EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
With that in mind we have to commit ourselves to helping each other, everyone around us.
My request is that we who volunteer need training in this matter, however brief such training may be made available.
The CHRs as well as social workers do not seem to have the resources nor the time to deal with this matter.
So the volunteers in the communities who put in the time to help other should be recognized and get formalized training so that we are equipped to further help members in the community, particularly in the smaller communities.
I am very aware that having a good life may make this issue easier to deal with.
It is apparent that if there are support services, it may help alleviate the problem of suicide.
Thank you for giving opportunity to write you in this important matter.
Sincerely, Elizabeth Lyall.
Last general comments, Mr. Alakannuark.
I will make my comments brief.
As I always say, I speak as a true Inuk, and from my experiences.
Once we see people who want to help, others may offer to help without regard to what type of people they are dealing with.
We as Inuit, it is in our culture not to look down on other people.
And that is how I speak from experience.
As I said I was going to make my comments brief.
I have known a person who as an adult attempted suicide.
With the sudden lifestyle change, this person just did not know how to deal with life anymore.
Those who have attempted suicide should be given support.
We also have to seek information from them to find out from them what indicators there are when people think that someone is going to try to attempt suicide.
Just collect this information from people who have actually experienced those feelings.
I think that a lot of us are not open to the type of indicators that people may have.
It is unfortunate, but it is no one’s fault.
I think that it is up to us to support the Minister, and it is not up to him.
In the communities, we have to realize that it should all come from helping each other.
I thank the Minister and his staff for trying to deal with this very difficult issue but we have to take it upon ourselves as well.
How can we alleviate the problem of suicide?
As I said, my comments were to be brief so, I will leave it at that, Mr. Chairman.
I know that we will be following the House rules once we start dealing with the main estimates, so do not be preoccupied with semantics while we are dealing with such a personal matter.
I just wanted the Members here to complete all their general comments as this is a very important issue.
Now we move to the question period in this committee meeting.
Going back to Minister’s Statement 095-1 (6) and Tabled Document 030-1 (6), we are now on questions.
I just want to ask questions on some of the comments that were made earlier by some of the Members here. Like James said, the action plan, whether we want to see it go or not is what I am hearing here.
During my statement, I talked about how we can do this action plan at the community level, territorial, federal, it touched upon all of those areas. I have said during my comments about it at the community level that I want to ask the Minister about the type of prevention measures involved and whether they are effective.
We do not know how they will be effective, we do not know that.
How were they put out?
From that I want to be able to say something as to how we can ask further questions or add more things that have been out there today.
Maybe I'll leave it at that for now.
I have one or two more questions after that.
Mr. Chairman, I think it is important that we have had success with the suicide strategy as some of the Members have pointed out today.
Some things have been working.
And the Member is correct.
Since 1999, when we put the mental health strategy in place about a year and half ago and before that, followed up with some of the extra staffing positions, we have actually seen suicides decrease in Nunavut.
For example, Mr. Chairman, here are some of the brief numbers.
In the 2000, we had 30 successful suicides across Nunavut.
The next year, we had 27.
Last year we had 23.
Every year since that strategy has been put into place, some of the things that we have talked about in health, it is actually going down.
Now, the Members will remember, when we were in Cambridge Bay, we unveiled an action plan, talking about strength in communities, strength in culture.
We talked about more mental health workers, alcohol and drug workers in communities.
If you look at the numbers, the numbers are actually going down, although they are not going down a huge amount.
They are going down about 20 percent over the last two years.
I think that is part of the success.
On the strategy itself, we have a mental health strategy, which talks about wellness and talks about some of the issues around family and support.
As the Members know we actually hired, as the Member for Repulse and Kugaaruk was saying, helping young people, we have actually hired youth outreach workers in communities for the first time.
I want to say that there has been success and part of the answer to the question is yes, the answer to the first question was yes.
Your second question was yes and the third question is that we are actually doing it.
I would like to ask Mr. Best to add a couple of comments, Mr. Chairman on the issue of suicide, as his background is psychology and he can give us a little bit of insight.
With that I will ask Mr. Best.
Mr. Best.
Mr. Best: Mr. Chairman, before I answer the question, I wonder if I can just make a brief comment that pertains to the answer of my question.
Stoffman said that life is a compelling force and we know that most people would prefer to live as opposed to die.
We have seen a lot of that even when people are having their last breath.
Because of that, I believe that we can make an impact in terms of what is happening here in Nunavut with the number of individuals who have taken their own lives.
One of the things that we have been trying to do as I look at some of the programs, is to instil hope and purpose and meaning.
Some of that has been done through what we describe as per the peer manual that have been used, episodically or periodically across the territory.
But let me just say this as I was talking about these different pieces.
We still need to do more and we really do not have a comprehensive, focused plan on suicide.
We have got a plan that is Mental Addictions Plan that as it broadens, it heals and helps individuals to live and help individuals to move toward wellness.
But truly, what we need is the kind of plan that does not just start where the parents and the children are.
To the school system, the school system needs to adopt the Peer Manual in a serious way and start teaching kids and young people ways of coping because that is part of the problem.
You look at three major emotions; anxiety, depression and anger.
Those are some of the areas that young people have difficulty coping with.
So you get anxious and you go and take a drink then you feel good for a while and then you get worse, you get depressed and then whatever.
The bottom line is, you are looking at the best ways to cope with behaviours that might and can be described really, as self-destructive behaviours.
I would say that most of those programs have been geared towards trying to help individuals cope with those kinds of things that they are faced with.
And you talk to young people who are thinking about suicide, you hear young people say, there is nothing here for me.
There is no value here.
There is no love here.
I am depleted of spirit.
Those are powerful emotional words that tell you that if they continue to play around in their heads or the jingle channel goes around and around and you cannot get control, that at some point they are going to take action and the action that you may take is one that says: I do not want to be here anymore.
That my life is no good, let us put it that way.
So, most of our programs have been focussed in those areas.
Where the programs are lacking, in my view, are the consistency.
The school does not have the consistent program.
There is no program in the communities that are consistent, that are attacking the problems that parents are having in terms of how to deal with children and what you have got is Social Services which is the last resort when all of these things break down.
I guess what I would like to see is more resources put into having a more focussed plan moving toward eliminating some of those self-destructive behaviours that we often see when kids are trying to cope.
Mr. Chairman, I do not know if that answers the question, but that is the problem as I see it.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Best. Mr. Havioyak you were not finished?
Mr. Havioyak: Thank you. Yes, part of the question is answered.
But I was more interested in what type of answer has been put out in Nunavut.
Do they understand?
I am just trying to get a picture of where we are at in the prevention of this here.
How you get the word out to the public?
Advertising I guess is what I am trying to say.
Anyways if those kinds of things were available to us, there are going to be more questions come out how we can try and get around and make sure that we can try and get the right message out to each community.
I talked about it earlier, again community-based, community level.
I really do feel that community workshop and the continued use of follow up where you need to, which community you need to follow up on.
I used Kugluktuk as an example where we had a workshop and a working relationship with another community.
It was a good workshop.
The community workshop that took place in Kugluktuk, after two or three years everyone forgot about the workshop.
What do we do again?
We need to continue to do the follow up, especially on prevention.
Without the follow up, it will never be an effective workshop.
Again, we cannot do it alone as a Government, we can do it as a community working together.
The action plan that we want to do, they are going to want to hear from my community what type of things that they want to do in my community, because it cannot be the same thing as to where I use you as an example, are we in the same boat?
Are we having similar problems or activities in the communities that think about suicide?
I want to ask the Minister in this type of thing that happened in the past, so far to date on the community workshop, I know that I am going into details; it is going to be interesting this type of workshop that we want to do and what are we going to do in the future about this action plan?
I know that it is detailed but I think that we need to know these things.
Mr. Chairman, I think the Member for Kugluktuk has picked up on a couple of key points.
What may work in Kugluktuk may not work in Clyde River or may not work in Gjoa Haven.
At the end of the day, we need to be able to massage whatever program we put in place and to specifically identify and help those communities.
Out of one of those workshops that you were talking about in Rankin Inlet last month, we had people in there from different communities.
It is interesting to see what young people and adults, they had adults, they had elders there, and they had good involvement from elected council members, and so on.
I think that it is interesting to point out what they showed and demonstrated.
The top three concerns that the adults had at that suicide workshop last month, for example, the three top issues was for adults to show that you care, that they have concerns about the young people’s future and feelings.
Do you know what the three concerns of the youth were; gambling, alcohol and drugs, abuse and they say all abuse.
It goes back to what the Member for Amittuq was saying; are we open, are we listening to what people are telling us.
Why are young people looking differently at issues?
For example, structure, church, and so on.
The issue directly, in the workshop, we have hired several new people over the last several months to begin working more on exactly what the Member was talking about.
For example, the Federal Government have helped us on wellness programs and I thank them for that.
We have over $1.3 million dollars available to communities across Nunavut under the building health communities for suicide or crisis intervention.
Any community can apply for those monies, $1.3 million dollars for suicide or crisis intervention and we have had communities access that money.
And we have people in each part of Nunavut.
For example, in Kugluktuk or in the Kitikmeot, Ernie Bernhardt is one of our facilitators, who is someone you know quite well.
Louis Taparti is one of our facilitators in the Kivalliq, and here in the Baffin Region, we actually have three different people, all Inuit to facilitate the $1.3 million dollars, on top of all the other monies we have for wellness.
That is how we are working out some of these workshops.
So, the community of Kugluktuk, after having a workshop three years ago, could request a workshop this year Mr. Chairman and say we would like to do another one.
And that is how they could do it for example through healthy communities or brighter futures or community wellness.
On the questions I posed earlier, he did not answer the other one and for those of us elders, it is getting a little late in the day.
(interpretation end) Mr. Chairman, I stated before, there are two cultures clashing.
It might not be the reason.
Some of it might be the root.
My western friends work very hard to live comfortably or to create something that might make life easier for them such as inventing the wheel, electricity, central heating and microwave ovens and anything to make life easier.
It has become so easy that you only have to make money now in order to survive the western standard.
There are over 5000 people in Iqaluit now.
If we were living the way Inuit were, all the caribou probably would have been gone by now.
We rely on stores to supplement our diets.
That makes it a lot easier for my son who hopefully will not commit suicide when he’s 18 or 17.
If I don’t teach him how my ancestors or my father for that matter was obsessed with surviving, how are we going to get the next meal tomorrow?
If he didn’t catch a seal, we’d go hungry.
That is all he would think about, surviving.
No wondering, how we thought growing up was surviving; how not to die.
So those two cultures are clashing, turn a new page where we became militant in interpreting this to our children and that is why they are different.
Of course, we left ourselves to go to school and left our parents and we really did not know how to cope.
But we were very lucky that we had counsellors and supervisors and teachers who understood we are parentless during those hostile times.
They were really helpful.
But when we got back, we really did not know how to parent.
We are intelligent people.
We know how to become Ministers and engineers and whatever, teachers.
But we really do not know how we are supposed to prevent our children from having too much candy or not too much TV.
We forgot to take them out on the land more than we should.
It is not our fault, it is the system.
We really forgot how to see before hand what is troubling them.
When they are having a problem with their girlfriends or boyfriends, we just say it is nothing.
But to them it is a really a big thing.
Or sometimes when they are poor too long or they do not get new clothes for quite some time, it really bothers them.
It did not bother me.
I had the same clothes for a full year until it was ragged and my old man gets me new rubber boots once it is spring time, once a year, one pair you know, for the year.
I took them for dancing too.
What affects you psychologically or emotionally is different.
We have forgotten to recognize that because to us it was nothing, because as long as we were not hungry at that time, everything else was easy.
I think we are going to have to be a lot more sensitive to our young people about what may bother them and what may not bother us.
My question, Mr. Chairman, is there some kind of commissioner to study this, who is not biased, who is a survivor, some kind of commission similar to the Romanow Report or something like that on suicide, the process, history of those suicide attempts, including all of them, because we have no answers because we lived completely different from that past.
So then they could tell us what went wrong on average.
It will not be identical as a society because they are a result of the society, although individual suicides, but how the society has evolved to a distinct society; some kind of commission or study by Nunavummiut that could give us a report and say that some of this report is valid.
Some of it might not be but some of it will be valid.
That would be a start.
We are in questions right now so please keep your preambles short and concentrate on the questions. I will give Mr. Picco an opportunity to respond.
We have talked a little bit about that.
I think that would probably be one of the first things that we should do. We have two individuals right now who have been doing some work and starting on April 1st.
We chose that because it is a new fiscal year.
And the project is called Tukisiniaqtut.
Mr. Arvaluk: Tunkisiniaqtut.
Hon. Ed Picco: Tukisiniaqtut.
Anyway, one of those Members is next to me and I am going to ask Andrew, Mr. Tagak, maybe to give a little overview on what he and Louis will be doing.
And the plan Mr. Chairman, right now and maybe we can broaden it with recommendations from this committee, a motion from the committee saying the other information you would like to see.
But the plan is right now, where Andrew and Louis would be going around to communities.
We will take X number of communities and we would ask individual families.
What was going on with that person before they committed suicide and find common markers, common values, exactly what you are asking for change.
Were they adopted?
Were their parents older?
Were they employed?
Were they in a long-term relationship with their girl from a very early age?
These are things we are hearing from elders and from other people and then to see what is actually occurring.
So, if I could ask, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Tagak, to just basically talk about some of that and some of the work that they will be doing, he and Louis Tuksigaqtuq over the next little while, Mr. Chairman; Mr. Tagak.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you, Minister Picco and to Mr. Tagak.
Mr. Tagak (interpretation): Since a few days ago, there has been some statements made about suicide and it is a very prominent task that the Government has taken on.
And because of this realization, we have to take some sort of a step in order to start combating the issue of suicide.
Not everything works, but it does not have a heavy enough impact.
So, what we decided to do was to go out and talk to the people, to the communities and that would be the initial step.
The people out there can tell us what we can do or what we should be doing and we were also told that we would have two main tasks.
On April 1, we will start touring the communities to talk to the people directly to ask those questions.
I am sure they are being recorded, that were tabled here in this House.
We will not have an Interpreter; we will talk to the people directly and direct communication because we have no other alternative but talk to the people of Nunavut.
And we do not want to keep dragging this because the people are here, they are living in Nunavut, they are from Nunavut and they are the only ones who have never been asked those vital questions.
So, since we have no other alternatives, this is what we are going to start doing.
What I am saying is let us do this by using Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit as our foundation.
So, that is what we are going to be doing on April 1.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you, Andrew.
Mr. Irqittuq (interpretation): Yes, I am very glad that we are going to be taking the initial steps from here and to hear from the people.
To keep it very brief, but I would like to reiterate because of course, we have a lot of time yet.
In 1966, Hall Beach was established and all the people of Hall Beach in 1966 permanently moved to the established community.
There were very few families who still lived in Outpost Camps.
For 19 years there was never one single suicide committed.
Then, in 1984-95, that is when the suicides started after the different denominations started coming into the community.
If we are talking about the establishment of a Commission, I like the idea and some of the comments that the Minister had stated is that they were, they are asking questions, one of the questions is going to be whether the individuals were adopted or if their parents were older and etc…
And because of this epidemic and our having no other alternatives, there has to be another study done to look at the implementation and the action plans out of it.
After this consulting period, we will have an idea of why they commit suicide.
Like I mentioned a little bit earlier on, our parents, when they passed away, because we were children, the mother, the grandfather, or their blood relative was wrapped without having the child see what is happening, or letting the children know.
At that time, it was an Inuk custom.
If my mother died, for example, if my grandmother died for example, you bury and then that was it.
You forget about them.
Those are some of the negative impacts that are very possibly a part of the problem.
I think that Andrew knows exactly what I am talking about.
I am sure that it will be included in this consultation period.
Chairperson (interpretation): I did not hear a question. I think that was quite clear.
As Dr. Best stated earlier, we will have to include the schools, to teach the students.
I think that they should be part of the consulting process because of course the school population learn two cultures hand in hand, one from the parent base and one from the school system base.
I have no other names. I apologize; I did not see your hand.
An elder in Iqaluit gave me some suggestions on what to say.
It is very brief.
This individual thinks that people who attempted suicide but survived, should be the ones that the Tukisiniaqtut, ask.
That was one question that was given to me by an elder from Iqaluit.
I would like to say hello to all the people in Iqaluit.
Mr. Chairman, I also received a letter from the same individual and I spoke to him at some length this afternoon on some of the issues around suicide.
I appreciate the letter as well as the comments from the Member.
I wanted to say a couple of things on the Tukisiniaqtut, that Andrew and our other colleague will be working on.
I wanted to make sure that there is no finger pointing.
They are going to be using Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit.
It is very low key.
Andrew is not going to go into a community and hold a public meeting.
They are going to deal with families one on one, and maybe go on local radio and say look we are here.
We would like to talk about some of these issues, and people are going to be able to go and see them.
It will be done very quietly and confidentially.
We are not there to blame people and so on.
For example, one of things that we want to find out from Health is if a person committed suicide, was there enough support from the Department of Health?
Did I have enough people to help this person?
Were they being ignored?
These are the kinds of things that we will find out.
And Andrew and Louis will be able to look at different communities.
They will report back to me and then I would report back to the House.
I would like to see coming out of this over the next couple of days from our debate today, Mr. Chairman, I think that we are right road.
As I said earlier, we have seen the number of suicide drop in the last two years, which is a very good thing.
I think it is from some of the work that we have done.
I would like to see some of the motions in the committees over the next few days giving me instructions to go the Tukisinaqtut group that Andrew and Louis will be working with and other people, so that those recommendations can be implemented; real plans and real ideas.
And the other point I would like to make very quickly before the end Mr. Chairman, is that as I said earlier, there are good data and good statistics on suicide.