From One Advocacy Effort to a National Vision: My Final Update On this Petition
✨A closing chapter — and one final contribution to the future of universal healthcare
Dear changemakers who have supported this petition,
More than five years ago, in the spring of 2021, as a social entrepreneur and a caring Canadian Citizen in Ontario, I started this petition with what felt like a relatively straightforward concern: if mental healthcare is healthcare, why are so many forms of professional mental-health support still financially inaccessible to people who need them? At the time, Canada, like much of the world, was living through the COVID-19 pandemic. I was deeply concerned by what I was seeing around me: rising mental-health needs, isolation, grief, burnout, financial instability, and long-term psychotherapy remaining unaffordable for many people. So, as a social entrepreneur and simply as a caring Canadian citizen, I started this petition asking the Government of Ontario to consider including mental-health services provided by a broader range of qualified mental-health professionals within OHIP.
The argument itself was not new. Mental-health advocates had raised concerns about affordability and access long before I did. What was different was the moment. COVID-19 had brought mental health into public consciousness in a way that statistics alone often could not. Experiences that had once seemed private or invisible suddenly became shared realities for millions of people, and for a brief period, a policy window opened. In November 2021, this petition was formally presented in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. That remains one of the moments from this journey that means the most to me. There was no lobbying firm behind the effort, no large advocacy institution directing it, and no major operating budget or formal machinery designed to move a policy agenda. What existed instead was a citizen, an issue I believed mattered, thousands of people who agreed that something needed to change, and a moment in which public concern, lived experience, and policy attention aligned.
Even now, one of the things that feels most surreal to me is seeing this petition pass 10,000 signatures. When I first started it five years ago, I genuinely had no idea whether anyone beyond my immediate circle would care, let alone whether thousands of people would eventually put their names behind the same concern. I certainly did not imagine that it would one day reach the Ontario Legislature, or that the question behind it would follow me through years of frontline work and eventually grow into a nearly 200-page proposal (attachment linked here) for Canada. Looking back now, the number itself is meaningful, but what moves me more is what it represents: more than 10,000 individuals, each deciding in their own small way that mental health access mattered enough to say, “I agree — this deserves attention.” For something that began with one person simply deciding to speak up, that still feels extraordinary to me.
That experience taught me something I have carried ever since: public-interest ideas do not always need enormous financial or institutional power before they are allowed to matter. Sometimes what matters most is recognizing a real need, articulating it clearly, gathering credible evidence, mobilizing people around it, and acting when the moment is right. But the petition was only one part of what I was doing. Before and alongside the policy advocacy, I was also building social-service initiatives through the nonprofit work I had founded. I believed then, and still believe now, that one of the strongest forms of advocacy is not merely telling people that a gap exists, but showing what addressing that gap could look like in practice.
At one point, that work included a global initiative that provided unlimited, free, and highly accessible emotional support, counseling, psychotherapy, and coaching, supported by nearly 100 supervised clinical interns. The purpose was not simply to create another program. It was to respond to an immediate human need while also learning directly from what happened when financial, geographic, and other barriers to support were lowered. People came. Professionals volunteered. Demand emerged across countries and time zones. That demand itself became information. It reinforced something I was already beginning to understand: when thousands of people seek support as soon as barriers are removed, the unmet need is no longer theoretical. Service delivery became a form of living evidence. Instead of waiting for policy to change before asking what expanded access might look like, we experimented with what was already possible under constrained resources. In that sense, the petition was asking the government to address a problem, while the service-delivery work allowed me to understand that problem much more closely and concretely. Later, it evolved into FASSLING.AI, offering unlimited, multilingual, holistic coaching support and creating a virtual safe space for anyone seeking help—24/7, regardless of geography.
Over the years, my own understanding of the issue continued to evolve. When I created this petition in 2021, I was thinking primarily about coverage. Gradually, I became much more interested in infrastructure. I started asking what happens before someone qualifies for formal care, what happens while someone is sitting on a waitlist, what happens after treatment ends, and what happens when someone knows they are struggling but has no idea what kind of support they need. I became increasingly interested in what happens when appropriate care exists, but the person cannot navigate their way toward it, or when someone needs connection, guidance, or early support but does not necessarily need, or yet qualify for, a formal medical intervention. Eventually, the deeper question became impossible for me to ignore: what exists between a person and the formal healthcare system itself?
That question led me far beyond the original scope of this petition. The issue was no longer only why more mental-health professionals were not included within publicly funded healthcare. It became a much larger question about what infrastructure a truly universal healthcare system might still be missing. That shift changed the entire way I understood the problem, and it eventually led somewhere I could never have predicted when I started this petition five years ago.
Ahead of the Government of Canada Department of Finance’s 2026 pre-budget consultation deadline, I submitted a nearly 200-page personal proposal in my capacity as a social entrepreneur with more than a decade of humanitarian experience. For me, this proposal represents far more than another submission to government. It is the culmination of years of observing, listening, questioning, building, experimenting, advocating, and trying to understand the gaps between people and the systems intended to support them. In many ways, it is where the question that began with this petition finally arrived.
The proposal centers the social enterprises I have built - For A Safer Space | FASSLING.AI-inspired model for a Canadian National Virtual Safe Space. For me, a National Virtual Safe Space is not simply an interesting technology project, and it is not merely an AI project or a convenient case study for discussing healthcare spending. It represents what years of frontline observation have led me to believe may be a crucial missing layer in Canada’s broader healthcare and public-health infrastructure. The question underneath it is simple but important: what happens to people before their needs become severe enough to fit neatly into an existing healthcare service, while they are waiting for care, after formal care ends, or when what they need most in that moment is simply a safe and accessible place to be heard, supported, guided, and connected to an appropriate next step?
There is an enormous amount of human experience between “I’m okay” and “I need formal clinical intervention,” and our systems do not always have a clear place for everything that happens in between. That, increasingly, became the pain point I believed deserved much more serious attention. My proposal, therefore, explores whether Canada could treat a National Virtual Safe Space as a form of public infrastructure: a universally accessible layer that could sit alongside, rather than replace, Canada’s existing healthcare system and professional services.
The purpose would not be to medicalize every difficult human experience. It would not be to replace physicians, psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, counselors, crisis services, community organizations, or other professionals with technology. It would also not assume that artificial intelligence can or should perform every role that belongs to trained human professionals. Rather, the idea is to explore whether Canada could create a continuous, low-barrier, nationwide point of support that could help people earlier, help them navigate available resources, connect them more effectively with appropriate services, and provide somewhere to turn during the many moments when they might otherwise find themselves navigating difficult circumstances alone. In that sense, the National Virtual Safe Space would not be designed as another isolated service competing with the healthcare system. It would be designed as a bridge into, around, and alongside it.
The more time I spent working around these systems, the more I also began to question the assumption that every meaningful improvement must begin with more money. Sometimes additional funding is absolutely necessary, but I became increasingly interested in another question: are we using the resources we already have in the best possible way? Where does someone enter the system? How quickly can they receive support? How much professional capacity is being spent on needs that might have been addressed earlier? How much suffering escalates because people do not know where to go? How disconnected are community resources from formal healthcare? How much expensive downstream intervention might be avoided if people had more accessible support upstream? And how might technology, professional services, community resources, public-health infrastructure, and existing government systems work together instead of continuing to operate as separate islands?
The broader purpose of my proposal is therefore not simply to ask Canada to put more money into healthcare. It is to explore whether we could organize some of the extraordinary public resources we already possess more intelligently, effectively, preventively, equitably, and humanely. In this sense, the proposal is not only about mental health. It is about system design. It is about how people enter, experience, navigate, and move through public systems, and whether those systems are designed around real human journeys rather than institutional boundaries.
This proposal did not appear overnight. It grew out of more than a decade of sustained observation of Canadian healthcare, humanitarian, social-service, and community systems, alongside years of social innovation, hands-on service delivery, experimentation, and advocacy. But perhaps the most important influence was simply listening. Over the years, people from many different socioeconomic circumstances shared their experiences with me. I heard about trying to find help, trying to afford help, waiting for help, being redirected from one service to another, not qualifying for one program while being unable to afford another, being technically eligible for support without knowing that support existed, and being surrounded by institutions and programs yet still feeling completely alone while trying to navigate them.
Those experiences stayed with me. Eventually, many seemingly separate issues began connecting: mental-health access, early intervention, prevention, healthcare navigation, loneliness and social isolation, crisis escalation, digital infrastructure, healthcare workforce capacity, community resources, continuity of support, and public resource allocation. Underneath all of them was a deceptively simple question: what should universal healthcare actually feel like from the perspective of the person trying to use it? Not only when someone finally reaches an emergency department, not only when an appointment becomes available, and not only when someone satisfies the eligibility criteria for a particular program, but throughout the much longer human journey before, between, and after those encounters.
I also want to be clear that I do not believe my proposal is perfect. I do not claim that every element of it is correct, and I do not believe my particular model should simply be implemented exactly as written. I certainly do not believe infrastructure of this scale could or should be designed by a single person, organization, profession, or sector. Something like a National Virtual Safe Space would require serious interdisciplinary work, including research, evaluation, public discussion, professional scrutiny, healthcare expertise, technology expertise, privacy and cybersecurity safeguards, ethical protections, legal analysis, economic modelling, community participation, and, above all, continued attention to the experiences of the people such a system would ultimately exist to serve.
My proposal is therefore not intended to be the final answer. It is my attempt to put one possible architecture on the table. After spending so many years close to these issues, however, I do believe the underlying gap deserves serious examination. That distinction matters to me. I can be uncertain about whether every detail of my proposed solution is right while still believing that the problem it is trying to address is real, important, and deserving of much more attention.
That feels like the appropriate place for me to stop. I am simply reaching the point where I believe I have contributed what I personally have to contribute to this particular chapter.
My responsibility, as I eventually came to understand it, was to notice, to listen, to ask difficult questions, to act when I believed action was necessary, to build when I believed something was missing, to demonstrate where possible rather than merely argue, and to put my ideas into a form that others could examine, challenge, reject, adapt, improve, or perhaps someday build upon. Just as importantly, my responsibility was also to know when to let those ideas go. I have now done that.
As a Canadian citizen, a social entrepreneur, someone who has spent more than a decade in humanitarian work, and a proud Chinese Canadian, submitting this proposal felt like my way of saying: here is what more than a decade close to these systems taught me; here is a gap I believe deserves serious attention; here is one possible way of thinking about it; and now, I leave it with Canada.
Whatever happens to the idea from here no longer needs to belong to me. Perhaps the complete model will never be pursued. Perhaps only one small part of it will prove useful. Perhaps someone else will eventually design something much better. Perhaps its greatest contribution will simply be encouraging another person to ask a different question. I am comfortable with all of those possibilities, because the purpose of putting an idea into the public conversation should not be to own its future. Sometimes the contribution is simply making a possibility visible.
"One should give rise to the mind that abides nowhere" - Buddhist Diamond Sutra
Ironically, it also took all these years of working around healthcare for me to understand something about myself that now feels obvious: my passion was never healthcare itself. And, admittedly, corporate healthcare was never particularly my thing either. 😅 My passion has always been public health. Healthcare was simply one of the places where that passion first found a problem large enough to hold my attention. What fascinated me was always the larger question underneath healthcare: how do we design systems that protect human well-being before people reach the point of crisis?
Once I understood that, the direction of my next chapter became much clearer. That question exists everywhere: in education, technology, cities, workplaces, humanitarian systems, social isolation, economic inequality, demographic change, community design, digital life, public policy, and countless other places where institutional systems intersect with everyday human experience. Perhaps, then, I am not really leaving behind the questions that brought me here. I am simply allowing those questions to become bigger.
Some chapters are meant to continue indefinitely. Others are meant to be completed. This one feels complete. As the center of gravity of my life increasingly shifts toward Asia, and as I prepare to formally step into a new role there beginning next year, I am looking forward to carrying everything these years in Canada have taught me into a much broader landscape of social and public-health challenges. This time, I will be approaching those challenges not only as a social entrepreneur, but from a new vantage point as a corporate entrepreneur.
The country may change, the context may change, the industries may change, and the problems certainly will. But I suspect the questions I ask will remain remarkably similar. How do people actually experience the systems we build? Where are the gaps between institutional design and human reality? What have we accepted simply because “that is how things are done”? Where do institutions fail to see what people on the ground experience every day? And what possibilities become visible when we start designing systems around human beings rather than continually requiring human beings to adapt themselves to systems? Those are the questions I am excited to carry forward.
To everyone who supported this petition, thank you. Truly. Whether you signed it five years ago or discovered it much more recently, you became part of a question that eventually grew far beyond the petition itself. Some of you shared your stories. Some shared the petition. Some followed quietly. Some challenged me. Some encouraged me. Some simply clicked “sign” because they believed that access to mental-health support should not depend entirely on someone’s financial circumstances. Every one of those actions became part of this journey.
More than 10,000 signatures is something I still find difficult to fully comprehend. From the perspective of the internet, 10,000 can look like just another number on a screen. But I do not experience it that way. I see more than 10,000 separate decisions made by individual people who paused, read, and decided that this issue deserved their name beside it. I never expected that when I began. I did not know whether the petition would go anywhere at all. The fact that it grew beyond anything I originally imagined is a reminder to me that sometimes you do not need to know exactly how far something will travel before deciding that it is worth beginning.
What began here as an advocacy effort around broader publicly funded access to mental-health professionals eventually became a much larger investigation into accessibility, prevention, dignity, navigation, public infrastructure, and the future of universal healthcare. Somewhere along the way, the question changed from “Who should universal healthcare cover?” to “What infrastructure might universal healthcare still be missing?”
My answer, or at least the possibility I believe deserves serious exploration, is a Canadian National Virtual Safe Space: a permanent, universally accessible layer of public-health infrastructure designed to help bridge the distance between people and the formal systems intended to support them. The nearly 200-page proposal I submitted is where I have chosen to leave that idea with Canada. Not because the work is finished, far from it, but because my part in this particular chapter is.
My final contribution to this journey is therefore not simply another request to put more money into healthcare. It is an invitation to examine whether there is a missing layer in the architecture of universal healthcare itself, and whether building something in that space could help Canada use its existing public resources more intelligently, preventively, equitably, and humanely. That is the question I wanted to leave behind, that is the proposal I wanted to complete, and that is where I am comfortable closing this chapter.
So, with that, 👋 bye-bye for now to Canada and healthcare-system issues for me~ There is a very big world beyond this petition. There are many other social issues, in many other places, that I am curious about; many systems I still want to understand; many assumptions I still want to question; many things I still want to create; and many public-health challenges I am genuinely excited to explore next. ✌️✨
Thank you, Canada, for the lessons. Thank you to everyone who trusted me with your stories. Thank you to everyone who volunteered, contributed their professional skills, or helped turn ideas about accessibility into actual services. And thank you to every person who supported this petition and gave one question enough space to become something much larger than where it started.
The petition was where the question began. The frontline work was where I learned what the question really meant. The proposal is where I am choosing to leave my answer.
And for me, that feels like closure. 🌏✨
This chapter may be ending, but the curiosity behind it definitely is not 🌱✨
Thank you for believing that this question was worth asking. Thank you for being part of these five years. And wherever the next chapter takes me, I hope some of you will come along for the journey.
If you are interested in seeing where this journey takes me next — the places I explore, the systems and social issues I become curious about, the public health questions I continue to think about, and whatever I end up building or creating along the way — you are very welcome to stay connected. You can follow my journey on
Twitter/X, Instagram, Medium, Threads, TikTok - @lifescholarzyj
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/lifescholarzyj
“Whatever living creatures there are, with not a one left out … may all beings be happy.” — Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta (Sutta Nipāta 1.8) “无论世间有何众生，一个也不遗漏……愿一切众生安乐。” ——《慈经》（Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta，《经集》1.8）
Best,
Dr. Yujia Zhu, D.Div., Ph.D