I would add that the supports could be... Again, it's very culture-based when it comes to how women are seen in the community if they are leaving an abusive relationship, so I think that needs to be addressed as well. The supports should be culture-sensitive.

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

Filomena Tassi Liberal Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON

How much time do I have?

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

You have 30 seconds.

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

Filomena Tassi Liberal Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON

Quickly, with respect to protecting families and the mental health issues that parents or children face, as well as parents who are caregivers, is there any advice you can offer us with respect to programs that would help this particular group, Dr. Stergiopoulos?

9:50 a.m.

Physician-in-Chief, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Dr. Vicky Stergiopoulos

I can start.

I think it's important to bring the services to where people are, and I think school-based programs and partnerships among mental health organizations and school programs and gyms in community centres are key. We need to bring our services to where people go. We need to make them accessible, available, and non-stigmatizing, and they need to happen in normative places. I think it will be key, and I think we're making progress in that area.

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

Thank you very much.

We'll go over to MP Poilievre, please.

9:50 a.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

I want to recount an experience I had when I was on the government side in working with an organization that helped young people who suffer from mental illness and addiction escape a life of crime and enter a workforce.

The organization basically created an apprenticeship. They employed the young people to learn. Those young people were actually paid a wage to show up every day and master basic mathematics that would allow them to work as a teller or at a checkout line, to master basic literacy skills that would allow them to read an instruction manual, and to master basic computer skills that would allow them to function in a modern society.

The program went on for about 40 weeks and had an extremely high success rate. The young people had to show up on time and do their tasks. They would not be paid or recognized unless they did those things.

They found that the biggest problem in dealing with people who had serious drug problems was that these young people had a very difficult time focusing on staying engaged and remaining motivated. The best treatment, they found, was physical exercise.

The organization went out and bought a bunch of rusty old dumbbells and used exercise equipment and made a half-hour exercise program every single day mandatory for these young people. The department said that this expense was not eligible for funding because this was supposed to be a job training program. It's supposed to be about employment. Building biceps does not create jobs.

This got me thinking about how we fund these kinds of organizations. Basically, the departments pay for eligible expenses. They receive invoices for rent and photocopiers and personnel and other costs that are eligible, and they send a cheque to the organization. In so doing, we prescribe what works and what doesn't work. This organization found something unconventional that did work. It seems to me that we should be funding them based on the results they achieve, not based on the costs that we as bureaucrats and politicians in Ottawa prescribe.

This organization said, “Frankly, give us no operating budget; just give us a share of the money that the government saves, because these people are going to be working, and we will financially be better off if you fund us that way.”

I wonder if your organizations can comment on the possibility of moving towards results-based funding for organizations that help people, particularly in the area of moving previously unemployable people into long-term, secure employment and specifically doing so without prescribing how these organizations achieve these goals, but rather recognizing and funding them when they do achieve those goals.

Anybody can answer that.

9:55 a.m.

Director, Strategic Initiatives, Working for Change

Michael Creek

Maybe I'll start with our organization, because a lot of the work that we do is working with people who often don't get an opportunity to try to improve themselves.

I'm a good example of that. I spent 13 years living in poverty on the Ontario disability support program. Today I'm a homeowner. I contribute in many ways to our country, both as an advocate but also as a person who is passionate about making sure that other people are lifted out of poverty.

We get to see that in our work every day. The problem with basing it entirely on their results in lifting people out of poverty and finding them employment is that you will get organizations that cherry-pick. We also see this happening now within organizations.

In our organization, we want to serve the most difficult people. We think that we have found a way of being able to do that with people with mental health, addiction, and poverty problems. We'd like to be able to expand those programs so that they'd be available to other organizations.

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Mr. Mantler, would you comment?

9:55 a.m.

Vice President, Programs and Priorities, Mental Health Commission of Canada

Ed Mantler

Thank you.

I think that innovation poses a particular challenge for funders, in that they should be providing funding to things that are proven, that have evidence to show that they work, yet many innovations are based on common sense and what intuitively looks like it should work. We must invest in research to produce the evidence around those innovations. We must invest in advancing research to inform our understanding of what works—

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

I'm sorry to cut you off. My concern is that when an organization is involved with a group of kids with criminal records who have never worked in their entire lives and don't have high school diplomas and they're struggling to get them into jobs, they don't have time to fund a brand new study when they know that if they put these kids in a gym and have them exercise for 30 minutes a day, their performance vastly improves.

I worry about us in Ottawa, where people say, “Well, before you can do that, we demand that you file a study, and we want you to contract that out, and it has to be an open request for tender, and maybe you have to hire a consultant on how to do that contract.” That's not how real life works. Small businesses don't operate that way, and we're not going to solve problems in real time if we require new studies every time someone comes up with a solution that works on the ground.

9:55 a.m.

Vice President, Programs and Priorities, Mental Health Commission of Canada

Ed Mantler

Your point is well made. I don't think research is the only answer, but proving what works in an empirical way is a part of the equation that must be considered.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

Thank you.

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC

Mr. Chair, I have a point of order.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

Sure.

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC

Marshall Smith was supposed to present to us this morning. He couldn't make it because his facility had to deal with the fatality of an alumnus, a person who had gone through the system before, who had addictions for substance abuse and all the rest. Marshall is an advocate himself. He was dealing with that last night, so he would have had to get up about three o'clock this morning, and he just couldn't do it.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

Thank you for letting us know.

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC

I would pass along our condolences to the society, and thanks for the time.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

Thank you for sharing.

9:55 a.m.

Conservative

Bob Zimmer Conservative Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC

It just proves why we're here doing what we're doing.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Bryan May

Exactly. Thank you, Bob.

Go ahead, Mr. Long.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB

Thank you, Chair, and my thanks to our witnesses this morning.

My team in Saint John–Rothesay serves breakfast at the men's shelter every Saturday morning. Depending on the day and the weather conditions, there are probably 30 men we serve hot breakfast to.

Out of the 30 men who are there, I would say that all 30 of them have mental health problems. The scary thing—or the challenge, if you will—is when you talk to the shelter operators at Outflow in Saint John, they're at their wit's end. They're there to provide shelter, but they're also there as counsellors, psychologists, and mental health workers, and they're overwhelmed, so one thing we're doing in Saint John is we're putting a group together with police, health care workers, levels of government, and we're going to go to the shelters and provide emergency mental health outreach as much as we can to help these people, because again, the concern is they're there, they get shelter, they have breakfast, and then they're back out on the streets, and it's just a vicious cycle.

I'm looking for your input. We're trying to put this project together. Can you give me some advice or recommendations as to how we could put that together, or how you see something like that working?

10 a.m.

Vice President, Programs and Priorities, Mental Health Commission of Canada

Ed Mantler

It's great that you've recognized the mental health issues and that you've realized an intervention is needed. Emergency mental health outreach in the shelters is one aspect of being able to do that.

I will go back, though, to my original comments and say that it may not be the long-term answer. Housing First we know is an approach that will end homelessness for those experiencing mental illness. Reducing the reliance on shelters for those people and providing mental health supports come with the Housing First approach.

10 a.m.

Liberal

Wayne Long Liberal Saint John—Rothesay, NB

Do you have any comments, Ricardo? Kelly?

10 a.m.

Policy Development Officer, Social Development, Finance and Administration, City of Toronto

Kelly Murphy

Thank you.

I think what you're identifying is the need for an expanded and more integrated circle of care so that we're not recreating these narrow sector strategies for funding programs. We've seen in Toronto that the At Home/Chez Soi study provides a good example of what's effective, and we have others in Toronto where funding is available for agencies to work together and to identify strategies for sharing information about clients.

They are able to do this in a way that protects privacy but enables a wraparound set of supports for clients, rather than having one program that delivers one outcome and others that deliver separate outcomes. We need to be fostering a collective impact across different sectors and different organizations, and we need to support them in working together. Historically, government has encouraged groups to deliver only on the outcomes associated with their sector.