As I started to say, we have put a lot of emphasis on research on aboriginal health by creating an institute that is dedicated to it. One of the first tasks that institute had was to create an environment of research that would address the numerous issues you've mentioned. One of the problems or situations was that even though a lot of research had been done with the aboriginal population, it had not necessarily benefited them. There was a certain unwillingness to participate. We had to engage the community in the research enterprise. To do that, the institute created a number of centres to start with to be able to mobilize the researcher and bring the researcher and the community together to identify problems that they wanted to address and also to assure them that they would benefit from that research.
Also, by creating these centres, they started to build the capacity to train people, aboriginal and non-aboriginal individuals, in research addressing issues important to the aboriginal population. It has now evolved so that these different centres, which are all across Canada, are part of a network. Today we are able to start to address very important questions for the population that transcend health--not only questions of health specifically, but also socio-economic factors play a very important role.
There are very specific programs with the aboriginal community on suicide prevention, acute substance abuse, and the problems of obesity and diabetes, which are much greater in the aboriginal population. Also, to help us better come to grips with this, we have entered into tripartite cooperation with other countries that face similar problems, such as Australia and New Zealand. This has also created momentum and visibility for the research to help attract researchers for these problems.
The last thing, which is also a very important realization, is the fact that we now have a specific ethics guide for doing research with the aboriginal community to address their specific concerns, which differ from the concerns of non-aboriginal people.