Canadian cities struggling to reduce needless deaths of people with unaddressed mental health and addiction problems need more from Ottawa than “unco-ordinated hodgepodge” responses.

That is the call from the mayors of Kitchener, Mississauga, St. John’s, Toronto, Vancouver and Windsor who spoke to reporters during Monday’s summit on mental health and cities.

Toronto’s John Tory, a co-host of the event at the University of Toronto, said the federal government must urgently get and distribute data on the extent of the problems as the first steps to establishing benchmarks for government responses in terms of supportive housing, drug treatment and more.

Cities don’t need new federal or provincial ministries, Tory added, but better co-ordination among the existing ones responsible for health, education, housing, policing and others impacted by unaddressed mental health issues and the related opioid overdose epidemic.

Ministries “need to start sitting together for real and actually making decisions and setting goals together for real instead of this unco-ordinated hodgepodge of efforts which are all well-meaning, I’m sure, and some are actually quite well-funded, but it’s not working because it’s a patchwork...,” he said.

“People don’t care about boundaries between governments — they just want to see people getting helped.”

Earlier, each of the mayors told a cavernous, crowded dining hall about the challenges their cities face and how they are trying to cope.

The most dire came from Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson, whose city has been ground zero for fatal overdoses from fentanyl and other opioid narcotics and noted “the morgues have been full.”

Safe-injection sites and emergency responders have saved countless lives but opioids still kill, on average, an “unbelievably horrific” four British Columbians per day, at least one of them in Vancouver, Robertson said.

“This is a crisis like we’ve never seen before in public health and it’s wiping out many, many people with mental health challenges who are self-medicating with opioids,” laced with poison, he said.

“This is a preventable epidemic and we need to see federal government leadership in co-ordinating the data, in focusing the resources where they can turn this crisis around, and making sure cities are at the table working with the feds and provinces to tackle this brutal crisis.”

He highlighted the complexity of the problem by noting that few Vancouverites actually die on the street in the city’s Lower Eastside, where vigilant harm-reduction workers and first responders work to prevent or quickly treat overdoses.

Instead 80 per cent die alone in their homes or in “single occupancy hotel rooms” — bare-bones rentals sometimes found with help from government agencies to help get addicted people off the street or out of emergency shelters so they can better access city and provincial programs.

“That’s where the stigma with mental health and addictions has to be broken,” Robertson said of people hiding drug use and dying without anybody knowing, much less intervening.

“There has to be a far bigger (anti-stigma) campaign at the national level,” and easier access to safer drugs including hydromorphone pills, a pharmaceutical narcotic derived from morphine, he said. “That’s what will save lives.”

Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens told the audience about the trauma of two police officers last month fatally shooting a mentally ill man who had stabbed one of the officers, and had said he went off his medications because they turned him into a “zombie.”

Other mayors told of the vast majority of calls to their police services relate to mental illness or addiction, of surges in demand in hospital emergency departments, and of challenges in finding homes for people trying to get treatment that can help them regain their lives and employment.

Mississauga’s Bonnie Crombie noted that a coalition of Canada’s “big city mayors” have had success pressing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government for help paying for new transit, affordable housing and infrastructure such as roads, bridges and sewers.

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Co-ordinated efforts to help people with mental health and addictions is “the next issue that we should tackle as a unified group of mayors,” Crombie said, adding it also might be time for companies and cities to hire “mental health officers” to help in the effort.

Ontario Health Minister Helena Jaczek told the summit she agrees mental health issues are a “crisis” and listed millions of dollars in spending in her Liberal government’s recent budget that she said could help to address it.

But Jaczek also noted Ontario is on the eve of a provincial election. With Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford leading opinion polls, she warned: “Now is not the time for deep cuts.”

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