THUNDER BAY - The leader of the opposition at Queen’s Park is calling on the Ford government to provide more supports for mental health and addictions services in the north, which she said is experiencing tragedy after tragedy due to overdoses.
“The magnitude of the crisis here in Thunder Bay is just stunning. It is causing people to lose their lives and causing parents to have to bury their children and it shouldn’t be that way,” said Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath.
Horwath was in Thunder Bay on Tuesday, where she and Thunder Bay-Atikokan MPP Judith Monteith-Farrell met with Carolyn Karle, who lost her daughter Dayna to an unintentional overdose earlier this year.
Karle, along with the Deck Foundation Recovery Centre, have been advocating for more mental health and addiction resources in the city, including more detox spaces and aftercare programs for people needing help.
“It’s really important to me because it’s the right thing to do,” Karle said. “Ignoring there is a crisis is the wrong thing to do. We need to be addressed up here in the North. We need help, and why are we not being helped? I’m really happy it’s coming to the forefront.”
During Dayna’s struggle with addiction, Karle said she sought care several times but there are limited detox spaces available in the city.
According to Horwath, the Balmoral Centre in Thunder Bay, which provides 25-beds for detox, turns away more than 3,000 people per year.
“We need to provide the resources to address what is happening here,” Horwath said. “It is shocking that Doug Ford hasn’t done that already. I can’t imagine how much worse things will be if he gets another chance to keep cutting and refusing to fix the concerns of communities like Thunder Bay have.”
Horwath criticized the Ford government’s inaction on the crisis, as well as cutting $330 million from mental health and addiction funding province-wide in 2018.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also exacerbated the mental health and addiction crisis nation-wide and Horwath said the Ford government sat on $5 billion in COVID funds instead of investing it into programs to help the people of Ontario.
Cancelling the increase to minimum wage and paid sick days also takes away opportunities for people in the province, Horwath said, leading to issues like poverty and addiction.
“That’s not what we need,” she said. “What we need is a government that is prepared to ensure people can make a decent living, keep a roof over their head, feed their families, and pay the bills.”
In addition to more detox spaces in the city, Karle is also advocating for better aftercare programs for people in recovery.
“I just feel that coming out of a 30-day treatment program makes me think of coming out of intensive care and I feel just letting people head back to their regular lives, if they don’t have a lot of support, I think it’s a long process to get recovered,” she said.
“I think you need to go into after care to learn life skills, have some great experiences, to be able to be strong enough to thrive in the community and not relapse.”
Karle said she and other advocates have reached out directly to the Ford government for help and she said having her voice, and the voices of so many others who have also lost family members to addiction being heard by leaders in the province gives her hope that change will happen.
“I’m really hopeful. I think it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “I think the northern community, we are very much in need and it would be a shame if we don’t get help because people are dying every day. I believe we are going to be heard. It has to happen. It’s a mental health and addiction crisis.”
