Status of Women Committee on Oct. 20th, 2022

[Dr. Stuart Shanker]

I agree.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I just want to move on to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have 10 seconds.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Oh, shoot.

My next questions will be for Melanie Omeniho.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Okay. Go right now. I'll give you your minute and half right now, Leah. Go, and then we'll come back.

We're just going to move you. Go for it.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

You spoke about land-based healing. We have a term about that. I was wondering if you could explain that. We know that “one size fits all” doesn't work.

Can you expand on that?

[Melanie Omeniho]

Many of our communities have land-based learning opportunities for people to reconnect to who they were, their culture, their identity and their ability to work through many issues. There have been many programs and pilots that have been examples of bringing our youth back to being a connected part of our community and our society.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I was just saying, feeding off the last question, that it's like feeding our blood memory. It's resolving past traumas. Would you agree with that?

[Melanie Omeniho]

Absolutely. As a young child, I was very fortunate to have my community around me. I was able to connect with family and always have people who loved and showed support, caring and kindness. Our young people now are missing that, especially our young women. We need to bring them back to connect with the grandmothers and the grandfathers so that they can feel connected to society.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

It's almost like a circle. You start understanding why you are the way you are today by understanding your lived history but also the lived history of the ones before you.

[Melanie Omeniho]

Absolutely.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

That's wonderful. Thank you so much.

We're now going to our next round. Leah, I'm dropping you from this round now.

For the next round, we're going to start off with four minutes for Michelle and Marc, and then with two and a half minutes for Andréanne and Annie.

We'll start with Michelle.

Michelle, go ahead for four minutes.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to everyone. We'll see what we can fit in four minutes here.

We are studying the mental health factors that are contributing to the decline of women. I know we have Brittany and Jordanne here from Kawartha Sexual Assault Centre. I'm going to try to do something in four minutes. Let's see if we can do this. I'm going to try to connect you to what Dr. Shanker is doing to see how that will actually help where we are going.

How is the frontline staff doing, Brittany, in managing the stress of caring for your clients?

[Brittany McMillan]

That's a great question. I think it's something that's so important.

If we think about the mental health of those of us who are the people serving the clients, that needs to be at the forefront. Unfortunately, with so much uncertainty in terms of budgets and things like that, people are always feeling at risk of losing their job. We've been asked to continue to provide this service based on our passion for helping people. But if we look at this as a systemic issue, people know that most people running these types of organizations are women and that we'll just do it out of the kindness of our hearts.

It is a systemic issue. We're drastically underpaid—from my role all the way to every frontline person there. We continue to do things with each other—we're a great team, and I'm hopeful that a lot of people have that support—but the reality is that it's really hard.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

The irony is that you need the care provided to you that you are ultimately trying to provide to your clients.

Now I'm going to turn to Dr. Shanker. Brittany touched on one of the things we are fighting for so much right now, which is that every parent, every person in general, is bombarded with the stress of this new world of inflation and worrying about the affordability crisis. That goes for the not-for-profit sector as well. When they don't know where their funding is coming from, that creates stress.

Dr. Shanker, how do we help these frontline workers? If we do not help them, if we do not help our RCMP officers who are out there getting killed because they are doing the work of too many people, how are we going to help shift our society to get back to calm and to self-regulation?

[Dr. Stuart Shanker]

Let me just say to the committee that what Michelle is saying needs to be processed very carefully. This is important. Right now we are doing big projects with the armed forces. We do projects with hospitals, pediatricians and nurses, etc. They are burned out. They are overstressed. Parents are overstressed because of the stresses that their clients or their patients or their frontline workers are feeling.

What we need to start thinking of—and this is Michelle's point—is a universal approach. We as a healthy society need to figure out why this is happening and what we can do about it so that we maintain what has always been the heart of Canada, which is that we are a society that cares about every one of its members.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

I love it when Dr. Shanker is able to tell people what my point is, because he's bang on. It's true, and I think if we don't have that national framework in place.... He's saying “universal”, but I'm going to speak from a federal government perspective.

Dr. Shanker, with that framework, $4.5 billion has been allocated, as I said earlier. If we don't send this mental health transfer into a universal or national framework, what's going to be the destiny of Canada? Answer in five seconds. Good luck.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have 15 seconds to reply.

[Dr. Stuart Shanker]

I can do it in eight seconds. Just look south of the border, Michelle.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Yes. Well said.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much.

We're now going to pass it over to Marc Serré for four minutes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses. It's going to be a challenge to get in all of this in four minutes. I just want to follow through with what Michelle was just mentioning about the national framework. Right now negotiations are happening with the provincial governments and the federal government. Obviously, community-based services and mental health and addiction services focused on youth aged 10 to 25 are one of the priorities. Previously we heard witnesses from The Royal Mental Health in Ottawa indicate that the system is broken and hard to access.

Brittany McMillan, earlier you mentioned a gap and how you cannot serve girls under 16 years of age. Who is serving them? What's happening and what recommendations do you have for us to go back to the bilateral agreements to address this?

[Brittany McMillan]

That's a great question, and it's something that sits really heavily with all of us. We know we need to be serving those girls.

I will say that we do have a limited Public Safety grant, through the federal government, to focus a little bit more on human trafficking and sexual violence. With that piece, we do have some flexibility to help service girls under the age of 16. However, again, it's not in our core funding model.

It's such an issue. I really worry about the girls. I think at this point they're often told to pay for services or to get services, as the other team that left was saying, from those who aren't specialists in sexual violence. We're not entry-level counsellors, but we pay only entry-level wages, so we need to make sure those young girls are getting service that's trauma-informed but also specific to sexual violence training.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you for that.

Earlier you also mentioned clinical therapy versus home strategies. Can you expand a bit on some of the recommendations along the lines of the hospital or clinical aspect versus the organizational and home strategies? You alluded to that earlier.