Bill No. 244 - Education Act. - 2nd Reading
CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their kindness. I'm pleased to rise and speak to Bill No. 244, introduced by my colleague the member for Dartmouth East.
I think there's a lot we can agree with him about. To begin with, we need to make children's mental health a priority. We know that. We've been talking about that for a long time now. As the member points out, we live in a rapidly changing world. I think the member for Dartmouth East, as a former educator - maybe an educator on hiatus; I don't know how he likes to be referred to - has said that the classroom is a place that changes a lot. I see this with my own children, that the reality today is completely different from the reality when I and many of us were children.
Many of us didn't have computers in our classrooms. We didn't have smartphones. I think it is a whole new world and I think there are also different pressures in the world. We've spoken a lot in the last while about what many call the existential threat of climate change. We know that conversations about that are impacting students. While many of us enjoyed a childhood where we could look forward to the future in the kind of innocent way that kids do, many kids today don't enjoy that same luxury.
To the substance of this bill we would say, sure, but not nearly enough. The member pointed out that he can remember when there were no first aid kits in the classroom. Obviously there ought to be a first aid kit in the classroom. I think this extends that concept and that's great.
In the classrooms where my children spend their days, I see that there are a lot of kids who need constant help and intervention from the educators and support folks in their classroom. I think anything that can help those folks intervene in a productive way is great, but I think there are a lot of other things that are needed. I think in this case, Mr. Speaker, a lot of it really goes back to the social determinants of health and the same things that you'll hear our caucus talk about time and time again. Healthy food in schools - we know that children who don't eat lunch - and there are many, many children in our province who don't eat lunch - tend to have behavioural issues in the afternoons.
Even in my district, Mr. Speaker, I talk to librarians, I talk to principals, I talk to teachers, and they say that everything is kind of okay until noon and then all bets are off. The reason is because they don't know if kids have eaten. I mean, there are a lot of reasons, I am sure, but if you want to find a common denominator, that's a really simple one. That's why we advocate for things like school food programs and poverty alleviation, because one in four students in this province is food insecure. That statistic rises when you get to certain parts of the province. That directly impacts students' mental health and ability to learn.
Similarly, shelter - we know that, increasingly, a great number of students in this province are also housing insecure. They don't know where they are going to be spending the night. I have several case files in my office of parents who can't find a place for their family to live. Imagine the stress, Mr. Speaker, of not knowing, not feeling comfortable and secure in just even knowing that you have your own room or your own home or where you are going to be the next day.
The issues of what happens in school pale in comparison in a child's life to those fundamental feelings of safety and security. Again, Mr. Speaker, this is why we repeat these points over and over again.
Our solution to this problem, and again we support the member's bill, but if we really want to get into the issue of child mental health, we have advocated for and introduced legislation towards a child and youth advocate in Nova Scotia. We believe that having a child and youth advocate would help advance the issues being faced by vulnerable children in this province and would help address many of the issues that we see being raised here.
We also support raising income assistance rates. There are many children whose families are supported in this way and, again, who are housing insecure, who are food insecure.
A $15 per hour minimum wage, Mr. Speaker - and again this is where these issues of the social determinants of health, of housing, and food and security really overlap. In my constituency we have the Dartmouth Non-Profit Housing Society. They are a fantastic organization. They manage a ton of below-market-rate units as a non-profit. When I talked to Nick Russell, their director, when I first took office, I said, well Nick, what do you do? He said, well, we manage this portfolio of below-market-rate rentals. Typically, they're townhouses, typically they're two or three bedrooms. He said, our bread and butter is the single mum with three kids who works at Tim Hortons because that single mum doesn't have a hope in heck of finding an appropriate place to live for her family. It is not possible.
This was years ago. This was before we were in our current rental market. This is what I hear from folks like that. So, this is why we push for funding for these folks, this is why we push for support for these folks, and this is also why we push for the establishment of some control on rising rents. All of this is directly connected to student mental health.
One of the points in this bill is that the kits will contain access information, contact information for provincial mental health services. My question, Mr. Speaker, is what happens when the teacher or the student or the EPA makes that call? Well, it depends on which part of the province they live in and it depends on how lucky they are. How long will a student wait to access those mental health services? It could be quite quickly, for a choice appointment, if they are in the catchment of the IWK here in HRM. It could be 41 days, it could 210 days. It could be longer in parts of Cape Breton - 210 days is longer than the entire school year. Picture a student in distress and the teacher accesses this kit and it helps for a little while. This student, as with many students, needs more help than that. They need to avail themselves of the public mental health system. Picture that they make this call and they are told that next school year they'll get an appointment.
These are the issues that we are pointing to. These are the interventions and wait times in access to mental health that could make the material difference in lives of students and children who are suffering from mental health issues. Other Maritime Provinces have next day, walk-in mental health clinics. We need same day, next day clinics here.
Our caucus has also repeatedly called for a mental health bill of rights here in Nova Scotia. This would help us to unpack issues around mental health and act on them accordingly. I think the bill that the member brings forwards highlights that there are major issues arising in the classroom around mental health. I think it's one sensible piece of a tool kit, but I think there are so many really big interventions that need to be made to really crack the code on this.
We currently spend 4 per cent of our very large health care budget on mental health. Our bill of rights would call for that percentage of funding to increase to 10 per cent. Mental health and physical health are not disconnected. We know that people who suffer from mental health, particularly untreated, tend to avail themselves of all kinds of other parts of our health care system much more frequently than if their issues were dealt with, if there were more upstream interventions, and if we could appropriately triage and treat and support folks who are coming forward with these issues, especially children.
We have also, in that vein, called on the government to provide clarity on the investments in inclusive education. We are happy to see those investments; we are glad to see $15 million in this budget. We want to know how it's going to be spent because we continue, over and over again, to hear issues around students in classrooms not being appropriately supported and not being able to learn.
That is the issue that was at the heart of the report on inclusive education and the excellent outreach and consultation that was done around that report. That's the nut we're trying to crack and the problem we're trying to solve. We're just asking for transparency as we move down the road to solving that because we're not hearing about a lot of progress. We hear anecdotes around progress from the minister and from the deputy minister. It may be too soon to see the data, but we would like to see more detail on how those plans are rolling out so that we can understand whether or not they will be successful.
Mr. Speaker, mental health kits in classrooms is a start. Back to the member's early comment on this bill that he can remember a time when there were no first aid kits in classrooms, and now we would think it was ridiculous if there wasn't a first aid kit in a classroom. Similarly, I think it makes eminent sense to have a kit with things that could support vulnerable students in the classroom. The underlying issue as we see it is much bigger and is fully in the government's purview to address.