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Barrie-Innisfil candidates offer ideas on how to improve mental health, curb drug abuse

Many of Ontario’s youth are struggling with mental health. What can you do to include to better support mental health and substance abuse issues in your community?
mental-health

Editor's note: For the 2019 federal election, BarrieToday teamed up with a journalism student to provide extra coverage on important issues. 

The interviews conducted during this Q-and-A series were done by Emily Hsueh from Algonquin College in Ottawa. The issues and topics of discussion focused mainly on youth and young adults in Canada and the Barrie-Innisfil riding. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.

This installment touches on the the issue of youth mental health and substance abuse. 

Liberal candidate Lisa-Marie Wilson and People’s Party candidate Stephanie Robinson could not be reached after several attempts.

Many of Ontario’s youth are struggling with mental health. What can you do to include to better support mental health and substance abuse issues in your community?

Conservative John Brassard

Personally, I’ve been a very strong advocate for mental-health initiatives, working with the local Canadian Mental Health Association and other organizations. But we also have to continue to support them and the work that they do as well.

Very pleased, for example, to see that the provincial government announced a $40-million initiative to provide mental-health workers within the school system in Ontario. Oftentimes that’s where identification of mental-health issues happens, whether it’s with teachers of students themselves seeking the help that they need.

That, to me, is something that I’ve heard consistently from mental-health workers and educators, that we need to make sure we’re in the schools.

The initiative from the provincial government is a very, very smart and very, very good initiative. The previous Conservative government has always taken the issue of mental health seriously by creating the mental-health commission, but there’s no question that there are significant mental health-related issues and stress among young people, and all governments have a role to play in that as well.

From my standpoint, I’ll continue advocating for youth and mental health, and we’ll continue to make sure that the issues that relate to that because they often lead to other areas. They can lead to increased drug use and addictions, and I can’t overstate how pleased I am to see this initiativ by the provincial government, because it’s something that I’d been hearing.

There was a model, I’m thinking back specifically to a model that I heard in St. Catharines where St. Catharines school boards were already engaging in that type of program. So, to see it expanded provincewide, I think that will be a big, big help in not just identifying mental-health issues, but also preventing some of the related and ancillary effects of that mental health, which can lead to addictions and other issues as well. So hitting it where it starts is critical.

There are agencies within the community that deal with at-risk youth and substance issues. I know for example that (Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre) has an outpatient mental-health clinic that they just opened up a couple years ago and it’s, unfortunately, getting a lot of use. But in terms of any initiative for substance abuse, there’s an awareness campaign that governments are responsible for.

But as far as any substance abuse programs, there are a lot of groups within the city that are engaged in that. The Canadian Mental Health Association, there’s other organizations as well. We need to continue to support the work that they do because many times it’s not government that’s on the front line, it’s those organizations that are on the front line and we need to support them.

NDP Pekka Reinio

Federally, what I think we need to do is make it a priority. All parties agree that mental health is a concern.

But we need a party that actually has the political will to address mental health and the NDP is a party that has prioritized mental health. We will be investing in mental health at the provincial level and making sure that they are able to improve mental-health services across the province.

We’ll be working in partnership with the communities to ensure that they have access to mental-health and addiction services.

We do have support for the opioid crises that are going on; we would declare a national emergency and help communities to bring in safe consumption sites.

Green Bonnie North

Barrie is one of the worst communities hit with the opioid crisis, so we have homeless as a result of that, and the opioid crisis needs to be dealt with as well.

There’s been some tension municipally of having a safe consumption site, which is literally the bottom line on dealing with opioid issues. It’s part of the entire toolbox to deal with everything and it’s there as an emergency first-aid, essentially, to keep people from dying on the streets.

There’s been tension municipally because people don’t want to have a safe consumption site in certain areas of the city, even though the evidence shows that when cities and towns have safe consumption sites that it does save lives. But people resent some of the neighbourhood problem that might crop up because of them.

We definitely have to expand mental-health care and addiction care. The access to mental-health services in Barrie, and I can speak to this personally, is really not very well provided. We had a family doctor shortage for a long time. We definitely need to do better in mental-health care in this city, but I have a feeling it’s probably the same in many places across Canada.

One of the main reasons that people become entangled in substance abuse is because they’re dealing with untreated pain. Whether that pain is physical or psychological, there's a failure in our health-care system and in our social networks to deal with them.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough money in the system to provide alternate treatments, like perhaps cortisone shots or pain clinics that deal with pain in a holistic way, rather than just writing a prescription and sending them away. They could become addicted to opioids used to treat this and there are so many reasons why people become entangled in substance abuse.

We are clearly not doing a good enough job for any of those things and we definitely want to increase access to mental health-care everywhere in Canada.

There’s been some tension because the local health unit has shown evidence that safe consumptions sites are and an important part of the toolkit to deal with the opioid crisis. They’re not the only solution, but you need to have it. It keeps people from dying.

We've been talking about this in Barrie for quite a while and the health unit has provided a lot of data and information supporting it and, unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of buy-in from certain sectors of our city with respect to where the safe injection site goes.

Complicating it, there are members of our city council who are opposed to it and the local Conservative MPs have not been very supportive of it, so all of this has created an awful lot of tension in the community. We're still struggling to get the safe consumption site that was planned to have been underway by now.

The Green Party wants to decriminalize opioids. We believe that it’s a health issue, not a criminal issue. Until we decriminalize it, there will always be stigma, there will be people hiding and not self-declaring their problem, because they’re afraid of getting arrested.

There are people who might not rescue anyone because they’re afraid of calling 911 if one of their friends has an overdose because they don’t want to get ensnared in some kind of a criminal preceding. People are going to die until we look at the model that places like Portugal has with how they deal with substance abuse and opioids in their country.

Other topics in the Q&A series are: food distribution, the youth job market, crime, LGBTQ issues and the environment. 

The federal election is Oct. 21. More local coverage is available here.