Yes, it is fair to say that.
Anybody who knows me knows that I can certainly talk to you about how to spend $200 million or more.
One of every four children or youth, more typically youth, who end up in CHEO's emergency department in a mental health crisis has been there in the last six months. They come back. That is an indicator of an inability to access community-based mental health services.
For example, here locally, we've created something called 1Call1Click that brings together all 24 child and youth mental health and addictions organizations, including CHEO. There's one way in. All referrals from schools, starting two weeks ago, come in through 1Call1Click. We have nurses in schools. It's a central intake and it's a case coordination service. We think of it as catch and hold, so that as kids come into the system, they don't get dropped in the transitions between levels of care and different organizations.
That program exists because of the Royal Bank of Canada. It does not exist because of support from government. We have been able to stand that up thanks to philanthropy. We were able to convince RBC to commit to multiple years of funding.
We are not able to expand it to reach it's full potential without support from government. At the risk of generating more questions from Monsieur Garon about this, I would say that notional $200 million, whether the carve-out is 25% or more for child and youth mental health, I would want it to leave the Government of Canada, headed out in our case, Ontario, with some kind of reporting back so that you would be able to see that, in fact, 1Call1Click, if that's one of the places it ended up, was where it did end up. It did actually make a difference in terms of improving access and care for kids who need mental health services.
I'm still thinking about the fact that Jaden is 26, because in my mind he's 11. That's quite something.