Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown has found little support at Peel regional council for his proposal to launch a pilot project where people with mental health and addiction challenges are subject to involuntary medical care — despite coming armed with a unanimous resolution from his own council and endorsements from the Peel Region Police and the local paramedics' union.
He refers to it as a "compassionate intervention" pilot project — a euphemism he says Ontario's association minister for mental health and addictions, Michael Tibollo, encourages him to use.
Brown initially went to Thursday's Peel regional council meeting asking it to send a formal request to the PC government to "establish and fund an involuntary mental health and addictions treatment pilot project" across all of Peel.
But he abandoned this resolution after his fellow mayors, Carolyn Parrish of Mississauga and Annette Groves of Caledon, made clear that it was unacceptable.
Brown did manage to get the council to unanimously pass a heavily amended version of his motion, however, with all references to involuntary treatment or arguments in favour of a pilot project stripped out. Instead, it asks for the region's Community Safety and Well-Being Committee to host a roundtable discussion with Tibollo, Health Minister Sylvia Jones, and various mental health experts to "build action plans to address the addictions crisis based on nationally identified best practices."
Parrish, who thanked Brown for "taking our concerns into consideration," made it clear that she considered this to be "a brand new motion because we are not voting on the Brampton pilot."
Brampton, she said, is on its own.
"I would never tell Brampton what they can and can't do on this, and I am happy to watch how it turns out," said Parrish.
"We [should not] get the rest of the region of Peel involved in this yet ... There are going to be legal challenges coming out of our ears before this thing even gets started — it's already happening in BC — and it's a Band-Aid solution for something that is one of the most crucial things we have to deal with."
The Peel council is not the only one wary of backing the idea of involuntary treatment for people with severe addictions and mental illness. During a press conference Thursday, Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would support allowing parents to impose involuntary treatment on their children, citing the example of 13-year-old Brianna MacDonald in British Columbia, but stopped short of calling for adults to be forced into treatment.
"I'm still doing a lot of research on how that would work," he told reporters.
During the Peel debate, Parrish accused Brampton of "cherry-picking" lines from a letter sent to the Peel Paramedic Union to Brampton city council on Tuesday declaring the region's "900 paramedics “support the introduction of a plan to bring care to patients who need it but may not have the capacity to want it.”
"Once the Naloxone wakes them up, they are free to walk away. The result can be multiple calls to the same individual for the same problem in the same day," reads the letter, a line that was quoted word for word by Brampton Councillor Rowena Santos during the debate.
Parrish noted the paramedic letter warns that "without new beds" and guidelines on where to take these unwilling patients, "this pilot will fail."
"We cannot expect our overwhelmed hospital system to absorb additional patients. We cannot say to a person we are going to mandate treatment and then have that treatment occur in a hospital hallway," the letter reads.
Region Chair Nando Iannicca also gently chastised Brown and Santos for not making it clear that the letter was from the paramedics' union and not the from Peel Regional Paramedic Services.
During the Brampton city council meeting on Wednesday, Peel Region Police's manager of community safety and well-being John Versluis said that "involuntary treatment legislation would provide a necessary option to those individuals that represent a chronic risk to the safety of the public and themselves under exceptional circumstances."
Councillors asked Peel's medical officer of health, Dr. Gayane Hovhannisyan, how long willing patients are currently waiting for mental health treatment, and were told more than 12 months for serious addiction or mental illnesses, two weeks for early psychiatric intervention, and nine months for psychotherapy.
Mississauga Councillor Natalie Hart said those statistics are reason enough not to go ahead with an involuntary treatment pilot.
"Before we bring in something involuntary, we [must] close the gap for those seeking treatment willingly and voluntarily, " said Hart.
"A year [wait time] is wildly inappropriate. If we want to write a letter to the premier, we should be asking him to fund his existing obligations before we put another ask on the table."
During a press conference earlier this week, Tibollo — who Brown insists is an enthusiastic supporter of involuntary treatment — seemed to suggest the lack of capacity in the mental health care system needs to be addressed before involuntary treatment can be looked at seriously.
Brown noted that his request for a pilot program is "conditional upon funding for treatment beds being available" and suggested more beds are coming to Brampton that can be used for involuntary treatment.
"Michael Tibollo really wants to help. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but we are talking with him actively right now involving a particular location for a treatment facility in Brampton, and so we're just trying to get put that together," he said.
Tibollo's office declined to comment.
Brown has another chance on Oct. 18 to garner support from other municipalities for involuntary treatment when the Ontario Big City Mayors are scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling for the province to pass legislation using the notwithstanding clause to head off potential charter challenges.
"Certainly, I would never want to push other municipalities to go down a path you're not ready to go down — yet," he said.
