March 24, 2021
Bill No. 24 - Emergency “911” Act
Full debate here starting on page 440.
THE SPEAKER: The honourable member for Dartmouth North.
SUSAN LEBLANC: Mr. Speaker, I am honoured today to rise to speak to our Bill No. 24 - A Series of Amendments to the Emergency “911” Act that would create provincewide emergency mental health response teams. This bill requires the Minister of Municipal Affairs to ensure that 911 is able to dispatch geographically situated emergency mental health response teams across the province and to delineate the expertise, training requirements, and composition, and define the role of peace officers on the teams. Mr. Speaker, this is a service that would save lives. It is consistent with what mental health professionals, community organizations, anti-racist advocates, and police themselves have asked for.
The fact is that our mental health care system is bursting at the seams. It is simply not meeting the needs of Nova Scotians who have struggled with some of the highest rates of mental health challenges in the country, and who, since the COVID19 pandemic, are struggling doubly. We know what more people in this province have reported higher rates of anxiety than anywhere else in Canada since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Twenty-seven per cent of Nova Scotians describe their anxiety level as high, a 20 per cent jump from prepandemic levels. Sixteen per cent of Nova Scotians have reported high levels of depression since the pandemic, more than double the pre-pandemic number of seven per cent. People’s mental health landscapes are simply more complicated than ever before, and the pressures that are pushing people to the brink are more real than ever.
Mr. Speaker, when there is a fire in your home or there is a worry of fire in your home and you call 911, when you can hear the sirens coming in the distance, that is a sense of relief. When someone is having a medical emergency - a physical health medical emergency - and you need to call 911 and you hear the sirens coming, that is a sense of relief. But people who are in mental health crisis possibly do not feel a sense of relief when those sirens start - they can hear the sirens coming in the distance. People who are in mental health crisis should be allowed to feel absolutely safe when they call 911 and know that they will be met by professionals who are equipped and ready to help. Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, this is not the case, and for too many people, the intersection of mental health crisis and policing can be deadly.
In the last 20 years, 460 Canadians have died in encounters with the police. A substantial majority of these people who were lost struggled with mental health issues or substance abuse or both, and often these issues prompted the call for help in the first place.
The situation is getting worse. According to a CBC investigation, the rate at which people die in interactions with police has nearly doubled in the last 20 years. The investigation also found that Black and Indigenous people were over-represented in these deaths, and I will table that. Tragically, we all know the names of too many of these Canadians. Only last year, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black and Indigenous woman with ties to Nova Scotia, fell to her death from a Toronto balcony after police were called to her home to help. A week later, police in Edmundston, New Brunswick, fatally shot Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman, after being asked to check on her well-being. In April, D’Andre Campbell, a Black man living with schizophrenia, was killed by police in Toronto after himself calling for mental health help. And, in June, Ejaz Ahmed Choudry, a Toronto man living with schizophrenia, was killed by Peel Region Police after being called to check on his wellbeing.
Closer to home, here in Halifax last year, a 28-year-old man died after police used a taser on him. They were called to the premises after reports that the man was inflicting self-harm. In 2014 in Halifax, Mohammed Eshaq, who lived with schizophrenia, died after he fell from his balcony in the South End while police were in his apartment. They were called there by a nurse after concerns about his mental health care. I could go on and on. Mr. Speaker, this deadly problem is acute for racialized people. We know that structural racism is baked into our justice and policing systems and it is not a surprising outcome that so many people are met by harm when what they desperately need is traumainformed professional help and de-escalation.
This incredible problem means, first, that racialized people are at a higher risk of being criminalized, harmed, or killed in encounters with the police when what they are seeking and what they need is help. We recently heard Emma Halpern, the executive director at the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia, speak about this at a Standing Committee on Community Services. She said,
“Over the last few years in our work, we’ve seen some very concerning trends. We see high numbers of African Nova Scotian and Indigenous girls engaged in our programming around trafficking and exploitation. We see the criminalization of trauma and victimization, particularly for African Nova Scotian and Indigenous women and girls. When police arrive, for example, on scene when an issue has occurred, we see young women and girls being identified as part of the ‘problem’ - being criminalized for small things rather than recognized for what is actually going on, which is their tremendous victimization and trauma.”
I can table that. I believe Emma Halpern would agree that this trend of criminalizing people in crisis is fuelling the over-representation of Black and Indigenous women in the justice system. Second, it means that racialized people are less likely to seek help when they are in crisis if they know or suspect that police might be sent to the scene. It means that this government has a distinct responsibility to protect people seeking help in mental health crisis and to enable alternatives for the thousands of Nova Scotians every year who find themselves in this position.
People deserve better access to mental health care in this province, including, and possibly especially, when they are in crisis. That means making appropriate emergency help available to people, not necessarily the police. All of this, Mr. Speaker, is why a key demand for the Black Lives Matter movement is to defund the police. From Black Lives Matter Canada:
“Taxpayers spend over $41 million per day collectively on police services across the country. This does not include spending on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, railway and military police, and government departments enforcing specific statutes in the areas of income tax, customs and excise, immigration, fisheries and wildlife. In engaging in these policing practices, police forces across the country routinely engage in surveillance against Black and Indigenous people, constrain our movements, harm and kill us. We believe that Black communities, and all communities, deserve better. The $41 million per day that is being spent on policing is not creating safer, more secure communities. This funding can be reallocated to create safer and more secure societies for all of us, and to rid Black and Indigenous communities of a serious threat to our safety.”
I will table that, Mr. Speaker. Allocating these resources and defunding the police means having systems set up that are safer and more appropriate. That is the spirit behind this bill, and I urge my government colleagues to support it. It is important to explain a little bit about what the movement to defund the police is about. It is about reallocating resources to community-based and other government organizations that are better equipped to deal with the roots of the non-violent issues that police are mostly called on to address, such as homelessness, mental health, and addictions. The police are the first to admit that they are increasingly called on to address everything, from potholes to cats stuck in trees. It’s simply about ensuring that the best, most appropriate help is deployed, which will work upstream to address the root of the problems people are experiencing. We will all know by now that police services across the country and here in Nova Scotia agree that they are not equipped to deal with the mental health crisis situations that they are asked to respond to. Chief Dave MacNeil of the Truro Police Service has said of mental health crisis response:
“This isn’t the type of work that we sign on to do, and it’s not the type of work that we’re actually trained well to do . . . We don’t call mental health clinicians to respond to break and enters, but unfortunately the police are kind of the agency of last resort . . .We’re the only 24/7 helping agency in most communities, and people call the police for all kinds of things.”
Bridgewater Deputy Police Chief Danny MacPhee says,
“We’re not full-time mental health case workers. We’re not in crisis management every day. We don’t have that experience from working full time . . . That’s not our profession. That’s not who we are.”
Both have asked for more crisis response resources in rural Nova Scotia.
Adrienne Peters, an assistant professor of sociology and a liaison and co-coordinator for police studies at Memorial University in Newfoundland, explains how this can go wrong.
“We do live in the society in which there is institutional racism. Police are simply an institution within this working system, mostly governed by the priorities and the mandate of government and what they’ve set forth for them.”
I will table that. This means that it is squarely in this government’s set of responsibilities to develop alternatives to the currently dangerous and mismatched arrangement that is the case today for so many Nova Scotians in mental health crisis.
I feel it’s important to comment on the cost of such an initiative, as I suspect this might be at the root of any opposition to the bill by the government members. Firstly, meeting the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum 10 per cent of health spending on mental health, as is committed to by the NDP’s Mental Health Bill of Rights, would help fund essential mental health services such as this.
Secondly, police are already doing the work of responding to people in mental health emergencies, though as I have described, many agree that they are not equipped to appropriately fill this role. The crucial point of defunding the police is about reallocating existing resources so that more compassionate, safe, and appropriate services can be enabled.
There are untold costs from the justice system that are rooted in criminalization of mental health issues, many of which could be avoided if we could get people suitable mental health support in crisis. Of course, the price we risk paying is in people’s safety if we fail to act. To summarize all of the comments about cost: it is more expensive not to put this program into place.
When people are in physical health crisis - when they are experiencing cardiac arrest, or stroke, or are in a life-threatening accident - as a society, we have committed that they should have emergency help available to them no matter where they are or what time of day or night they may need it. Mental health crisis can be lethal, and there is no reason why we should not make this same emergency help available to people in distress.