Good morning, Mr. Chair.
It is a pleasure to be with you today in order to provide you with our thoughts on the links between mental health and poverty.
I'm accompanied today by Ruth-Anne Craig, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Manitoba division, and the principal author of our brief. Ruth-Anne will be dealing with most of the presentation and the questions following my presentation. We look forward to discussing the issues in our brief with you today.
By way of background, the Canadian Mental Health Association is Canada's only voluntary charitable organization that exists to promote the mental health of all people and to support the resilience and recovery of persons experiencing mental illness. CMHA accomplishes this mission through advocacy, research, education, and service. Our vision--mentally healthy people in a healthy society--promotes individual and collective health and public accountability, while providing a framework for the work we do.
In addition to our national office in Ottawa, we have 11 provincial and territorial divisions and some 135 branches and regions in communities across Canada. Since 1918, CMHA has worked to advocate for policy change related to mental illness and mental health for all Canadians. CMHA serves over 100,000 Canadians annually, with programs and services in education, advocacy, research, direct service, mental health promotion, mental health literacy, information, and public policy development. Because poverty affects so many persons living with mental illness and is one of the causal factors that produces mental illness, income equity has been a major advocacy issue for CMHA for many years.