Thank you, Mr. Chair.
“Seniors’ mental health is a highly relevant issue right now”, according to Dr. Mah, who is the associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She further stated:
We know that during the SARS epidemic in 2003, there were increases in psychiatric problems among older adults in areas with large outbreaks of the virus. Today, one-third of people below 65 years of age are experiencing depression and high stress, even when they have not been infected or exposed to COVID-19. These numbers may be even higher in older adults, who are more vulnerable...
Further, I will offer the comments of the assistant professor at the University of Victoria, who said:
But there are some unique features of the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus' ease of transmission compared to others has necessitated, in some regions, much more broad-reaching public health responses. For example, lockdowns of cities, extensive business and school closures.
I don't think we're addressing the issues that are global, as was mentioned by Dr. Powlowski.
The Canadian Medical Health Association stated:
Canadian mental health has taken a severe hit during the pandemic with the nation seeing exploding rates of anxiety and depression, increased use of alcohol and drugs, and difficulty accessing important supports, according to a recent survey from Mental Health Research Canada.
That's as recent as April 2020.
More than half of Canadians feel the federal government and the provincial governments should be doing more to support mental health for Canadians. I am saying this in addition to the United Nations, which said that good mental health is critical to the functioning of society at the best of times, and must be front and centre in every country's response to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The mental health and well-being of whole societies has been severely impacted by this crisis, and it is a priority to be addressed urgently.
When I see that it is one simple bullet point on two small-font recommendations, I believe that we are missing an opportunity. I know we have seen an awful lot of finger-wagging and accusations that we should have done more sooner when we got engaged and responded to the pandemic that we are now in.
This is my point. We now have an opportunity to get ahead of what I refer to as the “second pandemic”, and it would be on us if we didn't take the appropriate steps to make sure that we acted when we could. That's one of the reasons I brought my own motion forward.
Now is the time for us to focus on containing the issue that we have and, in part, some of these recommendations will help. I'm not sure the production of documents is a productive step forward, but we can work our way through that. Now is the time for us to be proactive and deal with what lies ahead of us. What lies ahead of us in mental health is something that concerns me deeply. I've seen its effect on members in my community.
This is not a pandemic we're going to fix with a vaccine. This is something that requires very careful early thought, and to be one of such a number of broad statements does injustice to people who are suffering from the mental health pandemic.