Status of Women committee  I actually live about 2,000 metres from the Six Nations reservation here in Caledonia, Ontario, so we've been fortunate enough to develop links with the Six Nations birthing centre and a group of local indigenous midwives to try to understand the unique struggles faced by first nations people here locally.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Congratulations on the birth of your eight-month-old. You seem to be doing an awfully impressive job as a mom and MP, but I will stop being ingratiating. There are a lot of remarkable people doing remarkable work across sectors at the municipal level, at the provincial level and at the federal level.

Status of Women committee  It's an interesting conundrum to negotiate these agreements between the provincial and federal levels, but I do believe that the federal government's creating quality standards and discussing with the provincial governments their needs and what they can help with will be helpful.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Over the past few decades considerable evidence has accumulated to suggest that the risks associated with being born to an individual who struggles with postpartum depression are myriad. Children who are born into this setting are about three times as likely to experience a grade failure and significant school problems.

Status of Women committee  I smiled when you asked your question, because we used to call the shower in our house Clark Kent's phone booth when our daughter was born. My wife would go up there, take a shower and come back out as superwoman. We've had the tools to detect postpartum depression for some time.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. One thing the pandemic showed us was the importance of supports, family supports, community supports, networks of support people, so when people are taken away to give birth to their children, it disrupts that. It disrupts the birth process. It disrupts the experience.

Status of Women committee  I would see the national quality standards as setting the stage for the stepped care models. Quality standards across the care spectrum from detection through treatment could set standards for access, wait times and things like that. Once we have those quality standards in place, they could be used to identify human resource needs.

Status of Women committee  stepped care pathways are the systems by which we deliver and monitor psychiatric treatments so that the most effective and least resource-intensive treatments are applied at the right time. In Canada, we have remarkable strength in perinatal mental health research, leadership and clinical work.

Status of Women committee  Prevention is an integral part of the package of improving the perinatal mental health of pregnant persons, birthing parents, mothers and women. Three years ago, just before the pandemic, the United States preventive services task force recommended that all individuals who are at increased risk for developing postpartum depression be provided access to effective treatments.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Ryan Van Lieshout, the Canada research chair in perinatal mental health and Albert Einstein/Irving Zucker chair in neuroscience at McMaster University. I'm a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a perinatal psychiatrist whose research focuses on developing scalable psychotherapeutic interventions for those with perinatal depression and anxiety, and optimizing their impact on offspring brain development.