Children with disabilities are experiencing a mental health crisis and Manitoba’s systems are waiting for them to really struggle before they respond.

Across Canada, children with disabilities experience far higher rates of mental health challenges than their peers. Nearly three-quarters of children and youth with disabilities experience elevated mental health challenges. More than one-third score in the “very high” mental health difficulty category, a rate nearly 10 times higher than among children without disabilities.

Between 30 to 50 per cent of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities are diagnosed with mental health conditions, compared to eight to 18 per cent among typically developing children. This includes children with autism, ADHD, FASD, intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities and communication disorders.

Children who struggle with communication, sensory regulation, mobility, executive functioning, or social interaction are often excluded long before systems recognize the emotional consequences of that exclusion. Loneliness and exclusion are not side issues — they are public health issues for children with disabilities.

The deluge Winnipeg experienced on June 9 and 10 is a harbinger of extreme weather yet to come.

This can no longer be considered a freak event, as such storms are becoming commonplace. Homeowners are being cautioned to prepare their homes with backwater valves and sump pumps to avoid the menace of overland flooding and sewer backups. City infrastructure is not coping well with our changing climate. Five different pumping stations lost power that night, and as a result 8.72 million litres of untreated sewage wound up in our rivers over a 24-hour period.

According to Tim Shanks, director of the City of Winnipeg’s water and waste department, crews are alerted ahead of these storms and put on standby, which means being prepared to move a mobile generator on a trailer to one of 75 pumping stations within the city. Mobile generators are retrieved by staff from city compounds or other stations.

This practice may have proved effective in the past but, as evidenced by this storm, abnormal weather patterns have gained the upper hand. Shanks was not prepared to direct blame, but acknowledged that the present system has its faults, including the delay of 18 hours it took to stem the flow of raw sewage at the Woodhaven pumping station.

Picture this. A teacher creates an assignment using AI. There is a provocation generated by a prompt, followed by vague parameters and a generic rubric. The AI-generated emojis are left in, and the task and success criteria are not connected to the passion, interests or soul of the child.

Subsequently, the child responds using AI. The thinking and language are clearly not their own and there has been no transformative or profound educative experience to stir cognitive dissonance. The child has not been asked, or better yet invited, to engage in sophisticated thinking and work that matters to them. That matters to community.

When the child uses AI, it’s considered “cheating.”

So here we are. An opportunity lost because we are not thinking deeply about the impact of AI on our species.

Winnipeg is facing a housing shortage. We see it in rising rents, increasing homelessness and the growing number of people struggling to find safe and affordable places to live.

Governments at every level have recognized the need for more housing and the City of Winnipeg has adopted policies such as OurWinnipeg 2045 and Complete Communities 2.0, specifically to encourage the type of development needed to address this challenge.

Yet when new housing is proposed, particularly in established neighbourhoods, opposition often follows.

The recent discussion surrounding the proposed development of a six-storey, 120-unit apartment building at 470 Des Meurons St. is one such example.

‘Credibility is a leader’s currency. With it, he or she is solvent; without it, he or she is bankrupt.’ — John C. Maxwell

In Manitoba health care, credibility manifests on the balance sheet. It shows up when a board asks executives to endure change, patients to trust a plan and the government to fund another deficit. Lose credibility and every decision eventually carries interest.

Dr. Alan H. Menkis, in the Free Press, recently asked: “For the patient, where does the buck stop?”

His concern was a health system with many layers: government, Shared Health, regional authorities, hospitals, boards, agreements, legal counsel and executives. Each layer can be lawful. The patient can still disappear between them.

IF you drive through certain parts of the city these days, you’ll see people bent over where they stand. Frozen mid-motion, the way fentanyl leaves a person, folded forward as if the world had simply paused them there. You’ll see people lying on the sidewalk who may be sleeping or may be something more urgent than sleeping. You’ll see it in broad daylight, in view of the bus stop, the convenience store, the school a block away.

Some days the impulse to look away from all the suffering is overwhelming. The mind reaches for something else to focus on, something less heavy, less difficult.

But there are people who don’t look away. Not because it’s easier for them. It isn’t. It’s harder, in fact, because they’re not just seeing it once from a distance. They’re walking into it, every shift, sometimes more than once in an hour.

I think about the outreach workers who carry naloxone the way the rest of us carry keys. Who have, more times than they could count, knelt down beside someone whose breathing had slowed to almost nothing, administered the medication and waited, in that terrible suspended moment, to see whether a life could be saved this time. Who have done this for strangers. Who have done this for people they’ve come to know by name, and have had to do it again, and sometimes again after that.

THE United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes that all children have the right to an education that helps them reach their full potential. It should develop their personalities, talents and mental and physical abilities. Actualizing these rights in the classroom, however, is not as easy in practice.

Every classroom includes learners with different strengths, challenges, identities and experiences. Some students are especially gifted while others have medical needs, require accommodations or manage complex issues that require additional, individualized support.

Under Manitoba’s appropriate educational programming legislation, students are entitled to educational programming that meaningfully supports both their academic and social lives. However, the number of students in Manitoba who require complex support in the classroom surpasses the number of resources teachers currently have available.

The Manitoba Teachers’ Society recently surveyed 3,400 Manitoba teachers about these gaps. Seventy-eight per cent said students are not getting needed support and 63 per cent reported fewer educational assistants. Eighty-one per cent identified class size, complexity and lack of support as top issues — citing an increase in students with complex needs within the last five years. Today, nearly half of teachers have six or more students with complex needs, a sharp rise from previous years.