An example that I raised is that some of the youth are crown wards. Another example is somebody who comes here with a family when they're very young. Sometimes we have cases in which somebody has come here at the age of a few months or a few years. They tend to experience mental health issues that go undiagnosed for years and years. They come in contact with the criminal justice system. Immigration picks them up down the line when they've already been here sometimes for 40 or 50 years. This is the only country they've known. They do not have any family. Oftentimes they don't speak the language and have no idea about the life in the other country.
What we know about mental health is that in order for people to keep doing well, they need continuity of support. They need the familiarity of the situation. Throwing somebody out into such an unknown situation, somebody who is already not doing well mentally, is often causing people to commit suicide. Unfortunately, we've had to deal with cases where folks took their own lives because they could not cope.
Again, I would like to say that while we support the idea of the immigration system being fair and responsive and not catering to individuals who are horrible people out there, at the same time we feel that the majority of permanent residents, the majority of foreign nationals, are not horrible people. They're people and they have needs, and for us, those with mental health issues require special consideration.
We cannot, on the one hand, have a mental health strategy, and go out there as a leader in mental health care, and at the same time completely disregard this population in our immigration process. We are really hanging them out to dry when we send them to countries they don't know, where they do not have any supports or systems in place to help them stay well.