Finance committee  Merci, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting me here today. My name is Dr. Patrick Smith. I'm the national CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Canada's most established mental health organization, on the cusp of our 100th year anniversary and with more than 10,000 staf

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. Granger and I were both at a health round table that the minister held, and it was unanimous. Everyone around the table, including Canadian medical, Canadian nursing, Canadian home care, and Canadian mental health, all think there needs to be leadership and direc

Finance committee  It's because of the years of deferred maintenance. This isn't pointing fingers. Many countries have found themselves in the same position over the years. The gap between what we know we need and what we have is so significant that the transformation fund that we're talking about

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me here today. My name is Dr. Patrick Smith. I'm the national CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association. Celebrating 100 years in 2018, we are a Canada-wide organization, with more th

Finance committee  No, I'd be happy to continue.

Finance committee  No, actually, she was just doing the timekeeping. We talked about five areas needing investment. They are based on the tiered model and the stepped care model, very much in line with what people are saying here. We are a proud member also of CAMIMH, and we support the recommend

Finance committee  Again, you can't read it, but we sent it electronically, the information on the pyramid or tier model. It isn't something that we came up with on our own. It's something that we've done with Veterans Affairs, the specialty program we've done. Around the world they're using this t

Finance committee  Yes, and I think this is also documented in the Mental Health Commission's mental health strategy. We have a mental health strategy from the commission, but it's not an action-based strategy that we're talking about here. The G7 country with the lowest spending on mental health

Finance committee  I was going to quickly add that when we're working with the provinces across the country, they often like to see how it has worked in another province, so that they have the actual evidence. For Canada, you can actually see that with the U.K. It's not selling this kind of pie-i

Finance committee  It is one in five, and the other four are the family member, the colleague, the co-worker. What we try to say, and as Prime Minister Trudeau so eloquently said in his post during Mental Health Week, mental health affects everyone. Every one of us has physical health. Some days w

Finance committee  There are certain areas because of the social determinants of health. Clearly, we know that in the indigenous communities and some of the areas where there's more poverty, there are going to be more stressors and therefore you're going to have higher incidence of mental health is

Finance committee  I think Canada has some of the best leaders in that. When we went to the International Institute of Mental Health Leadership in Australia and were looking at some of the workplaces in corporate Australia and corporate U.K. People look to corporate Canada. Actually, because of the

Finance committee  I was head of the addiction psychiatry division at U of T, and then also founding head of the addiction psychiatry program at UBC, so addictions have kind of been my career. Fetal alcohol syndrome is, as you're saying, completely preventable. One of the things, though, that we ha

Justice committee  That's great. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting us here today. My name is Dr. Patrick Smith. I'm the National CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association. Bill C-375 is a very important bill to us. I would definitely hav

Justice committee  I hear you now. I now have audio.