Tory calls for national summit on ‘mental health crisis’ on Toronto streets

Toronto Mayor John Tory is calling for a national summit on mental health, regarding to a “mental health crisis” playing out on Toronto streets every day.

He also mentioned that more government supports are needed to solve the problems.

In a statement issued Wednesday that coincided with the annual Bell Let’s Talk event, Tory said it’s time that the country’s mayors, premiers, ministers and the prime minister sit down “to discuss how we can better coordinate across governments to support Canadians living with mental health and substance addiction challenges.”

“This summit must be the moment we start treating mental health care as health care. That we clearly decide on who has responsibility to do what, and to get on with doing much more together,” he said.

The mayor asserted that a shortage of funding for mental health supports from the provincial and federal governments has shifted the burden to municipalities that are financially “ill-equipped” to address the problem.

“A lack of mental health supports undoubtedly contributes to a number of issues we are seeing in cities across the country,” Tory said.

“When people are suffering and unable to receive adequate support, frequently they are left on our streets, on our transit systems, and in our emergency rooms to fend for themselves.”

He pointed out that demand for psychological services in Ontario grew by 50 per cent last year and that according to the Ontario Psychological Association approximately 900,000 young people in the province are living with mental illness, and there were thousands of opioid related deaths across Canada last year.

Tory said that while Toronto has attempted to respond to a wave of mental health and substance abuse issues with initiatives like the Toronto Community Crisis Services pilot, health care is ultimately the responsibility of the provincial and federal governments.

Cities, he said, are struggling to deal with the fallout of untreated mental health.

“The lack of spending on mental health – particularly as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic – is painfully clear on the streets of municipalities across the country. When people are suffering and unable to receive adequate support, frequently they are left on our streets, on our transit systems, and in our emergency rooms to fend for themselves,” Tory said.

“When the federal and provincial governments don’t fully and adequately fund mental health care, the responsibility is offloaded to ill-equipped municipalities across Canada which are without the financial resources to address this crisis – it is offloaded to our shelters, to our police services, to our transit systems, and to hospital emergency departments.”

He said confronting the mental health crisis will take the same level of determination and cooperation as was required to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in Canada three years ago with the first detected case in Toronto.

Tory noted that despite Toronto’s financial constraints, the city’s draft 2023 budget allocates $1.53 million in tax base funding to Toronto Public Health mental health initiatives, and $13.75 million to the Toronto Community Crisis Service, a program that provices non-police responses to people in mental crisis.

The mayor claimed the federal government has yet to follow through on its pledge of ongoing mental health services funding under the Canada Mental Health Transfer of $4.5 billion over 5 years.

Tory said he has been “shocked’ by the prevalence of seemingly random acts of violence on the TTC recently, including incidents this week that saw a group of people attack two transit workers in Scarborough in a “swarming” and a young woman stabbed and seriously injured on a downtown streetcar in an apparently random incident. Last Friday an 89-year-old woman died after she was pushed to the ground near the intersection of Yonge Street and King Street in what police described as an unprovoked attack.

It’s not clear what role mental health issues may have played in the incidents.

Part of the article was reported by the Star.