Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank everyone for coming today to share your information with us.
I wanted to also thank Harold very much for bringing forward this bill. As you well know, we have supported it from the beginning.
This was first flagged in the House of Commons by the Liberal Party when Mr. Rae mentioned that he himself had faced a certain amount of depression at a certain point in his life. The stigma, as we well know, is a big part of suicide prevention. I was shocked this very weekend to have a very dear friend of mine tell me that she had been battling with depression for quite a long time and that she was so ashamed to tell anyone about it. To meet her, you would think she was the life of the party; she was always full of fun. But it was interesting that she finally admitted it, and I think she did so because she was probably reaching a particular point in her life at which it was becoming too much for her to cope with alone.
I think that everything that you have said is very important, but I want to touch on a couple of parts that weren't discussed here today and that I'm sure are going to be discussed as we move on, later on. One of them, of course, is the high rate of aboriginal and Inuit suicide in this country. We know that we can compare ourselves to countries such as New Zealand and Australia in terms of looking at this issue. I wonder whether Dr. Goldbloom or anyone else, maybe Mary, can talk a little about what we can do to deal with that particular...because it's not as simple or as generic as if we were looking at other solutions for preventing suicides. I would like to hear somebody talk a little bit about the effective things one can do. There is a federal government program—we know that—and the question is whether it is working. If it isn't working, why is it not working? What are the specific initiatives we need to undertake to deal with this?
The other issue I want to talk a lot about, which no one speaks to, or which is only now beginning to come to the surface, is post-traumatic stress disorder, especially amongst our veterans. This is an issue I would really like us to touch on to consider how we can prevent it from happening. In many ways, if you want to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder in our veterans, the point is not to send them to a theatre of war, which is where they meet all those things. We know that isn't really a very practical solution.
What are the things that we can do, in those two groups, to address this particular issue and the specific problems that they face?