Parents, the NDP and service providers are teaming up to call on the Ford government to provide more funding for children’s mental health services.
The call comes after a report was released that shows wait times for children and youth have doubled over the last two years.
Diane Walker is the executive director of Children’s Centre in Thunder Bay and says at her centre they have around 200 kids waiting for services and many wait for over a year or longer.
Walker notes in the remote north there is nothing to wait for.
“There is no hallway, and there is no waitlist and people don’t understand. The only way they can get service is to pay for a $1,500 plane flight out of their community to be brought to another community, to be brought to yet another community,” Walker stresses.
The Children’s Centre CEO says she is begging the Ford government to keep their campaign promise of providing funding for youth mental health services.
Walker adds they have wait times because they are underfunded and need more program funding to address these long wait times.
Educator and parent Tesa Fiddler says she is seeing the challenges in getting help for her child first hand saying it’s like a “bottleneck” trying to access services.
“In remote communities, there is no waitlist to get on because there is no mental health service available. They have to leave their communities, say Muskrat Dam to Sioux Lookout, but there’s no service in Sioux Lookout, so they have to go to Thunder Bay, but there’s a waitlist in Thunder Bay, so they have to travel to southern Ontario and wait too long for help,” Fiddler says.
Fiddler adds services need to be made available in Thunder Bay and other northern communities so families don’t have to travel far distances for help.
Fiddler closed her comments by saying “our children are dying and we need to do better.”
The NDP wants the government to act on a bill they proposed to speed up access to mental health and addiction services for people age 26 and younger by capping wait times at 30 days.
The NDP bill is at the committee level since it passed second reading a year ago.
NDP Member Judith Monteith-Farrell feels the bill could help the urgent situation if it was provided with provincial government funding.
