Commission, just to speak a bit more about that, has been a unique opportunity coming out of the report of the Senate committee on social affairs, and then of course the former chair of that, Mike Kirby, became the first head of the Mental Health Commission and has worked with all jurisdictions and with stakeholder groups to bring them on side.
As you know, one in five Canadians has a mental health issue. That means that just about every family in Canada is touched by mental health. And it touches us with respect to children and youth. It touches us in the workplace--workplace mental health. Depression, for example, is one of the major causes of loss of productivity, not just absenteeism, but what is called by some people “presenteeism”, that is, people who are coming to work who aren't really working because they're not able to do that.
There's also the issue that has to be dealt with of reintegration. If you look at the long-term disability claims in this country across all industrial sectors, including, I would say, the Government of Canada, a larger and larger percentage of those claims relate not to physical illnesses but to an inability to work for mental health reasons. One of the real challenges is not only to pay those claims, but then to find a way to get people to reintegrate, because statistics have shown, research has shown, that if people are away for an inordinately long time...the longer they're away the more difficult it is to ever get them back into the workplace.
The Mental Health Commission, as you may know, has set up a series of expert advisory groups. It has a very elaborate structure, with a board of directors, but also with all sorts of people who are really interested in every aspect of this. There is, for example, an expert advisory group on workplace mental health. There's an expert advisory group on child and youth mental health. There's a group on aboriginal mental health. There's a group on mental health and the justice system, from two aspects. One, the justice system is sometimes used as a way of housing people who have mental illness who may act out violently, and on the other side there are justice system issues in terms of contract and civil law issues that need to be worked out.
There's an awful lot of work going on through the Mental Health Commission. As I mentioned, there are the homelessness projects that are being carried out across the country to determine the specific comorbidity around homelessness and mental health, and it manifests itself very differently in different cities, so we hope to get a lot of good research coming out of that.
The Mental Health Commission is also involved in a number of key activities, the most pressing of which I think is the creation of an anti-stigma campaign. If I were to ask people in this room if they had a mental illness, they probably wouldn't volunteer it. If I asked you if you'd ever had cancer, probably people would say yes. A few years ago people wouldn't talk about cancer either. We've come a long way with physical diseases. We have a long way to go with mental illness.
The other thing the Mental Health Commission is doing that's very important is developing a knowledge exchange, a place, whether it's web-based or otherwise, where people can go to actually get information about mental illness with respect to caregivers, families, and patients, information about the conditions and information about the resources to help.
And finally, the commission is developing a national mental health strategy. They have a 10-year timeframe to do their work. They're off to a very good start.