The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to the Stars That Made Me

Catherine Hernandez is an award-winning author and activist who has dedicated her career to promoting, capturing, and performing the stories of women of colour. The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to The Stars That Made Me, the plays that make up this collection, explore female empowerment, growth, and sexuality within the LGBTQ communities. Hernandez offers a focused commentary on vulnerability that arises from the imbalance of power in a hetero- and cis-normative society. The discourses surrounding abuse, love, and survival are made accessible to the audience through the breakdown of the “fourth wall” of literature, with there being no limiting descriptions of the main character. This technique is typical of Brechtian theatre as Hernandez is encouraging the audience to be active participants in the experience. They are immersed in the story while being reminded that this is a dialogue that must be voiced.

An Ocean of Minutes

In Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes, Polly Nader time-travels to the future to work off medical debts for her boyfriend, Frank, who needs a life-saving treatment. She plans to reunite with him after her work as a bonded labourer is done. However, Polly is rerouted an additional five years, and the book alternates between Polly’s relationship with Frank in the past and her present search for him. While the prose is gorgeous, it covers reflections on remembrance far better than it does Polly’s predicament, which lacks a strong sense of place and urgency. Dreamlike yet occasionally dreary, Lim’s novel explores love’s vitality in a world where time creates as many wounds as it heals.

Created in support of Ryerson University’s Office of Sexual Violence Support and Education, We Believe You is a colouring book for survivors of sexual violence. Toronto speaker and educator Farrah Khan and artist Karen Campos Castillo are behind the project, offering affirmations for those affected by sexual and gender violence.

When Krista Dale was 11 years old, she awoke from a sleepwalking episode to find her stepfather on the couch next to her.

“He was trying to have sex with me,” she remembers, 18 years after the incident. “I freaked out.” She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and began yelling for her mother, who was sleeping next door.

Dale, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told her mother what happened, but her stepfather suggested Dale dreamed it all. Dale insisted that wasn’t what happened, but her stepfather was adamant. Eventually, Dale caved under the pressure and, against her gut instincts, agreed she had probably imagined the whole thing.

“In the morning, I was so embarrassed. I thought I had been sleepwalking and accused this man, who was like a father to me,” she says. “I apologized to him.”

In the weeks and months that followed, however, Dale’s stepfather continued his visits, this time in her bedroom. Sometimes he would touch her, sometimes not—sometimes, she says, she would wake and he would be in her room, watching her. “You’re a kid. You don’t even understand what’s happening. I just assumed this was something girls had to deal with,” she says.

In her early teens, Dale became increasingly depressed, even suicidal. At 15, she began drinking heavily, staying out all night to avoid sleeping in her own bed. “It’s pretty fucked that, at 13, I was thinking about killing myself,” she says. As time passed, the abuse continued.

Some of these encounters took on a “hazy, surreal” quality. She caught him, once, trying to put something in her drink. She began to suspect he was drugging her. That same night, Dale decided to try to catch her stepfather in the act. She waited, pretending to sleep. He opened the door to her bedroom. She sat up, and her stepfather, stunned, stopped in his tracks. He turned away and left, shutting the door behind him. Dale confronted him the next day but he denied his actions. Her mother and five other siblings continued to stay silent. A week later, he emptied the bank account her mother and he shared, and disappeared.

Dale never reported the abuse, nor did her mother, including the missing money. “I think we were all just happy he was gone.”

***

Now 29, Dale is a fast-talking, kind-eyed, funny young woman who loves music. Although her stepfather is gone from her life, Dale says the impact his actions had on her mental health was deep and long-lasting. She attributes her mental health issues, including depression and severe anxiety, to the trauma of the abuse. “It just broke me down, I guess. Sex with men was really terrible for a long time,” she says. “I felt like a pretty useless human being. I felt like a piece of meat.”

Stories like Dale’s are unfortunately common among women. A 2015 study from the journal Psychology Medicine found that, compared to 12 percent of men and seven percent of women in a control group from the general population, a staggering 40 percent of surveyed women with severe mental illness reported being sexually assaulted. Meanwhile, a 2006 paper by the National Resource Centre on Domestic Violence noted that victims of childhood sexual assault were five times more likely to be diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than non-victims, and up to 65 percent of women who experienced sexual trauma as adults reported symptoms of PTSD.

It happened to me, too. I was sexually assaulted in the fall of 2016 by a man I trusted, someone I thought was my friend.

The assault itself was the culmination of several months of verbal, emotional and, at times, physical abuse by a man who was emotionally and mentally unstable. Following that act of violence, I suffered a clinical nervous breakdown.

The breakdown manifested itself in a depression so thick it had a physical weight that made each step and each breath a gruelling act of will. Anxiety and chronic insomnia dominated my nights. I suffered panic attacks, dreams that the man who harmed me was in my house, hunting me down. I drank constantly, spiralling into outright alcoholism. The thought of suicide dogged me, a ghoul that whispered unceasingly in my ear.

The #MeToo movement has done a lot to bring attention to sexual assault, but not enough has been said about the long-term effects of that violence. The movement has largely focused on male entitlement and toxic masculinity, which manifests itself in acts of sexual assault and harassment. Failing to discuss, support, and connect the patriarchy-endorsed violence against women with its long-term mental health effects is a sign of how deeply entrenched male dominance is: We focus on the immediate male-centric acts of violence and harassment, and downplay the emotional, female-centric suffering it creates.

Dale and I are excellent examples of this: We both lived in Whitehorse, a small town of about 21,000 people, and knew each other well enough to give the other a nod at the grocery store. She was a bartender at one of my favourite watering holes, but it wasn’t until we chatted for this story that I had any idea what she had experienced. Likewise, Dale couldn’t have known, as she poured me pints of IPA, that I had recently been sexually assaulted myself.

I’m not exactly sure what that means about human beings in general, except to say that perhaps we should be gentler with each other.

***

How the medical system deals in the aftermath of sexual assault with the resulting mental health effects is “quite complex,” says Bailey Reid, the sexual assault services coordinator for Carleton University in Ottawa. “We medicalize trauma response to the violence, which results in mental health issues that are a normal response to this kind of violence,” says Reid. “Physiologically, this is how our bodies respond to this kind of trauma.”

When a woman seeks treatment for a mental health issue following a sexual assault, the focus is identifying and categorizing symptoms caused by the trauma—depression, anxiety, dissociation—so they can be treated like any other mental illness. While this is practical from a health care perspective, it puts effect before cause and assumes that all mental health issues, regardless of their root, should be treated in the same way. It’s akin to treating a patient with brain cancer the same way as someone who has a concussion; the symptoms of headaches, memory loss, and behaviour change may be similar, but the treatment required to make a patient well again is very different.

As Diane Pétrin, a women’s advocate with the Victoria Faulkner Women’s Centre in Whitehorse, notes, an assault— and, if reported, the legal battle that may follow—are sources of extreme emotional stress: A woman who “was fine, who had a life” prior to an assault might develop depression afterward. If a woman was already experiencing mental health issues prior to the assault, she “might find them intensified.”

“There are assessments, phone calls, appointments, court appearances, they’re dealing with trauma… there’s no one to keep [women who report] going and [the police] aren’t really good at explaining what is going to happen [after an assault is reported],” Pétrin says.

Even more troublingly, if a woman is diagnosed with a mental health issue and decides to press charges against her assailant, the defence for the accused may use it to make her look unstable, says Pétrin. The use of drugs or alcohol prior to an assault can also be used to discredit their reliability.

When it comes to reporting sexual assaults, Reid says, the legal system can be problematic for survivors. “It’s heavy on this burden of proof [on the victim], which is really impossible,” she says. “If you’re outside this perfect legal paradigm of what a victim looks like… the legal system has a way of warping around you [that] is not really respectful.” As Pétrin says, “People think [accessing the legal system] is about whether or not a woman has suffered. It’s not; it’s about the legal system’s version of the law, and whether that law has been broken. It has nothing to do with the suffering of the individual.”

This burden deters some women, like me, Dale, and Shonagh McCrindle, from pursuing charges. McCrindle says she was sexually assaulted by a man she knew casually during the 2016 Dawson City Music Festival, an annual Yukon event known for its heavy drinking and drug use. She says she can’t remember much from the time of the assault, possibly due to trauma. Although she had a rape kit done, she decided not to pursue charges; she didn’t feel strong enough to undergo such public scrutiny. “I wasn’t stable enough [to go to court],” she says. “It definitely changed my mental state. I definitely suffered very hard for over a year.”

***

If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have reported my assault, either.

My experience with the justice system was a major factor in my nervous breakdown. Interactions with the police were pointless and disempowering at best; at worst they were combative, intrusive, and accusatory.

In early 2017, I attempted to get a peace bond against my assailant. Although the assault happened in B.C., procedure dictates that you must first file with police in the jurisdiction where you are presently living; for me, that was Montreal. When I called and said I had been sexually assaulted, I was informed that, whether I wanted to or not, an investigation had to take place. Shortly thereafter, two male police officers showed up at my Plateau-area apartment, fully armed. Neither officer spoke passable English, which meant I had to repeat traumatic and highly personal details multiple times. During questioning, the elder of the two officers asked me—over and over, as if hoping to catch me in a lie—why, if things were as bad as I claimed they were, it had taken me several months to file a report. He asked this so many times his partner finally had to tell him to stop.

Once I had reported to the Montreal police, I found I also had to give a statement to RCMP in Whistler, this time on a recorded phone call. It meant telling another strange man the intimate, sexually explicit details of my assault. To add insult to injury, there was a delay of nearly a month between the time I filed with the Montreal police and the time the RCMP contacted me. The Montreal police had recorded my phone number incorrectly.

In addition to these highly personal statements, I also provided the name of someone I had called in a panic after the assault, text messages between me and my assailant, and pages from my private journal to help create my case. I did all that was asked of me. I waited.

And nothing happened.

Months passed. I was told my attacker could not be found in the small coastal B.C. community where he lived, which meant the peace bond could not be served.

Six months later, I received a phone call informing me the Crown had decided not to pursue charges. The Crown did not feel they could go forward with the case, due to an “inconsistency” in my testimony. This “inconsistency” amounted to the fact that, in my statement, I stated the accused had initiated anal sex against my will, but in a submitted text message between me and the accused, I said he had “tried” to “stick his dick in my ass” against my will.

If you really must know, he got about one-third of the way in—unlubricated, without a condom—before my yelling, pushing, and striking made him stop. This is apparently not the legal standard of “fucked in the ass” as the Crown defines it.

***

Shortly after my case was dropped, my attacker showed up unexpectedly in Whitehorse, where I was then living. I was having a beer with a colleague after work, and bam—there he was. This man, an emotionally volatile person with a history of criminal involvement, was standing at the bar holding a pitcher. Smiling.

I panicked.

I immediately went to the RCMP in Whitehorse. I pressed again for a peace bond, and considered appealing to a specialist regarding my case. The RCMP were sympathetic but told me it was outside of their jurisdiction; anything I claimed against him was being handled in B.C. They sent a pair of officers down to the bar, but when they arrived he was gone.

I saw my attacker twice more after that; I don’t think he saw me. I was afraid he would see my name in the newspaper I wrote for, wait for me outside the office and attack me. I was afraid he would do something to my dog, or sabotage my vehicle. I was afraid he would find out where I lived, come to my home at night, and murder me. He lurked, physically and mentally, beyond the edge of every shadow.

There was nothing I could do. At the advice of my doctor I took medical leave from work and went to stay outside of the territory with friends on a farm in the Okanagan. I was a nervous wreck, but the fresh air and trees helped. I lost wages and travel expenses, but I got a little better.

That was until I had to come back and resume my life, still not knowing where he was or when I might run into him. Then I got worse all over again. If a photograph of a “complete mental breakdown” might be taken, it could have been a candid shot of me, sitting in the messy backseat of my car on a Tuesday, frantically pounding cheap red wine from a used coffee cup in a Canadian Tire parking lot just to get through the day.

***

Following my breakdown, I found therapy a useful release valve. I received eight sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy as part of a victim services program in Whitehorse. When I had used up all those sessions, my work insurance did not cover additional therapy costs. I could either pay for treatment myself, cease treatment, or start over with a new therapist. Considering the high costs, I chose to discontinue treatment, although I feel I would have benefitted from more.

According to my doctor, my therapist, and several documents, what I was experiencing leading up to my breakdown was PTSD, brought on by abuse and the trauma of the sexual assault. It was comforting at first to have some kind of a label, to be able to box the bruises and the gaslighting, the shouting and the constant fear. Now that I’m doing better, though, I understand it my experience differently: some messed-up shit happened to me, and the people who were supposed to support and protect me—the police, legal system, and government, represented by the Crown—failed to help me in any meaningful way.

My assailant has never been charged, and neither Dale nor McCrindle pressed charges against their assailants. Dale, who is a server and bartender, paid for her therapy herself. She says her therapist never mentioned programs that might be available to help her pay for treatment. She has never completed treatment. McCrindle, meanwhile, had “extensive health benefits” through her job and received therapy. She also had a good support system of friends who helped her recover, she says.

The reality of many sex crimes is that, when charges are dropped or aren’t laid, survivors must find ways outside the system to protect themselves, often by restricting their own choices and movements, even as their attackers move freely. We live in a state of constant fear and hypervigilance; even if the threat is more perceived than actual, this is emotionally and physically draining.

I can’t publicly name my attacker without fear of libel or slander. Many assailants are protected by the legal bodies and social mores that have failed us.

At its core, being raped is less about the physical act and more about what it symbolizes. To be raped is to have agency over your own body taken away from you, a complex psychic attack completed through base physical violence. Someone else uses your body—sometimes goes inside your body— without your consent, demeaning the very will within you that otherwise defines you as a human being. Rape is a despicable act of violence, but the scar it leaves is in a quieter, deeper place in the country of the self than the mere crude physicality of the act would imply. It is the dirty bomb of the gender war; long after the blast is over, the dispersed pathogens remain.

And let me assure you, from the front lines, this is a war.

Sludge Utopia
By Catherine Fatima

In Sludge Utopia, Catherine Fatima captivates readers with an auto-fictional take of a woman’s journey discovering her place within the world’s definition of love and desire. Protagonist Catherine’s life seems typical of millennial Torontonians—studying, pursuing romances, and trying to keep grounded while maintaining friendships and social networks. However, she is simultaneously struggling to understand her dependence on sex and intimacy while moving through tumultuous relationships with close friends and new partners. Readers will be hypnotized by Catherine’s enigmatic observations about herself as she explores her frustrations. Fatima’s disjointed portrayal of her characters leaves you questioning your own definitions of fulfilling personal relationships throughout the entire novel.

Jean-Louis and Marie-Angélique Riel, ca. 1888, by Steele & Wing, albumen print

A freestanding wall decorated with blue motifs frames a glass case. Inside the case sits a brooch inscribed with a person’s name and dates of birth and death. On the other side of the wall, the front of the brooch is exposed: a portrait of a little girl, Alice Walker, the daughter of Canadian artist Horatio Walker who died at the age of nine from diphtheria—a disease that was once a common cause of death among Canadian children.

A Little History, an exhibit in the Canadian Museum of History’s Treasures From Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gallery, presents 36 artifacts that elevate children’s voices and presence in Canadian history. Some voices include daughter of Sir John A. Macdonald, Margaret Mary Theodora Macdonald, Sandford Fleming, and David Suzuki.

“I thought this was an opportunity to highlight this sort of little-known aspect of Canadian history,” says exhibit curator Carolyn Cook. “Children are typically absent from the historical narrative, and I think it’s important to look at what their experiences can shed light on. Because, really, they have their own stories.”

Many artifacts that were found and kept about children were actually produced by adults: government records, art, toys, textiles. The things that children made themselves were not prioritized. These things “kind of provide a more romanticized view of childhood.” Cook sees this exhibition as a step toward improving practices that include children’s history in Canada’s historical narrative, in all its unromantic glory.

The Canadian Museum of History and LAC did manage to find some artifacts that were created by children, such as a composition by a young Glenn Gould and a design submission for a new Canadian flag to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Cook believes the artifacts that were made by children “are the gems of the exhibition.”

We often forget that children lived through historic events, and that adults aren’t the only people who have been affected by them. A display houses a diary by 12-year-old Eleanora Hallen in which she details her voyage across the Atlantic from England to Upper Canada in 1835. She describes everything from a tussle over steak to seeing an iceberg for the first time.

In another display sits a photograph of a young David Suzuki on the back of a pick-up truck with his two sisters—the photo was taken inside a Japanese internment camp. Accompanying the photo is an interview with David Suzuki, who describes his relationship with nature while in the internment camp and speaks about how dangerous discrimination can be. Cook is right, the gems of the exhibition lie in the heart of the child, not in the hearts of the adults who know what’s best.

Photo courtesy of Dana Prieto.

Glazed in black, the beauty of Dana Prieto’s hand-crafted ceramic vessels forces the viewer’s attention—but what they wouldn’t be able to tell at first glance is that the artwork may contain traces of arsenic, cadmium, and mercury.

Prieto, an Argentine visual artist based in Toronto, describes the vessels as an “inhospitable gift,” made with soil from the contaminated territories of Belén and Hualfín, in the province of Catamarca. The vessels will be gifted to the CEOs and corporate social responsibility executives of Canadian mining companies operating in the South American region.

Contaminants to the land and water in Belén and Hualfín seep from Bajo de la Alumbrera, the country’s first open-pit gold and copper mine that has been in operation since 1997. Although the mine had been set to close in March, it will now remain open for another decade. Bajo de la Alumbrera is owned by Glencore, headquartered in Switzerland, and two Canadian companies: Goldcorp and Yamana Gold.

The vessels, titled 1:10000 (the scale of the vessel in relation to the mine), are 3D models of the mine, created to scale. A disclaimer at the bottom of each cup reads: “Handmade with soil affected by Bajo la Alumbrera mine.”

“They can fill out the rest of the narrative,” says Prieto.

The soil was provided by Silvia Delgado, a Buenos Aires-based ceramic artist and activist. Delgado has extracted clay from Belén for many years and mentored Prieto in the construction of the vessels. “I consider ceramics to be part of that ancestral time where domestic and ritual uses of objects had a strong social bond,” says Delgado. Unlike most ceramics, however, the luxury aesthetic of the vessels is intended to appeal to a CEO.

The act of sending these vessels is more important to Prieto than what actually happens to the gift itself. In the gallery space, the vessels are displayed on wooden boxes under a spotlight. The lights are dimmed, and the walls painted a dark grey. Inside each box is a quote engraved in gold leaf from the 2017 book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: “Death may not, after all, be the end of life; after death comes the strange life of hauntings,” it reads.

To illustrate the immediacy of the gift, 150 boxes with Canadian postage surround the gallery, accounting for all potential recipients across the country. On the wall, a stencil made with ink made from the contaminated soil reads: “Handmade with soil affected by Canadian mining companies.”

“I hope that works like this can make a call to the heart, because such profound devastation has wounded our land, corrupting the human soul and our existence,” says Delgado.

You still didn’t feel comfortable drinking in front of your parents. You texted “bless you” to Vikas, as he received your drink from Sumeet Uncle at the open but not self-serve bar. You then said the same words out loud when the cold glass met your sweaty palms. Vikas was your best friend and a recovering alcoholic. He’d once tried to tell his parents, explaining about AA, the Twelve-Step Program. But disease to them was physical and microscopic: a virus, bacteria, something happening deep within in your cells. And even if they could concede that a love of Johnny Walker was infectious, they couldn’t grasp this concept of therapy: gathering with strangers in a gymnasium reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Why didn’t he just tell them when he’d reached the tipping point? Why didn’t he just stop? You took a sip. Bless you, number three.

Some of the middle-aged women were singing along with your aunts, one of whom had taken charge of the dholak and was keeping a lively beat. Though the lyrics were in Punjabi, you couldn’t help but hear them in English. A lot less rhyme, a little more reason.

Bring me the mehndi from the black gardens
That will be absorbed into my fair palms
Mother-in-law, don’t say son, son
Now your son is mine…
When he drank milk from the bottle
Then he was yours
Now he drinks Malt Whiskey
Now your son is mine…

Other women were dancing, their shoulders moving up and down in time with the drumming, their henna’d palms pointed to the plastic canopy, their saris flashing intricate patterns, gazes locked towards one another. Even the eldest woman there had abandoned her constant private recitation of Hari Om, Hari Om, Hari Om, and was now tapping two spoons together. You’d been keeping your eye on one man. The older generation called him “Sethi Saab”, the younger, “Sethi Uncle.” When you were eleven, your family would visit the two-bedroom apartment where he lived with his wife and daughter. In the time it takes to aim an autofocus lens and shoot, “Uncle” would corner you, grab hold of your shoulders, and press his lips tightly against yours. It only stopped when you’d moved away to university.

That was where you’d met Vikas. He was only on the path to alcoholism back then. He taught you to read John Ashbery, appreciate organic chemistry, and play pool. The first time you found yourself behind an eight ball, Vikas came over to your side of the table to move the white cue ball out the way. That’s when you’d told him. Why didn’t you tell anyone? I don’t know. Did it happen every time? Every. Single. Time. How long did it last? Three to six seconds. Four point zero seven, on average. What did he say? You are looking so grown up now. He didn’t ask you what you wore. But you knew. Tight Sergio Valente jeans, size 24.

Tonight, Sethi Saab looked distinguished with his grey temples and black Nehru jacket, unmarked. In fact, he looked happy. Perhaps he’d repented. Perhaps he’d donated money to the Violence Against Women Campaign or the World Wildlife Federation. All those battered women and pandas. You realized you’d forgiven him. You were having a hard time getting upset about anything or anyone. You’d had two gin and tonics.

It was getting dark and lanterns had been lit. People were still taking selfies. You saw Sethi take a tween named Meena by the shoulders, smile, and give her a hug. It lasted more than five seconds. You took your phone out of your beaded red purse and held it up to the night. At the same time, the girl pulled away and held her smartphone up to his face. You saw her flash. What you couldn’t hear: she’d whispered #thismanisapervert into his ear. She didn’t even have to make eye contact.

“Do you want me to say something?” Vikas had brought a third drink and also a plate of carrot halva. He’d asked this question every time Sethi was at the same gathering, though tonight he’d waited until near the end to bring it up. “No. I don’t.” You were pleased enough with your ability to spend an entire evening not even crossing paths with him. Like you’d figured out precisely the necessary reaction steps to build some complex molecule. Stored in your phone were your red, red lips. The inner square had had a hard time focusing on Meena and Sethi, so you’d turned it into a selfie.

“But out of curiosity, if tonight were the night, what would you say? What would you say right now?” Vikas thought for a few seconds. Before he could answer, you kissed him on the mouth. You counted to five, backwards and slowly, in your head. You were sure no one noticed. Vikas tasted a hint of juniper.

The Showrunner

In Kim Moritsugu’s seventh novel, she introduces us to three fearless, ambitious women who will do just about anything to stay relevant in a capricious industry. The dialogue between the characters is quick, playful, and biting, and Moritsugu has a knack for making a story feel like it is racing toward its conclusion without rushing the plot unnecessarily. Do not feel surprised to catch yourself switching allegiances during the course of the novel because it is nearly impossible not to root for all of these women to get what they want (and deserve).

my retractable claws right through his thorax.
He hugs me and his staleness is battery acid.
Cultural capital is the only capital.

That’s why the bank has repossessed my studio
in the Mortgage Crisis of the Future.
It isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of the system.
In the Fourth World, the manufacturers come and go
Talking about debt-to-earnings ratio.

Wherever the jobs aren’t, that’s where I fly.
That’s how I do my art.
Dessert in economy class is a Lampedusan blood gelée.
Dessert in this fourth-wave café is a neighbourhood primed to gentrify.
The neighbourhoods are gnashing their teeth
for yarn shops and strollers and whiteness to swoop in.
I work on commission for Lockheed Martin.
The name of this neighbourhood means Christberg,
which is a titanic sinker in need of a rebrand.
History slithers in mysterious bands.
Red touches yellow touches black.
Every man in Xberg (née Kreuzberg) has identical tattoos.
It’s 2024 and they are renovicting all the Turks and intellectuals.
The faggots too.

Raytheon’s market index soaring.
All my wars are foreign.
All my condos foreign.
Bombs fall over Jordan.

For the first time in the history of Canadian mental health, in 2017, the federal government announced an investment of $5 billion to improve access to nationwide services. The lump sum, which is part of the government’s Health Accord with the provinces and territories, is slated to roll out over the next 10 years. Mental health advocates, care workers, and organizations acknowledge that the investment is a welcome first step in tackling Canada’s growing mental health spending.

But the funding is a “mere drop in the bucket to address all the lack of resources and capacity,” says Chris Summerville, co-chair of the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health. In 2015, Canada’s mental health spending was 7.2 percent of the total health spending budget. To raise mental health spending to the nine percent minimum recommended by the Mental Health Commission of Canada in 2012, “the federal government would have to release nearly $778 million annually, to reach all of the provinces and territories,” says Summerville—well above the pledged $5 billion.

Just over a year after the investment was announced, we break down how much each province is receiving over 10 years.

BRITISH COLUMBIA
Population (2017): 4.81 million
Mental health funding: $655 million

While B.C.’s budget has significant spending allotments for affordable housing and supports of Indigenous people, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), it does not show direct allocations for mental illness. CMHA national director of research and public policy Fardous Hosseiny says Canada’s mental health systems focus “more on crisis care.” CMHA recommends that governments adopt a bottom-up approach to funding mental health, by focusing on early intervention, screening and assessment by community and peer support groups, mental health and addictions counsellors, recovery coaches, psychiatric nurses, elders in Indigenous communities, and so on.

ALBERTA
Population (2017): 4.29 million
Mental health funding: $586 million

Facing an opioid crisis that claimed 343 lives in 2016 alone, Alberta’s Minister of Health Sarah Hoffman received a 3.5 percent funding boost from the federal government, in response to her 5.2 percent ask. In 2018, the province’s budget allocated its own $7 million to improve mental health services. Recently, the province also promised a $5 million grant to hire staff and build school-based programs, extending mental health support to 100,000 students across the province.

SASKATCHEWAN
Population (2017): 1.16 million
Mental health funding: $158.5 million

Mental health makes up five percent of Saskatchewan’s total health budget. The province aims to increase that allocation to seven percent. Meanwhile, suicide deaths among First Nations people in Saskatchewan is 4.3 times higher than non-First Nations Saskatchewanians, according to a 2017 Saskatchewan First Nations Suicide Prevention Strategy report presented by the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations’ Mental Health Technical Working Group. The province’s 2018-19 budget estimates mental health expenses of $367 million. New targeted investments in mental health include $4.6 million for improved children and youth mental health, $5.2 million for better access to community mental health supports, and $1.5 million for greater mental health delivery.

MANITOBA
Population (2017): 1.34 million
Mental health funding: $181.6 million

At first, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister held out on signing the federal Health Accord, demanding more money for Indigenous health care and rising rates of kidney disease and diabetes. In August 2017, the province signed the health pact and received an additional $5 million for 2017-18 in health care funding to fight kidney failures. Currently, “mental health spending in Manitoba is approximately 4 percent of its health spending budget. Even though the funding announcements have been made, those funds will not bring mental health into parity with physical health,” says Summerville.

ONTARIO
Population (2017): 14.19 million
Mental health funding: $1.9 billion

One in three Ontarians will suffer a mental health or addictions crisis in their lifetime. The province estimates an expenditure of $29 billion on mental health in the next five years. The recent 10-year allocation from the health accord is “simply not sustainable,” said former health minister Eric Hoskins. To match the federal allotment, Ontario is funnelling a supplementary $2.1 billion to mental health and addictions care for the next four years. The province has also increased the annual funding for mental health and addictions operations to $3.8 billion.

QUEBEC
Population (2017): 8.39 million
Home care and mental health funding: $2.5 billion

Every year, over 500,000 Québécois aged 12-24 and 430,000 aged 25-64 are diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Up to 50 percent of long-term absenteeism in the province is attributed to mental disorders. The Québec Health and Welfare Commissioner estimates the yearly cost of psychotherapy in the province to $400 million. In 2017, Quebec announced an investment of $35 million in mental health which will support their first public psychotherapy program.

NEW BRUNSWICK
Population (2017): 759,700
Mental health funding: $104.3 million

In 2015, Moncton reported 22 suicides. In 2016, that number grew to 40. Suicide rates in northern New Brunswick are even higher, and youth hospitalization in the province is almost twice the national average. Wait times for those in crisis range from six months to a year at mental health facilities in Moncton. Most mental health professionals operate private practices not are not covered under the province’s health plan. But recently, the Medavie Health Foundation donated $360,000 to support mental health research and evaluation.

NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
Population (2017): 528,800
Mental health funding: $73 million

In 2014-15 Newfoundland and Labrador reported an average of 13.5 percent of citizens who experienced repeat hospital stays due to mental illness, in comparison to a national average of 11.5 percent, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Fatal police shootings in the province are rare, but two out of three that have occurred since 2000 involved people living with mental illness. The province is hoping to tackle this $1.7 million allocated in its 2018 budget toward mobile intervention units. And $6.1 million has been reserved to replace Waterford Hospital, the province’s century-old mental health facility.

NOVA SCOTIA
Population (2017): 953,900
Mental health funding: $130.8 million

In 2017 health services audit, Nova Scotia reported an expenditure of $225 million on mental health services per year. The report by Nova Scotia’s Auditor General, Michael Pickup, found that the government lacks a specific plan on how it intends to deliver mental health services to those who need it the most, delivery is inconsistent based on location, wait times and assessment methods vary, and there are ongoing concerns around patient and staff safety. The province’s 2018-2019 budget has allocated $3.9 million for mental health and youth supports.

P.E.I.
Population (2017): 152,000
Mental health funding: $20.5 million

In 2015, Prince Edward Island reported a suicide rate of about eight people for every 100,000. The province’s 2018 budget allocated funding for student wellbeing teams, a 24/7 mental health response team, a $175,000 grant to CMHA for island-wide support groups, and more.

YUKON
Population (2017): 38,500
Mental health funding: $5.2 million

Both Ontario and Yukon have almost the same amount of funding allotted per capita. But the territory has a suicide rate of 20 percent, while Ontario’s suicide rate is 9.7 percent, making it clear that the amount of funding allotted to Yukon is disproportionate to what it needs.

NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
Population (2017): 44,500
Mental health funding: $6.1 million

In 2015, the Northwest Territories reported a high suicide rate of 24.7 per 100,000. The 2018-19 budget allocated targeted mental health funding of $1.5 million for education and training of child and youth mental health counsellors, and $500,000 for on-going funding for the youth-in-crisis mental health programs and existing community care for Indigenous peoples.

NUNAVUT
Population (2017): 38,000
Mental health funding: $5.1 million

In 2016, Nunavut’s suicide rate of about 86 people for every 100,000 was the highest recorded in the country. The provincial government, Nunavut Tunngavik, the Embrace Life Council, and the RCMP have embarked upon a five-year action plan, Inuusivut Anninaqtuq, by investing $16 million to bring wellness programs within reach of all Nunavut communities.

NATIONAL
On Indigenous mental health

In its 2018 budget, the federal government committed a separate $200 million over five years for the delivery of culturally appropriate addictions treatment and preventions services in First Nations communities, and $248.6 million over three years for mental health and emotional supports for residential school survivors and their families. But according to Yipeng Ge, Vice President of Government Affairs at the Canadian Federation of Medical Students (CFMS), there’s still a need for more accountability and transparency in tracking the distribution of the funding to the communities that need it the most. Budget reports don’t get conveyed to those working on the ground, Ge said. CFMS has called on the government to adopt the frameworks and strategies recommended by Indigenous peoples to address First Nations and Inuit suicide, comprehensively review current distribution of funding through the National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy, and more.