EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
We are using electricity and everything that makes an individual feel more comfortable and we even have thermostats in the house to make us more comfortable.
We have packaged foods, ready to heat up food.
And insurance and medical insurance, that are there to make every individual comfortable in life.
And we are teaching our children that.
We are teaching them on how to be more comfortable and have more and better and safer surroundings.
Even us, we have skidoos to go and hunt for food.
We even have vehicles and drive from here just to over there, a few minutes away.
We even drive to work by vehicle from home, which won’t even take an hour to walk.
What I am trying to say, Mr. Chairman, is that I am going to be asking questions.
Sometimes, we give out five dollars to people who beg for money.
A lot of times, people give up things that are so minimal and feel helpless because, perhaps in their past, they went through a very traumatic experience or have gone through grief or abuse of some kind at home.
Perhaps they commit suicide because they look back to that certain point where they remember things.
I used to go to Nunavut Arctic College to school.
I studied the life skills program.
I tried to work through things that I have experienced where I’ve gone through hard times and it seems impossible at times, but I tried my best to get through it.
I did my best because that is my goal that is how I learned life skills.
I am not ashamed to talk about talking about this to young people.
Sometimes people have no idea on how to survive; as soon as they have no more money, they are kicked out of their home or their parents pass away.
Also they feel less loved if you direct your attention at another child, they feel abandoned.
We know for a fact that suicide is not the answer.
I myself as I stated earlier, if you are trying to survive, sometimes it is hard to think about suicide.
I, myself am totally scared of death, of causing death except to animals.
That is what we are not teaching our children.
We are not blaming anyone.
We are not blaming any individual.
But we have forgotten how to parent our children.
We are at a point where we are living in an environment where we see today only and we don’t see the future or their future.
My father started teaching me about life and I’ve learned how to cope and look at my children, my adopted children, and I want to be able to be a good parent to them.
Some of us do not wish to scold or discipline them because we tend to love them so much.
Perhaps this is because of what we watch on TV or what we learned at school as the majority of the time our parents never taught us that style of child rearing.
We are overprotective of our children, although our parents never did that because they disciplined us by traditional methods and this included unconditional love.
I have a multitude of comments or suggestions to make, but too little time as there are a lot of things that we could discuss on this issue.
Perhaps I could ask the Minister, have you developed any plans to use Inuit methods, not social services, not a mental health specialist, nothing that the administration considers professional but in the traditional specialist area or with people who have attempted suicide?
Have you talked with families who have lost family members to suicide?
Have you talked to any organizations able to collect information or conduct research on suicidal phases and families who have suffered at its hands?
Have you collected information on why these young people are committing suicide?
Why they tried to commit suicide and we should be trying to meet this challenge because it is only when we know the reasons that we can deal with it.
There are inquiries at times when someone does that in a public environment.
Has the department ever thought about doing research into why people attempt suicide and have you tried to get information from those who have experienced this aspect of life?
Minister Picco is presently busy, so I do not know if he heard you.
I will ask him directly.
Mr. Picco, can you comment on the questions posed by the Member?
Mr. Chairman, first of all, since the first day of the discussions and comments on the issue of suicide, we have heard some excellent comments across the floor from all the Members.
I did want an opportunity at some point to respond to some of the comments that we have heard and get into some of the specific questions and throw some questions out for the Members.
Mr. Chairman, Mr. McLean said it earlier and Mr. Arvaluk has talked about it, Mr. Puqiqnak has mentioned it.
The issue of suicide did not begin on April 1, 1999, since Nunavut started.
It has been going on for years.
But there are some questions that we could look at as a department and as a government to see how we could refocus our resources on those.
So, for example, Mr. Chairman, I want to throw out a couple of questions and get some discussion on these issues.
Why is it Mr. Chairman, that some communities have not experienced any suicides?
Since April 1, 1999, we have some communities that there have been zero suicides.
We have some other communities, Mr. Chairman, not just communities of 200 or 500 people, some communities that are some of the largest in Nunavut where there has not been one suicide.
In other communities, Mr. Chairman, from the smallest to the largest, we have had a lot of suicides.
Is there something in those communities that is lacking or that is working that is preventing suicide?
I told you a couple of years ago, Mr. Chairman, a question in the House, when we talked about our little health committees that we set up.
In one community in Nunavut, we have had the worst episodes of suicides by numbers, right up before April 1, 1999.
That community put a small health committee in place and they have had no suicides since April 1, 1999 and they have had only one suicide since 1998.
So, something that community is doing is working.
Is that something that we can do, not only as a government but also as communities all across Nunavut?
That is a question.
When I look the statistics too Mr. Chairman, I want to make something else very clear.
For every successful suicide, there are five attempts.
For every attempt, there is an equal or more number of people who did not complete a suicide attempt because they were counselled against it.
Right now, Mr. Chairman, after our debate last week on this issue, I had calls, faxes, emails to my Office, people came to see me saying: What about all of the good work that is happening in communities; will that help people not even attempt suicide?
Church groups, youth counselling groups, peer groups and the work that people are actually doing out there like mental health workers, drug and alcohol workers, social workers, are actually counselling people every single day.
For every successful suicide you hear about, there are five that do not even happen because someone has been helping them.
So, I want to make sure that we act now with that in the House.
We know people out there are helping, but maybe some of the questions we could say is, you know, look at the number of communities, why are some communities not experiencing suicide?
And how do we help those people who just put programs in place?
I disagree with Mr. McLean and the Federal Government.
I do not think that we should have some Federal Government ask the United States for help.
I do not think it is a government-wide issue.
I think we have to start it right off in families and in the communities.
And I can go through a list of things the government has done the last three years.
We have put 17 new psychiatric nurse positions in place, we have hired new mental health workers, we put alcohol and drug councils in, and we have opened psychiatric facilities.
I can go on, Mr. Chairman, I know that we need to talk about it and the Member was saying that this is a serious issue.
So, all I am saying is, you want to me to stop and I will.
All I am saying is: What are some of the things that we have already done?
I know we are not doing enough, but maybe the opportunity here, Mr. Chairman, is to look at communities where there have been no suicides, because something is working there, with families and working with other issues in those communities with health groups and so on.
Maybe that is something that we can also think of.
Take the successes, because there have been successes in the last three years and we need to be able to talk about that and we need to be able to talk about the good work that has happened with counsellors, with some of the work that is going on like the Crisis Line.
And I also want to point out one last thing, Mr. Chairman. Next week there will be another conference going on about suicide here in Nunavut.
We are polling some of the Members who have talked about it.
People from across the world, we are having people coming in from Australia, where the Aboriginal population in Australia also experience very high rates of suicides.
We are having people from Greenland here to talk about suicide and they are all doctors and psychiatrists and those kinds of people.
After that conference in May, we will be having our own Nunavut conference and then the National conference, but I think it goes back to talking about the issue and seeing how we could, as a government and as Members, can address the issue.
As Mr. Arvaluk said there is no easy solution or answer; if there was, we would all have it.
Chairperson (interpretation): Like I said earlier on, that I was going to allow some Members to talk again who have already spoken just to make sure that everybody gets their say.
I just wanted to ask Members if they would like to speak again on the topic.
If you have any more questions or comments. Mr. Arvaluk.
Mr. Arvaluk: I think you were right by asking the Minister, whether he understood me or not.
I guess he did not.
I simply asked, Mr. Chairman, I want to ask again, but I thought I made the comment, hearing myself few seconds so that I could ask further, my statements.
My simple question was: Do you have statistics as to why individuals, how the individual lived before committing suicide or attempting suicide?
Is it the family, is it the person, is it the grandfather, etc. etc.
I guess the simple question is, yes or no.
The second question is, will you set up some kind of committee or commission or group or whatever you want to call it on suicide prevention and make recommendations on an action plan for the government and the communities, not made up of experts from Toronto, but of the survivors, by the survivors of the suicide attempts and respected community front line workers on suicide prevention.
They might not have the answers, but at least they will give us information as to why, on average some of these young people try to commit suicide or are successful in committing suicide.
Just a short response from the Minister would be adequate so that there can be more questions from the Members.
Mr. Chairman, I understood the question the first time.
I thought I was given the opportunity to respond to all the things that we have heard.
I thought that is what we usually do in the committee.
So I was going to respond back to the Member and Mr. Arvaluk is correct.
We do have the statistics and the review and I had said in my Member’s Statement, which the Members have tabled here.
I was just looking at it again just now, since 1999, we do an immediate review of all suicides and I had said in the statement, in questions in the House a couple of months ago, Mr. Tagak, is one of them right here next to me.
We have two people within the department and another person in the Keewatin, starting on April 1st, where we are actually going and looking at exactly what James talked about earlier.
What is the family background?
How old were they?
Are there supports needed?
Were they put in place?
I guess that is exactly what Mr. Arvaluk had been asking for.
So, that is in place.
I don’t know if Mr. Best or Andrew would like to add anything to that short answer but I am trying to keep my answer brief as you requested, Mr. Chairman.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you, Minister Picco for the response to Mr. Arvaluk’s question.
At this time I have Mr. Irqittuq.
This is not a very easy subject because we live a very different lifestyle today.
We are all new to the lifestyle of today.
It is not like the one the person sitting next to me, Mr. Alakannuark, had earlier in his life.
That is why he’s sitting with us in this House.
I think we are in an unbearably difficult situation, especially the young people who are in a very hard situation, maybe because we are spoiled, or maybe our parents got spoiled and in turn spoiled us.
At that time, years ago, some people didn’t have anything.
Today there were some comments made that years ago, the dogs were slaughtered because they wanted to force us into a new lifestyle.
Today it seems that there are more suicides compared from that our previous lifestyle.
Even though there is suicide, I think that if the numbers go down that it would greatly improve.
There are already two suicides that occur every month in Nunavut sometimes more.
What we have to do is create a commission and like Mr. Alakannuark said, we have to do our work.
We have to try to prevent suicide in our communities, but we also need to conduct studies into the reasons.
As the Minister stated, they have the statistics of the previous lifestyles of people who succeeded in committing suicide.
I think that we have to do a study more vigorously which should be some commission or a body of people to help each community.
Perhaps we can start by asking very personal questions about the lost one, and if the parents agreed with the concept, then questions about the circumstances, the mental stress or anguish, the factors related to their attempt if they do not mind answering them.
With your parents, ask everything about how they started off with their married lives, what their parents wanted from them?
How did you feel when your parents died?
Were you put in a separate room when your parents were buried?
Those are the types of traditions we have that is bothering the people that commit suicide.
I cannot point my finger at who is at fault.
I cannot blame my parents.
Maybe they had problems deep inside them, in the lifestyle they were raised in and how they were raised that in turn, affects us in raising our children?
And our children end up committing suicide.
For instance, if they were not happy growing up, they want their children to live a better life then theirs.
For the older people out there who grew up in the traditional lifestyle, they are becoming frightened by their children’s habits and antics.
When we got into settlements, our parents were living in luxurious conditions compared to the olden days and they basically started to spoil us.
They could afford to lavish gifts of affection without fear of starvation.
This has destroyed a lot of people.
I have some questions later on, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to state again that our young children today have too much now.
It seems like they have no rules for them to follow at all.
They do not get any discipline from their parents anymore.
I do not really want to talk about religion, but our parents taught us about the bible when we were younger.
There is no religion in the homes anymore.
Not all the homes, but the majority of the homes, have any religious background anymore.
It has been said that we are living in a very stressful and difficult life, but we have to teach them about Jesus, that there is God, and there is also Satan.
We have to teach our children that.
There is no belief in religion in the homes.
We have a small Church in our community and it has never been full.
There is a fairly large population in my community, but only the elders attend Church the majority of the time and there is a clear age distinction.
That is the teachings we were taught and here are the children sleeping and when they wake up, they just go and play hockey on the streets.
They don’t think about going to church.
I think this is the kind of teaching that we have to start with our children now. What I want to see, Mr. Chairman, is to have some interviews with all the families of the people who committed suicide to find out what kind of lifestyle that they had because we can use that information from the parents to try to resolve this critical issue.
Some of the people who have tried to commit suicide have never been asked to make a testimony.
There are people in my hometown who know about trying to commit suicide and survived.
Sometimes they go into the church and they give a testimony about what happened to them and the preachers just say it is the way he was supposed to live, just to make the parents feel better.
Some young people say after trying to commit suicide, after that when they go to church, they will say they was supposed to try this and survived somehow.
They were supposed to try to commit suicide and survived just to make others feel good.
The preachers, there is a reading in the bible that talks about that type of issue; something to do with the figures in the bible, the people in the bible who committed suicide and survived.
They talk about having a near death experience and stuff like that.
Nobody knows that they are going to be in a better position if they attempt suicide.
My brothers and sisters told me, they were trying to comfort me, but it wasn’t really comforting because they didn’t know where my brother went to or my other relatives that committed suicide.
For all we know, maybe they went to eternal fire. What happened a year ago with my parents is that they tried very hard to survive.
It was very hard for them.
They were too scared of death to even think about suicide. Those are the types of things that I wanted to talk about.
I feel the Department of Health and Social Services should produce or start something whereby the surviving parents are interviewed and the siblings are interviewed as to the life of the individual who committed suicide just to find out what kind of lifestyle they had.
I am not talking about those experts from down south.
I am talking about the surviving siblings and the parents.
I am sorry I have a cold, I tend to cough when I try to speak.
As the Minister stated that the Federal Government may not be able to help but I don’t agree with him.
In this 200-page document, there is a Canada-wide council that deals with this issue.
Can the Minister say who participated?
Mr. Arvaluk (interpretation): My apologies, but it is 6 o’clock.
I would like to move to extend the session for one hour until 7 o’clock.
As we know, we are not going to come up with an action plan here, but it is just in support in dealing with the situation.
Chairperson (interpretation): There is a motion to extend the sitting hours to continue this Item until 7 o’clock.
Mr. Nutarak (interpretation): I second the Motion.
All in favour? Okay.
We will extend the sitting hours an hour.
I will just go back to Williams.
As I was saying, I did not agree with the comments that the Minister made about not asking the Federal Government for assistance.
There is an eight member Council with the First Nations participants that are Canada-wide.
There is some mention of Inuit in the report.
My apologies, I would like to acknowledge the Minister for his support in the communities.
I also had to assist one of the communities just the other day where these communities have these people in the communities who do not have formalized training to be counsellors, but are willing to give time to help in the communities on this issue.
I would like to ask why the Federal Government is not assisting us on this very critical matter.
Why are there good services for the First Nations people that do not seem to apply to us?
And there is this program where you can apply for funding and there is all of these experts in this field that are trying to deal with the matter.
So, I would like to ask, Mr. Chairman, the Minister as to whether we have representation in this.
I have quite a number of names on my list.
Try to make your response brief.
Hon. Ed. Picco: All I just want to point out is that, as a government and people in Nunavut, it is up to us to try to look at the issue and try to solve some of the issues around suicide.
On the Federal Government on the paper the Member is talking about, I have a copy of that too.
That disturbs me.
They never approached me as the Minister of Health for Nunavut’s involvement; or advice in the process that they put together.
However, on Page 38 of that report, they make one important point, they say suicide among First Nations youth is a political issue involving the Government of Canada, the Assembly of First Nations and First Nation Communities and members.
And the Federal Government talks about First Nations and Ms. Williams is correct,, they talk about First Nation Indians on or off reserves.
If they have used any Inuit in their study, we would probably be a very token amount at that.
So, that was my point.
I think maybe at the end of this debate that we have in this Assembly for the first time; maybe one of the recommendations that may come forward is that we petition the Federal Government for monies to do a report like they did with the First Nations in the south.
That is the kind of support I was hoping to have.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you, Minister Picco for your brief response.
I am confused at this point as the Chairperson as some people ask questions and some people have not made statements on this matter and I get confused easily when I am asked a question, but I want you to know that once the statements are done, I will open the floor for questions to the Minister.
So, we have not even reached the point where we can ask questions to the Minister.
We have already been given the opportunity to speak to the matter, those of us who were here at the previous meeting.
I thought that only the people who were not present and did not have the opportunity would be the only ones making their statements on this issue.
I figured that we have the chance to ask the Minister and his staff on this matter, that is why I thought we had the opportunity to ask questions.
Suicide is a very serious matter so as Chairperson, I took it upon myself to give each Member an opportunity to make a statement on this very personal matter.
Just be patient with me.
We will come to the point where we can ask questions.
I made my statement yesterday and I would like to ask questions as soon as you are ready.
Once there are no more comments, then we will proceed.
If there are no more general comments, then we will move onto questions.
Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I would like to read a letter that I received from one of the community Members regarding this matter.
If it is fine with you, I would like to read the letter for the record.
Once you are done with the reading of the letter, there is no one else on my list, so we will move onto questions.
Go ahead Mr. Puqiqnak, proceed.
Mr. Puqiqnak (interpretation): I can wait until there are no more comments, Mr. Chairman.
Chairperson (interpretation): Yes, we have a lot of other duties besides the issue of suicide but we would like to take this opportunity to discuss this issue in all aspects so that we can just finish this matter at this time so that Members will not be compelled to return continuously to the issue.
The letter is from Elizabeth Lyall, dated March 6, 2003, to Uriash Puqiqnak, Member of the Legislative Assembly regarding the discussion of suicide.
As discussed earlier, I would like to write this letter regarding the issue of suicide.
I have lost my only younger sister in 1992 and that really opened my eyes.
I never thought I would be affected by suicide in my family, but now I have gone through it and from then on, I took it upon myself to ensure that I help others who may be going through the same situation.
We have community gatherings in the month of December and open the floor for people to discuss their hurts.
We light candles and have vigils and this has made it easier to cope for all victims of suicide.
We know that we have to start discussing this matter, especially the problems we have in our lives.
If we do not speak about our problems, the hurt will compound more within us.