Wellness Together Canada

Wellness Together Canada (WTC) launched to help address the unprecedented rise in feelings of stress, anxiety and depression in Canada due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In its first year, more than 1.1 million people across all provinces and territories have accessed the WTC portal in over 3.6 million web sessions.

More than a year later, with variants and various states of public health measures still in place throughout the country, the pandemic continues to have a profound effect on all of us, particularly those who do not have ready access to their regular support networks.

Support is just a call or click away and it is important that members of your network have access to WTC live support and credible information, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Through WTC, individuals of all ages in Canada or Canadians abroad can access supports ranging from self-assessment and peer support, to free and confidential sessions with social workers, psychologists and other professionals.

WTC offers services in both official languages and phone counselling is available in more than 200 languages and dialects, through instantaneous interpretation.

In order to continue to improve mental health services, Budget 2021 proposes to provide $62 million for the WTC portal so that it can continue to provide everyone in Canada with the tools and services to support their mental health and well-being.

Learn More

Other Resources

Beyond Wellness Together Canada, there are a multitude of resources and supports available for mental health, suicide prevention and substance use. We all have a role to play in helping prevent stigma and making sure our friends and neighbours don’t have to suffer in silence.

General mental health and well-being for Canadians

• Canadian Mental Health Association
• Hope For Wellness (Indigenous peoples)
• Mental Health Commission of Canada
• Promoting Health Equity: Mental Health of Black Canadians Fund

Urgent care and distress

• Crisis Services Canada: Local distress centres and crisis organizations across Canada

Seniors

• Canadian Coalition for Seniors’ mental health COVID-19 resources
• Canadian Frailty Network: Tips to avoid social isolation

Youth

• Jack.org
• Canada Youth Network
• Kids Help Phone

Suicide and self harm

• Language Matters: Safe Communication for Suicide Prevention
• Association québécoise de prévention du suicide (French only)
• Canada Suicide Prevention Service

Substance use

• How to talk to a friend or family member about drugs
• Talking to your health care provider about opioids
• Get help with problematic substance use

The post Mental Health Week resources appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands)
2020-05-27 13:49

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is with regard to the urgent problem of mental health crises across Canada. My colleague, Jenica Atwin from Fredericton, held a press conference this morning in which she used the term “echo pandemic”. We will face an echo pandemic. We’re already seeing increases in suicides on southern Vancouver Island.

My question to the minister is this: Will we see direct funding to community mental health services as urgently requested by the Canadian Mental Health Association?

Hon. Patty Hajdu (Thunder Bay—Superior North)
2020-05-27 13:50

Mr. Chair, I read the honourable member’s colleague’s letter just today, and I want to reassure all members that we have invested in mental health supports for Canadians, obviously before the pandemic hit but certainly since we’ve been living with the pandemic.

I’d like to remind all members to direct their constituents to the wellnesstogether.ca website and portal. There Canadians can find online resources, as well as connections to real and alive counsellors and other professionals who can help them with their various concerns.

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OTTAWA – The Green Party is calling on the government to do more to counter misogyny amid reports of increasing rates of domestic and gender-based violence across the country.

This week the Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Maryam Monsef, said that front-line organizations are reporting a 20 to 30 per cent increase in rates of gender-based violence and domestic violence in some regions of the country. This comes on the heels of the tragic killings in Nova Scotia that began with the assault of the killer’s intimate partner.

“We have a misogyny problem in this country,” said Green MP Jenica Atwin (Fredericton), the Green caucus critic for women and gender equality. “It is deeply-seeded in the fabric of our communities and to counter it we are going to need to call it out at the highest levels. We need a national action plan to address intimate partner and gender-based violence.”

Earlier this month the government announced $50 million dollars in funding to assist women’s shelters, sexual assault centres and similar facilities in Indigenous communities during the pandemic. The Green Party is also urging the government to maintain predictable funding after the pandemic so that community organisations can provide consistent support to their clients.

“Fighting the pandemic has meant we have all been asked to stay at home,” said Green Party Interim Leader Jo-Ann Roberts. “For many of us, home evokes warmth and security. But for a significant part of the population, the home is a place of violence and danger, where the day-to-day experience is a waking nightmare. For these Canadians, we must do better. We have the tools and resources to do better, now we need the leadership.”

Help is available at:

Crisis Services Canada, 1-833-456-4566: https://www.crisisservicescanada.ca/en/

Or get in touch with your local Women’s Shelter: https://www.sheltersafe.ca/

Mental Health Helpline:

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/mental-health-services/m…

# # #

For more information or to arrange an interview:

Rosie Emery

Press Secretary

613-562-4916×206

rosie.emery@greenparty.ca

Shannon Carmont

Chief of Staff to Ms. Atwin

506-440-4980

shannon.carmont.253@parl.gc.ca

The post Green Party MP Atwin calls out misogyny, calls for a national action plan to address gender-based violence appeared first on Elizabeth May.

On October 2^nd, Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada and MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, will take part in MIAW’s Breakfast on Parliament Hill. “Mental illness, like any other illness, requires a concerted national strategy for prevention and treatment. As MPs, we can help in bringing attention to this issue. There is still a stigma surrounding mental illness, but I believe initiatives such as MIAW create an opportunity for public discussion of mental health and mental illness, ” said May.

The Green Party promotes a comprehensive approach to mental health including:

• An increase transfer funding for non-institutionalized mental health patients including children and youth to provide adequate community-based support and outpatient and inpatient care by mental health practitioners, including in rural Canada where lack of facilities and trained professionals is acute;
• Support for a public health initiative to reduce the use of psychoactive drugs through better rehabilitation and prevention programs, especially for children;
• Requirements for greater involvement of people dealing with personal mental health problems in research planning, policy development, program evaluation, and other decisions that affect their lives and communities.

The post The Greens Support Mental Illness Awareness Week appeared first on Elizabeth May.

We need more support for non-institutionalized mental health patients including children and youth, to provide adequate community-based support and outpatient and inpatient care by mental health practitioners, including in rural Canada where lack of facilities and trained professionals is acute.  At the same time, we need adequate institutionalized spaces for people with mental health issues that constitute a danger to themselves or to others.

We need to identify drug addiction as a health problem and focus efforts on harm reduction, treatment and prevention.

The post The Need for a National Mental Health Strategy appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The minutes for both meetings can be found here  and here.

The post Standing Committee on Health (HESA) appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The committee continued its review of the various front-line health and wellbeing services offered to Canadian veterans. Two witnesses from the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research (CIMVHR) provided some information on their organization and the kind of high-impact research that their centre conducts. Separate witnesses from the Department of Veterans Affairs presented on the various research that the department conducts itself. The results point to satisfactory improvements in the transition to civilian life by veterans; however, there are still some shortcomings in dealing with veterans who suffer from mental illnesses, especially suicide ideation. A second group of witnesses from the department presented on the New Veteran Charter (NVC) and the improved rehabilitation and financial programs it offers veterans.

The post Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs (ACVA) appeared first on Elizabeth May.

One of the issues that caught my attention in the member’s speech relates to support for individuals with mental health issues. In my riding of Sudbury, the Canadian Mental Health Association does great work with those individuals. However, we are starting to see more and more individuals who require mental health services ending up in jails and not necessarily getting the services they need. What we do not want our prison system to become is the next system for individuals with mental health issues to get those services.

I would like to hear the hon. member’s comments as to what we see coming forward for individuals with mental health issues and how the bill would do anything to change that or even support them.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Madam Speaker, it is clear there were attempts to amend this legislation. The witnesses appearing on behalf of the Toronto Lawyers Association and others on behalf of the legal community argued that this legislation should be amended to take into account mental health issues. That was not possible at committee. Those amendments were not given adequate opportunity to be discussed.

In this set of amendments, we are bringing forward a safety valve that deals with mental health issues.

This legislation would criminalize the mentally ill. We are not seeing the resources that are needed in prisons to help people with mental health issues, nor are the mental health issues on the streets being addressed. If we are not dealing with it and we are not helping those individuals, we are jailing them.

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I want to begin my brief remarks by paying tribute to one extraordinarily brave Canadian woman, Maureen Basnicki, whose great courage and perseverance in the face of losing her husband, Ken, in the disaster of 9/11 inspires us all.

I had a chance to talk to Maureen in the justice committee hearings. This was during the time we were transfixed by a government motion to end debate and push the whole bill through that day. She was disheartened, as an individual Canadian, that so much in the bill was caught up in an omnibus bill. As much as I support the efforts to allow Canadians, such as Maureen, who ever experienced the tragedy of personal loss to an act of terrorism overseas, and as much as it is quite right and appropriate, Canadians should be able to seek civil remedies overseas.

There is much in the bill that changes the characteristics of Canada and the values of Canadians in ways that do not reflect the kind of country we are. In fact, one of the trite things said after 9/11 was that if we abandoned civil liberties, if we changed what we were as a country, we had let the terrorists win.

To throw people in jail on mandatory minimums without the discretion of a judge who sees the person before him or her, without the opportunity of the criminal justice system to work toward restorative justice, without the opportunities that a compassionate justice system has to figure out if the person deserves jail time, or needs mental health facility where he or she can get the help needed, or is a victim of systemic racism or is someone for whom only criminal justice will work, needs revision. Putting forward my first amendment, which relates to the victims of terrorism act, is an important improvement in Canadian law and I support it. The amendment I have added today, should it be passed, will only expand the ambit of those Canadians who have been damaged by acts that fall well below the rule of law.

My amendment would add to the definition of terrorism that we would also recognize an act of torture to be something for which Canadians could seek redress overseas. It would apply to the case of someone like Mahar Arar. He was taken, in violation of all that is decent and in violation of all rule of law, not in recognition of his Canadian citizenship at all, and subjected to torture. He too would have redress to these civil remedies.

Since I have the opportunity to speak to the bill, as the hon. member from the official opposition has done, let me also speak to the broader problem. In the view of every criminologist, expert, academic who appeared before the justice committee and who commented on this through the media and in learned articles and so on, no one who has an experience of mandatory minimums believes they work. They do not believe they will reduce crime. They believe they will drive up the cost of our system and impose on the provinces. As has been so well pointed out by the provincial justice minister for the province of Quebec, there could be untold billions of dollars in the cost of new prisons.

We already have overcrowded prisons. To crowd them further will impose other problems. The state of California needed a court order to release prisoners because the overcrowding constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of its bill of rights. We do not want that situation in Canada.

I want to raise a very specific point that did not come up in committee. I believe it is very important for all Canadians to recognize that every member of the House of Commons favours law-abiding citizens. Every member of the House of Commons wants to do better than the bill does in supporting victims of crime.

However, the legislation will not deliver safer streets. I cannot say that forcefully enough. One of the aspects of this, which I do not think has received adequate attention, comes from the experience in the United States, when the Americans removed judicial discretion with mandatory minimums and gave power in the hands of prosecutors to exact plea bargains.

Plea bargains have become far and away more common than criminal trials, which means that presumption of innocence goes out the window. There is generally a sense that if one insists on one’s innocence and goes to trial, one will be punished down the road with a mandatory minimum. That is how prosecutors exact plea bargains. They say that if people go to trial, they will increase the offence. If they are found guilty, they will go to jail for 20 years instead of 2 years.

I will quote an article from the New York Times, on September 25, 2011, titled “Sentencing Shift Gives New Leverage to Prosecutors”, and a legal scholar, who was a former conservative federal judge and prosecutor and now law professor. I want to emphasize this and I hope members of Parliament will reconsider it and give weight to this last moment we have at report stage to fix this bill and get rid of mandatory minimums.

This is what former judge Paul Cassell said:

Judges have lost discretion, and that discretion has accumulated in the hands of prosecutors, who now have the ultimate ability to shape the outcome. With mandatory minimums and other sentencing enhancements out there, prosecutors can often dictate the sentence that will be imposed.

The story goes on to say:

Without question, plea bargains benefit many defendants who have committed crimes and receive lighter sentences than they might after trial.

In other words, taking discretion away from judges does not guarantee, as those on the government benches so desire to see, that people who are guilty of crimes will be put behind bars. They may get the perverse result that I am sure they do not want, that mandatory minimums drive us to a completely new system in which prosecutors have the ability to plea bargain. In that process, people who would have been found guilty before a judge and jury, and be subjected to a harsher sentence, would get a lighter sentence.

Yes, we will overcrowd our jails. Without the safety valve provisions in the amendments that we will be reviewing today, without an ability to say “mandatory minimums should not apply here”, without that, we will be crowding our jails.

We know as of now we are not putting sufficient resources into programs for mental health or to help people with addictions. We know that so many of the problems that occur in crimes on the streets have to do with systemic problems of poverty, lack of access to mental health resources, treatment and care and addiction. If we are not dealing with those, we are merely throwing people from the streets, where there are problems, into jails. Jails are not a solution to mental health problems. Jails are no solution to the absence of affordable housing.

This is not legislation that will work for Canadians. It will not make safer streets; it will make meaner streets. This is not a bill that deals with Canadian values. This speaks to some other country that I do not know. I do not want to live in a country that thinks it is better to impose stark mandatory minimums rather than have a criminal justice system rooted in the rule of law that recognizes the primacy of the value that goes back to the times of common law, before the existence of our great country of Canada. We recognize the presumption of innocence. We must not lose that.

We must not live in a country where a member of a governing cabinet can look across the floor of the House and accuse an opposition member, as if it were a crime, to have worked as a lawyer for the defence. The defence of people accused of crime is essential in a criminal justice system. As we know from Donald Marshall Jr. and the Milgaard case, innocent people get accused of crimes. Those people who defend them in court are an essential part of the fabric of a civilized society that understands the rule of law.

I do not think I have ever been so deeply shocked by anything I have heard in the House of Commons as an accusation that the hon. member, who now stands as the official opposition House leader, was somehow a bad person because before entering politics, while practising law, he defended people accused of crimes. We should remember that when someone is accused of a crime we do not say a person is “defending criminals”. The presumption of innocence is an essential part of the fabric of a civilized society. I fear we are losing that.

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In Canada far too many lives are lost each year to suicide, almost 4,000, over 10 each day. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Canadian youth ages 10 to 24. Aboriginal youth suicide rates are especially troubling at five to seven times higher than the non-aboriginal rate. In Waterloo region’s high schools, three youths lost their lives to suicide in just one single week last year.

Suicide has a horrific impact: shortened lives, grieving families, devastated friends and even broken communities.

There is already lots of good work being done in suicide prevention across the country, but with some federal coordination and federal leadership, we can do better for vulnerable Canadians.

Seconded by Elizabeth May : n/a.

Click here for the entire document

Interventions in the House of Commons: October 28, 2011

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