Prince Harry and Meghan Markle seem to be enjoying their time in Canada. They’re strolling through parks on Vancouver Island, taking in the mountain views, and participating in one of our country’s most widespread social media campaigns: Let’s Talk, Bell’s divisive mental health awareness initiative that’s 10 years old today. For every social media post using the #BellLetsTalk hashtag, the telecom giant donates five cents to mental health initiatives.
The Duke and Duchess posted photos of some of the participants in their Instagram story on Wednesday. They encouraged their 11 million followers to “be part of the solution” by joining people who “are taking action and creating positive conversations about mental health.”
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And more recently, a new controversy has arisen.
In 2017, Ottawa lawyer Michael Spratt discovered a secret agreement between Bell and the Ontario government, which allowed the company to rake in high profits from every collect call made from a provincial jail while giving the government a kickback.
And those calls are both inconvenient and very expensive, according to the documents Spratt got through a freedom-of-information request: Ontario inmates can only call landlines, and pay $1 for local calls and up to $15 for long-distance.
“The impact of Bell’s telephone contract on inmates in Ontario jails who suffer from mental illness? They can’t contact family members for support,” Spratt wrote in Canadian Lawyer magazine last week. “They can’t reach out for the mental health help that they are not receiving behind bars. They can’t arrange counseling, housing, or employment. They are not able to #BellLetsTalk.”
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Read Maija Kappler full article: Huffington Post
