Thank you very much for having me speak today.
My name is Ian Boeckh. I'm the president of the Graham Boeckh Foundation, a private family foundation dedicated to improving mental health services in Canada. The foundation is named after my brother Graham, who had schizophrenia and died in his early twenties from complications due to his medication. Our family felt that the system let him down badly, and that moved us to create a foundation.
Our foundation focuses on youth mental health. We have several large joint ventures with Canadian governments, provincial and federal, to create a new mental health care system for youth aged 12 to 25.
Let me tell you why I think Bill C-44 is a historic opportunity.
If you look at where we've come from, we recognize now the huge burden of mental illness. Research and statistics have pointed out both the social and the economic cost. We've made progress in reducing stigma, and huge numbers of people are now coming forward for help.
What we haven't done is create the services to help them. I think there's a possibility this bill could do it if the money is used properly. It could be a catalyst to finally having good services for people with mental health problems in Canada.
My colleagues here have talked very well about the shortcomings of the system. I think we have wonderful programs in Canada. We have wonderful professionals to help people. What we don't have is an organized system that uses our resources well and that suits people.
Our mental health care system was thrown in with other things and developed haphazardly. Nobody looked at creating a well-organized system that would be really suited to helping people with mental health problems. That's what we need to do now.
We need to take a systems approach, which you've heard my colleagues talk about here. This will be critical for making sure this opportunity is captured. Until now we've taken a piecemeal approach. The issues around mental health are complex and multi-faceted.
Minister Philpott, the Minister of Health, has talked eloquently about the need to address the issues of child and youth mental health; 70% of illnesses begin when people are children or youth or young adults. It doesn't make sense to wait for people to get really sick before we help them. So I think a focus on children and youth is really important.
In conclusion, this is a historic opportunity. It won't come again for a long time, so we can't blow it. We need to use this money from the health transfer, the $5 billion, not only to have better funding for services but also to create a system that makes sense, is well organized, and serves the people it's supposed to serve.
The federal government is going to have to work with the provinces. We hope they'll be able to work together in a constructive way to build a system. The provinces and territories are responsible for the mental health care system in this country.
One of the things people don't realize is that there is a consensus on what we need to do to improve the system, and I think you could hear that today. We need to go ahead and do it. We don't need to have endless consultations, or things like that. I think the path forward is reasonably clear, and we can get on with the job.