Money budgeted for mental health, addictions needs to reach rural Sask., say advocates

On Wednesday, the province announced the provincial budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year with a 10.9 per cent increase in mental health and addictions services spending. 

The Saskatchewan government announced $574 million would be put toward mental health and addictions services. Of that, $22 million will go toward increased utilization of hospital-based services, physician visits and prescription drug costs. 

"Our focus is on helping more people overcome addictions and live healthy, safe lives in recovery," said Tim McLeod, Health and Addictions Minister, in a press release Wednesday. 

"By making addictions treatment more accessible, we can save lives, heal families and strengthen our communities."

Kimberly Smith, manager of health and wellness at Kineepik Métis Local, operates a land-based wellness camp and homeless shelter out of Muskwa Lake and another at Pinehouse Lake. Pinehouse is located about 360 kilometers north of Saskatoon. 

She said while she is happy to see this budget increase, she finds most of the funding is doled out to the major centres and other communities tend to receive very little of this provincial funding. Specifically, the northern communities of the province. 

"We've been doing decades of work in trying to progress our programs and have them be funded; so, a lot of communities don't have what we have because we're not building them up," said Smith. 

She said more work needs to be done. 

"Some of the funding needs to be filtered down to the communities that authentically start to address, at the base level, at the ground level, some of the issues that take them from these places into those centralized communities."

Lori Skjeie is the mental health and addictions director of Métis Nation-Saskatchewan. 

She said that there is a need for culturally appropriate programming in northern communities. 

"I could see that being helpful as far as, you know, case coordination, mental wellness under addiction assessment, individual consequential crisis, trauma, anxiety, depression, stealing them, isolation," she said.

Skjeie wants to see more programming focused on youth, a population she believes to be underserved in these areas.