Human Resources Committee on Dec. 13th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Okay. Let's go over to MP Robillard, please.

[Yves Robillard, Liberal, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for being here this morning.

My question is for Ms. O'Hearn and pertains to aboriginal and Inuit communities.

We know that each community has its own cultural issues. Witnesses have told us that there is a direct link between the ability to keep a job, mental health, and poverty reduction.

What is your opinion of that statement?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Hello.

Thank you for the question. I'm sorry, but I speak very little French.

In Inuit communities, there's often a lack of employment opportunities due to the size of the community. We have also been concerned about oil and gas exploration and development, because of the boom and bust cycle of a lot of these exploration projects. We know from our perspective, having done some qualitative research in partnership with the University of British Columbia, that unless there's adequate advance planning in consultation with the community to anticipate some of these other social issues that may be worsened, such as violence against women, substance abuse, and STBBIs.... There is a need for this advance planning before a site becomes active.

This also gives me an opportunity to touch upon a previous question. It has been some time since I've read the research, but there was research done around economic development and cultural match, and I believe it was at Harvard, the Kennedy School of Government. I've had the pleasure of meeting the researchers, but it was a number of years ago. I would encourage the committee to look at this research. It speaks to best practice. Whether it's oil and gas, or forestry, or fishery, trying to develop new economies, or working with indigenous peoples, cultural match is a critical component of success. Whether the match is language or culture, whatever that match must be for a particular community or peoples, it can be a real contribution to success.

[Yves Robillard, Liberal, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Inuit culture has almost completely disappeared, which partly explains the disarray in the communities. There are 14 small communities spread out over the Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay areas. I think each of these communities must take responsibility for itself. It is not always easy. I come to this conclusion based on the two years I spent with the Inuit in Kuujjuaq and Akulivik.

I have another question for you.

A representative of the Mental Health Commission of Canada spoke to us about the Headstrong program. Designed for teenaged students, the purpose of this program is to talk about mental health and reduce the stigma. It is led in partnership with First Nations communities.

Is a program carried out in this way likely to be successful in your communities? How can the federal government assist in the development of effective programs?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Thank you. I think you raise a good point. At our organization, we always look at what may be working in other parts of the country, in other sectors of society, with a view to adapting promising practices and working with Inuit experts, whatever the subject may be, whether it's health or economic development, to do adaptation where we can. I know the Red Cross has actively partnered with the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services around a program called RespectED, a violence prevention project.

I'm delighted to hear that you spent time in Nunavik. I would say, however, that Inuktitut is one of the three indigenous languages in Canada expected to survive, and I think in Nunavik about 80% of the population conduct the majority of their lives in Inuktitut. It's important to revive and support culture so that it can flourish once again.

I hope I've answered your question. I'm not familiar with the program you were referring to that the Canadian Mental Health Association brought out.

[Yves Robillard, Liberal, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

I think Inuktitut is very hard to understand and to speak.

I've learned from talking with people over there that French and English are implemented in school. It's pretty good. The programs are doing very well. Of course, the young generation is more able to speak different languages, if they have this opportunity.

Thank you for your deliberation.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Now for five minutes, we have MP Poilievre, please.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Thank you.

My question is for Dr. Diette.

The reason I thought your testimony might be particularly interesting here today is that I understand you've done some research on the link between unemployment and mental health. There is a chicken and egg nature to that discussion. It's possible that bad mental health will cause unemployment, but it's also possible that unemployment will lead to bad mental health.

Can you share with us your findings on the impact of long periods without work on the mental health of an individual?

[Prof. Timothy Diette]

Thank you for the question.

It certainly is a chicken and egg problem, as you say, and I think for good reason, because it does run in both directions. Some of what we wanted to contribute in our research was to look explicitly on the unemployment causing the poor mental health.

Essentially, what we did for that was to isolate. We looked at two different populations. One population had experienced poor mental health earlier, and therefore, we still analyzed them but pulled that out and looked at that separately. The other individuals had robust mental health prior to any spells of unemployment. We looked and found that the effect of short-term unemployment was not harmful. In additional research, we found it quite interesting that in the United States context, among African-American women, that those darker skin women—who are more likely, as previous research has highlighted, to be subject to discrimination—were more likely to suffer from depression from unemployment. We at least hypothesized that it's because their employment prospects are not as strong, which is in some ways back to the prior question about the role of opportunity and how that influences—

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

The hopelessness....

[Prof. Timothy Diette]

Hopelessness, yes.

To your point, yes. The short-term unemployment was not a problem for those individuals, but the longer-term.... There's nothing magical about 26 weeks. That's what we had within our study. The longer-term unemployment was the one that was associated with poor mental health.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

It's been said that you need an income for a living, but you need a job for a life. A job doesn't need to be formal employment. It can be raising your children in the home or working on the family farm, but some sort of work is a basic human need. Would you agree that work is a basic human need above and beyond the income that it generates?

[Prof. Timothy Diette]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, I would agree. I want to highlight—I mentioned a bit in the testimony—the important role of the non-monetary aspects of work, which is the idea of the structure of the day, the purpose, and the meaning that people derive from work, and the way it organizes society, which is what sociologists talk about. Work does play an incredibly important role. For those individuals who experience unemployment or who lack hope, there's the importance of job counselling to help people understand where opportunities and job training might be to help them get those new jobs.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

I think your remarks are complementary to what I heard from Ms. O'Hearn when she talked about the loss of the culture of hunting and gathering for aboriginal men and how that affects their sense of purpose. The ancient tradition of hunting is not just something that people have done to feed themselves, it's also a purpose in life and it's a vocation. When people lose the ability to work and contribute because of a lack of opportunity, I think we all agree that they suffer.

I wonder if Ms. O'Hearn might expand upon her earlier remarks in that respect.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Thank you.

I welcome the opportunity. We didn't have a lot of time to prepare to be with you today, but when we were talking yesterday about what we wanted to bring forward, we did talk about individuals building sustainable livelihoods according to their own measure of success, and that success is not necessarily monetary. It's not necessarily the accumulation of wealth.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Right.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

It can be parenting, raising children, and contributing to the wellness of the community and the family. Hunting, as one act, requires a great deal of skill, knowledge, and understanding and interpreting weather conditions and survival in Nunavik, in the Arctic or subarctic, so I think that for work, absolutely, we do that every day and may not even be mindful that what we're doing is work.

I know that traditionally there was a much greater balance and value in the work traditionally done by men and women in Inuit cultures and our communities. Men, in the majority, were the hunters, but women also had to prepare the skins. They had to know how to make waterproof and very warm clothing, so there was a mutual need, a dependence for survival, but also an individual taking pride in that and feeling valued by their family and community, whatever their contribution may be.

Now we live in a wage economy. Not everyone wants a big house in Forest Hill, I think. It depends, subject to our own values, I guess, and wishes. It's a very broad question that you ask.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Hopefully we'll have more time in the second round to elaborate on that.

I do have to move on quickly to MP MacGregor for three minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. O'Hearn, we know that the suicide rate for Inuit is 11 times higher than the national average, and that the majority who attempt it are people under the age of 30. We know that there have been more than 1,000 attempted suicide calls each year in Nunavut, a territory with a population of just over 30,000. Your organization is an organization that meets the needs of Inuit women. Do you have a gendered understanding of suicide in Nunavut? Is this something that we in the federal government need to better understand?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Thank you for your question.

Anecdotally, I think we have a good understanding of some of the gender elements of these rates of suicide. We need evidence. We don't have evidence.

It's very hard in any culture and in any country to gather evidence around the incidence of child sexual abuse. It's very difficult for a lot of reasons. We have the police reported crimes and convictions that help document the known and the reported rates of crime. We don't know, really, what the true incidence is of unreported crime. We know that previous research has indicated that a woman can experience up to 35 assaults in her home before she goes to the police. These things are very difficult to quantify and to develop evidence for, but absolutely, we know through our work that physical and sexual violence is one issue, but there's also the lack of support to survive these traumas, and they become cumulative.

We talk about the continuum of violence across the lifespan. The federal government absolutely can make a significant contribution to supporting our small part of what we try to do. In looking at previous evidence, we can see that there has been work done around adverse childhood experiences that quantifies each trauma experienced by an individual and tries to measure those compounded impacts that can have a really devastating cumulative effect on an individual. To develop appropriate interventions, there has to be an understanding of the extent and depth of whatever those traumas may be.

Absolutely, on the federal government, we're here and we're ready. We need to rebuild a bit of our capacity. That's just one example of work we'd very much like to get into in terms of trying to build some evidence to tailor culturally appropriate supports.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

I appreciate your question.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Now we start the second round.

We'll go over to MP Poilievre, for six minutes, please.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Dr. Diette, I would like to continue with our earlier line of questioning. You mentioned that mental health problems grew worse as the duration of unemployment grew longer.

Can you tell me what led to this relationship, based on the research you've done?