I've had the opportunity to hear you speak. It's very impressive, but it's very bold on your part to do that.
In terms of the Nuremberg model, it did start small but now has stretched across Europe. The European Alliance Against Depression has actually taken the initial pilot work and adapted it, and now it's in hundreds of communities. The step has been taken from a scientific perspective. The evidence is there. What's happening now is that people are taking that evidence and applying it in context.
That's what's being proposed now. Take what we have in terms of what is not just a fledgling piece of evidence but is now an applied, scaled piece of evidence on a different continent and apply it within the Canadian context.
The timing is also critical from a policy perspective. I say that because I've had partners who have had many conversations with the Public Health Agency of Canada, and I have as well, which is poised to talk about its own strategy around suicide prevention with no implementation plan and no operationalization. Too often we come across strategies with no implementation. The public is very tired of the rhetoric part of that and is really poised for some action.
If you look at a very small pilot in Canada, you don't necessarily have the power to demonstrate some of the heterogeneity required to demonstrate how it can be scalable to the different types of communities that exist across Canada. What we've proposed is to have enough communities to have that variability so that we have the evidence available to then scale beyond that across the country. We think that's the way to go.
When I say “we”, I'm not referring to partners. I'm referring to the people that partners have brought together who have experience in youth suicide prevention, who have done a wealth of research, and who practise in their communities in their provinces to find out how we can best use existing evidence and apply it in the Canadian context.