Thank you to all of the witnesses.
I'm struck, actually. As many of you would know, I have a son with autism. He's 26 now, but he was nine when I was elected. I've had the chance to work with almost all of your organizations pretty significantly. Alex, I've toured many times at CHEO.
I will say that as a parent of someone who's very vulnerable, we spent a lot of time in the emergency room in Edmonton because there was really nowhere else to take Jaden, a non-verbal child who couldn't explain what he was going through at times. As I'm listening to the conversation, I'm struck by how that would be also reflective of the challenges of many kids generally, who are too young or are not at that communication level to be able to explain what's going on. The importance of what we're talking about today really dawns on me even more than usual. Thank you for the work that you do.
I'm going to dive into a specific area of spending. This won't be a surprise to others on the committee. We're a country right now that's spending more money than we've ever spent by far, yet we're talking about these crisis areas of spending right here. I'm going to zero in on children's mental health specifically.
We talked a bit about this at the last committee meeting. On mental health, I believe we're 31st out of 38 countries in the UNICEF report. We have a situation where in the last election campaign one of the few things we agreed on as parties was that we need to invest more in mental health. All parties had significant platform commitments on that.
The party that won and that is now working with the NDP—the Liberals and the NDP—had a promise for a Canada mental health transfer that was to have delivered $225 million in fiscal year 2020-21 and another $650 million in this fiscal year. That's $875 million that was promised to be delivered by now to the provinces through a Canada mental health transfer. It's a total of $4.5 billion and we're supposed to be heading into year three of that funding, but we haven't seen a single dollar so far.
One of the witnesses the other day mentioned this and there seemed to be a little bit of debate whether 25% dedicated to children's mental health was enough or whether it should be more than 25%. The 25% that would have been delivered by now would be over $200 million spread amongst the provinces.
How much difference would it have made over the last year, heading into two years, if we had an injection of $200 million across the country on children's mental health alone?
I'll throw it out to anyone who wants to take it. Maybe I'll go to Bruce first, then Alex and then anyone else who wants to weigh in.