Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for taking the time to participate in this debate. For people back home, when they hear numbers being thrown around, they do sound very impressive: $200 million in health; $300 million in the present, which has been stabilized funding. However, the issue happening on the ground is a crisis in community after community.
We have some great programs, such as brighter futures, the community health and well-being program, which do some really good work. We have suicide posters in all the communities. However, I go into communities where they have the posters on the wall, and when a child is in need, the wait times to get seen are extraordinarily long. What happens is that indigenous affairs will turn down that child for counselling, and then the child will have to go to Health Canada and it will turn them down. By the time they finish that back and forth, that child has either gone to ground or we have lost him.
I think it is important in the discussion tonight that we get our heads outside of Ottawa. The bureaucrats, the ministers, and politicians will make it all sound great. However, on the ground, those dollars are not helping in the way they need to help. That is what I am asking my colleagues to work toward. Can we find a way to break through that, so that the people who need it are getting the services required to save the children and give them the help?