I am Cécile Rousseau, professor of psychiatry at McGill.
There is strong evidence in the scientific literature in our research on children—which is a separate research area—and also in our clinical practice in the last 20 years that detention has strong and pervasive effects on children's mental health. It has effects. We have hundreds of terrible stories. I won't have time to explain them to you, but it has effects on attachments and on what we call internalized problems, such as depression, anxiety, school phobia, and learning problems. It provokes traumatic symptoms, such as nightmares and withdrawal, and it is also a source of behaviour problems for children who were well adjusted before that.
There was a move and a change from Bill C-4 to Bill C-31, which indicates—and I really want to congratulate the government on this—that the government was sensitive to the Canadian association of pediatricians, the Canadian association of child psychiatrists, and the association of public health directors. These three associations asked you and the minister not to detain children. We welcome the fact that children under 16 are now excluded from detention. We think this a recognition that the government knows this is harmful for children.
This will not, however, protect children, because children still will be in detention with their parents. For an eight-year-old child, being “detained” or “in detention with mom” is a semantic difference, and they don't know about semantics. Otherwise, they will be separated from their parents and placed in foster care. This has even worse mental health consequences, so we certainly do not wish to go there.
Finally, there will be no protection for pregnant women or for 16- and 17-year-olds, whose brains are still not totally developed.
Why is detention of children a public health hazard? Well, this is what we call toxic stress, because helplessness strongly decreases resiliency. It would take a very long time to explain to you that this is the kind of stress where there's no escape, but we know that this directly affects the developing brain of the child.
The separation from parents damages attachment and shatters basic trust. It provokes a whole range of consequences. In the short term, we see acute traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, adjustment disorders with different symptoms, and also adolescent risk-taking and suicidality, which are very common too. In the medium term, it is costly because those kids, who very often will stay in Canada, develop learning problems and relational difficulties.
As for the long term, we need to study it. We're calculating the cost with the social work department at McGill. This is likely to be very costly. A pregnant woman who has a damaged baby because of prenatal stress or insufficient prenatal care...this is hundreds of thousands of dollars. A kid who drops out because he has developed learning problems is a huge cost for Canadian society. We have to consider these public health costs beyond the humanitarian consequences.
Finally, there's this quote from a mom: “Canada is supposed to be a civilized country—to detain a mother and a baby is not civilized.”
I plead with you.... I think Canada.... I have been and I am still very proud to be Canadian. This would preserve our values and our capacity to protect the children—