September 11, 2005

Remarks to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
by David Caplan, Minister of Public Infrastructure Renewal

Check Against Delivery.

Thank you.

It’s always a pleasure to be at an event in Toronto, especially when I’m among friends.

I’m tremendously pleased that we’re here today with such great news for the Centre and this community – with the announcement that the government is committed to moving ahead with Phase One of the Queen Street redevelopment project, including the Alternate Milieu project.

This project is an essential part of the McGuinty government’s plan to modernize Ontario’s hospitals – which are now, on average, 43 years old.

Some of our hospitals were built over a century ago and you can’t deliver 21st century healthcare in a 19th century facility.

And nobody in the broad field of healthcare would know this better than those dedicated professionals who work in mental health and addiction.

They are the ones who continue to work tirelessly to de-stigmatize mental health and addiction and ultimately treat not only the ill, but educate the public.

In fact, the remnant of the wall that surrounds the perimeter of this site is a testament to a past when the mentally ill were literally separated by a wall from the broader community.

What today’s announcement will help to do is metaphorically tear those walls down.

Mental illness affects one in four people. That’s not just a statistic. Those people are our family, friends, neighbours and, yes, strangers too, some of whom are the most vulnerable members of our society.

And, it’s not just a cliché when I say that what we do collectively as a society for the most vulnerable in our midst is the true measure of our civility.

Today’s announcement marks the beginning of a radical and wonderful transformation of the centre for addiction and mental health.

More importantly, it marks an important change in the way we treat the mentally ill and addicted by creating the facilities that will allow for greater dignity and more opportunities to transition back into the community.

This announcement also marks an important beginning for mental health and addiction research.

CAMH has been one of the leading research, training and teaching institutes in Ontario and I’m not exaggerating when I say globally: It is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto and is a collaborating centre of the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.

Today’s announcement will ensure that CAMH continues to be a leading centre of excellence in mental health and addiction research in Canada and the world.

Over the course of the next five years the government and partners like the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health will invest $5 billion in new and expanded health care facilities.

By the end of that time, we will have started or completed more than 100 similar projects.

The net result of those announcements will be better treatment and better access to care for people in every region of this province.

I am proud to be playing a part in what amounts to a major overhaul of our health care infrastructure. Indeed, what we are doing is nothing less than launching the single biggest expansion of hospitals in Ontario in a generation.

And this transformation cannot happen a moment too soon.

Over many decades, governments have consistently been short-changing people on the investments in vital public facilities that were needed – from hospitals, to schools, to highways to water and sewage treatment plants.

Our government is turning that situation around. Not just in health care, but across the whole spectrum of public infrastructure.

It’s been estimated that we will need to invest more than $100 billion over the next 30 years in our public infrastructure. We are making a very substantial down payment on that target.

For the first time, the government of Ontario has a rational and coherent plan to restore the public infrastructure we all depend on for our health, for our education, for our economic prosperity and our quality of life.

Under ReNew Ontario, our government and its partners are investing $30-billion in public infrastructure over the next five years – to improve services, expand and renew the facilities we already have, and build new facilities that will serve our growing, aging population.

We are investing in Ontario’s future like no government has done before. And to achieve our goals, we are using a combination of traditional government financing and some innovative new approaches, including an approach called Alternative Financing and Procurement, or AFP.

In some cases, and especially with large, complex infrastructure projects, we are planning to use the AFP approach – which involves finding willing private-sector partners who have the expertise and resources to design, build and finance the new facilities over a period of time.

AFP projects are not privatization.

In fact, AFPs are simply a way to finance the cost of very expensive projects over the lifetime of a facility, instead of putting up all the money right up front.

For these major projects, the construction work will be financed and carried out by the private sector – which also assumes the financial risk of ensuring that the project is completed on time and on budget.

With this approach, we can tackle more of the infrastructure projects that are so important to the people of Ontario – projects that might never have been built using the traditional approach to infrastructure financing.

We have a big job ahead of us. It will take years just to recover what we have lost – and even more time to build the facilities we need for our growing, aging society.

But even the longest journey begins with a single step followed by another, and then another. And we are taking one of those steps today.

I am very proud to stand here, among friends and colleagues and the many individuals who have worked hard to get this project off the ground as we pass another signpost on the road that is leading Ontario’s renaissance.

We can all be proud of what we’re accomplishing here today – because the redevelopment of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health will make a material difference in the lives of thousands of people, not just today, but for generations to come.

Thank you.