I'd like to say a huge thank you, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity.
I would like to bring you a little bit into my world, which is the study of the resilience of children. I know that we're going to be experiencing a huge amount of delayed pathology because of COVID. I also want to bring you the message that there are potentially a lot of resources in our communities.
When I think about the work that I do, I'm also thinking about a young fellow, 11 years old, who is in elementary school and is exposed to a great deal of stigma. He lives in poverty in social housing, and his parents have incredibly few resources to cope with him. However, this fellow, who has bad teeth and is teased in his community, found inside his school community a custodian, a janitor of the school, who took him under his wing and who provides an element of protection and a sense of belonging.
We don't normally think of custodians at our children's schools as part of a mental health strategy. My research on resilience globally is showing that we need to begin to think about resilience and the health of our children in a more multi-systemic way. We need to get beyond simplistic solutions like offering a child a self-esteem workshop or a mindfulness-based stress-reduction workshop or simply a better educational experience. From the research that is emerging, we understand that when children's lives are thought about in their complexity—and this is what I so appreciate about a panel like today's, where you're seeing many aspects of a child's life represented—we tend to get better social policies. That means how the courts sentence children or indeed how schools respond to children.
My work is about looking at this cascade of positive effects. If we can jump-start one system, whether it's an educational system or better support for families.... The real trick with policy that seems to have an impact on long-term resilience for children is understanding that it is almost like dominoes hitting one another to create the kinds of changes that we're looking for.
In my research and my work, I'm now involved in looking at the impact of boom-and-bust economies on children and families in those communities that, as we green our economy, we're going to be displacing. Literally hundreds of families and communities are dependent on the oil and gas industries in places like Alberta, here on the east coast in Saint John, and indeed Newfoundland.
When we begin to think about resilience, and when we think about children's well-being and mental health, which is my concern, I'm thinking about the impact of even macroeconomic factors as they change family patterns, recreational services and opportunities for children to do the kinds of things they need to do.
A concept I might introduce to policy-makers is the idea of differential impact. What you offer as a policy might have a different impact on the child, depending on three things. First, what are the actual risks they experience? Second, what are the protective factors that are most likely to impact that risk and be helpful? And of course, what is the outcome you are trying to achieve?
All of that leads me to think about St. Mary's, a school outside Saskatoon. When they renovated the school—even though they serve a large population of indigenous children, refugee children and children who are visible minorities—they were having trouble getting those children to the local children's hospital for the appointments they needed. What the school board did, when they renovated St. Mary's, a K-to-9 school, was to build a purpose-built pediatric clinic in the school, so then it was easier for families to get access to those services close to their homes.
That is the kind of multi-systemic thinking, reaching beyond single, simplistic solutions to very complex problems, where systems are working together, that is likely create a cascade of positive impacts that will make our children more resilient, especially as we come out of this period of COVID, when there have been so many delays in their psychological and social development.
I'll leave it at that.