If you’re a Canadian who spends any amount of time on the internet, you know today is #BellLetsTalk day, an annual initiative to raise funds and awareness for mental health issues.

@Bell_LetsTalk Official Twitter logo

The initiative has, according to Bell, the telecommunications giant, been successful. They say they will donate 5 cents for every text and call for Bell users, every tweet and retweet with their hashtag, the aforementioned #BellLetsTalk, for every view of their awareness video, and use of their Facebook frame and Snapchat filter. They boast a total of 116,469,873 overall interactions.

The hypocrisy of the movement has been stated for years. Aside from seeing your former high school classmates boast their moral superiority and then continue to ignore mental illness afterwards because it doesn’t have a fun hashtag they can use for likes, there are more ways in which the initiative is sinister.

First, let’s talk about the company’s own response to mental illness among their own employees. In January of 2017, Maria Mclean was fired from the Bell radio station where she worked after submitting a doctor’s note that she should take ten days off from work to aid in her treatment for mental illness. After opening up to about her struggles with mental health, Bell fired her, and it took them weeks to inform her of the reason why, other than that she needed time off to focus on her mental health. Today, Bell links a PDG for the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace on their website.

Next, let’s talk about the worsening conditions of Ontario’s prison systems due to Bell’s involvement. The Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project, a group raising awareness about ongoing issues in jails and prisons, began a thread on January 11 from their Twitter account @letstalkjails. This thread highlights Bell’s contract with the Ministry of Correctional Services that was signed in 2013. Some details as highlighted in the Twitter thread include:

• Every call made is a collect call. Those receiving local calls pay $1/minute, long-distance calls can be up to $25 for 20 minutes on the phone.
• Calls can only be made to landlines. Less than 2/3 of Ontario residents have landlines in their homes.
• Bell makes a direct profit from these phone calls and the Ontario government receives kickbacks as well.

These facts are especially damning when partnered with the statistics on who makes up the prison population in this country. In a report released from Statistics Canada in June 2018, it was stated that while Indigenous adults represent 4.1% of the Canadian population, they accounted for 28% of admissions to provincial and territorial correctional services and 27% for federal correctional services. The report states that Indigenous people are overrepresented in the prison system, which, to anyone who can read the numbers. In a country rich in its history of colonialism, genocide, forced assimilation and horrific abuse through residential schools, this is very in line with the Canadian Government’s usual treatment of Indigenous people.

Phone calls are important for those incarcerated. They are sometimes the only connection that they have to their families and loved ones. They connect them to their lawyers. They are their line to the outside world, one of the very few things keeping someone mentally healthy. With the cost of talking to someone being astronomical, a person who is incarcerated may be forced to be completely alone. And in a country with recidivism being at an estimated 23.4% in two years, that is not helpful. Not at all.

Finally, let’s talk about Bell’s true intentions behind the movement – free advertising. Every year, thousands are exposed to the Bell logo, the Bell company line, and are then initiated as free advertisers for Bell. The biggest hint? The hashtag is #BELLletstalk, not #letstalk. Corporation before anything.

So Bell, let’s talk about mental health. Let’s talk about the real ways Canadians can combat mental health issues that don’t involve one day of preaching for self-gratification on social media. Bell, do some internal reformation on your approach to mental health in the workplace. If you would like for the Ontario Government to sever the prison phone contract with Bell, contact MPP Sylvia Jones and fight for the rights of all Canadians for access to mental health assistance.

And please people, stop looking to corporations to be your saviour.