Status of Women committee  Absolutely. If we can invest in training people within their communities, people who have experienced what life has been like in their community and have first-hand experience, that's going to be much more meaningful to human connection in the long run. I know I've talked about

Status of Women committee  Beyond the funding piece, I think when we're looking at women transferring out of a shelter or youth transferring into another care centre or somebody coming into an ER, something we see often is that only one thing gets addressed. If I walk into an ER with three bullet holes and

Status of Women committee  I think I would start with requesting that there be protected funds going directly to services such as women's mental health. You already said it perfectly. It's kind of ridiculous that we're depending on charities to continue to—

Status of Women committee  Yes, absolutely. As for whether virtual or in-person is better, that's interesting. I don't have any hard data to support it. If you had asked me prior to the pandemic, I would without a doubt have said in-person, but we've seen a really powerful impact with virtual care. If it

Status of Women committee  I would agree.

Status of Women committee  I would agree with you. There isn't enough space, and women are not likely to leave or to be prepared to leave if they know they're not going to have a place to go. I'm not sure if there was a specific question in there, but I would agree completely that we need to be looking at

Status of Women committee  I agree completely. I'm not overly familiar with the ARCC program, but I used to work on a crisis team in Simcoe County. In the crisis house I worked in, I would be deployed to situations usually without, but sometimes with, police. I can say with certainty that when police were

Status of Women committee  I mentioned in my opening as well that peer support is a really underutilized service that we can tap into to fill a lot of these vacant positions. You talk about how some people don't want to go to that clinical piece. That can be a really intimidating space, especially for youn

Status of Women committee  It's definitely negative. Owen, you said this earlier—the bullies can now be there at 3 a.m. on your phone, and that can be for parents or children. Also, on algorithms, once we start looking at certain things, our phones will now reinforce those beliefs for us over and over. If

Status of Women committee  I think I can expand on what the delays do, which you captured briefly there. When our experiences are invalidated by appealing court rulings and things like that, this prolongs when the money is going to go, which prolongs when it's going to make its way into communities and int

Status of Women committee  We're not even close. One of the barriers I see constantly is language. In the program we run, we don't have enough funding to even offer services in French, which is part of our national languages; never mind if you speak Somali. Language is such a barrier if you want to engag

Status of Women committee  Unfortunately, I would put a caveat on that as well: Sometimes, even when people are in crisis, they still do not get the help. You mentioned that we have advocates. If somebody has an advocate, they may be able to navigate the system. I'm not going to go into my personal situati

Status of Women committee  That is a loaded question. In the last year, I haven't worked frontline due to burnout in the pandemic. I left the front line, but 15 years prior to that, I did work frontline on an assertive community treatment team, so I worked with people who were incredibly unwell. This is

Status of Women committee  That's really what I think it is. If we don't want to face those tough questions down the line, then we need to start investing in preventative services now.

Status of Women committee  This goes back to what we were saying earlier, and what Owen was saying. The burnout that's happening among our frontline workers is only increasing. That means wait-lists are getting longer and longer. Again, people are on these wait-lists waiting for services, and by the time t