Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on June 7th, 2016

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you both for being here.

Jack, your work is renowned, and we appreciate it.

Natan, you are once again coming to this committee. You really do have a tremendous handle on your community, and I commend you for that.

Mr. Rusnak was talking about self-determination and self-government. Is the funding formula that exists for Nunavut and Inuit communities the same as that in other contribution agreements and grant-type programs?

[Natan Obed]

There's a wide variety of ways in which health care funding and mental health funding flow to Inuit communities. The first nations and Inuit health branch has contribution agreements, sometimes with Inuit-specific providers and sometimes with governments. There is the overarching transfer for the Government of Nunavut. Then within provinces, the Province of Quebec and the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador interact with our Inuit regions for funding for health care.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

You're saying there's a hodgepodge of different funding. Depending on what the program is or what the project is, there is an overarching fund. I guess what I'm getting at is that these funds are typically geared for a very specific area, and there's not a lot of control as to what can happen to that money beyond that area. Is that correct?

[Natan Obed]

Yes. In many of the Public Health Agency and Health Canada first nations and Inuit health branch programs, there are very specific terms and conditions around the types of services that can be provided and who provides those services.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Okay.

We've done studies on suicide and studies on health. We've done many different studies out there. Has a study actually ever been done—and maybe Jack can help with this—on the funding required to bring about social equality?

[Jack Hicks]

Our experience in Nunavut is that a strategy without a budget doesn't accomplish very much. Hopefully that's going to be rectified very soon. We're told that it is. That's basically the story.

Quebec put public money into a coordinated strategy to fund a range of activities. When the WHO recommends that every country have a national strategy, it means an adequately resourced strategy, which costs some money. I don't like to view it in these terms, but I really think suicide prevention pays for itself. Suicide costs government a lot of money—a lot of money.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Part of what you're getting at is what I'm leading to next.

I've been to Mistissini in Quebec, up into the north with the Cree people a couple of times, and I was there in the mid-eighties. There was a very different scenario when I was there in the mid-2000s, in 2005. I couldn't believe the transformation that had occurred within that community and within that society. It was as a result of the $10 billion that they had received from the Quebec government for the hydro dam project. They had a lot more self-determination and self-government over the types of services.

It was a beautiful community. You could see that it gave them pride in their community. It was incredible. I think that's part of this puzzle here: we have to figure out how we get the funding levels that are required to get that social equality to get pride back into the community and to get hope back into the community for the future for our youth. The expectations we set for our youth today are very high, but having no hope of achieving any of those expectations leads down a very dark path. Would you agree with that?

[Jack Hicks]

May I suggest you need to go one step more upstream? Adverse childhood experience—that's what the global literature speaks to. When Nunavut was created in 1999, there were seven Head Start programs; 16 years later, there are seven Head Start programs. After all these years of high rates of child suicide, why does every child in Nunavut not have access to a Head Start program? The communities that have them love them, and the federal government's own research says they're brilliant.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I'm sorry to cut you off, Jack, but I have one more point I'd like to make.

We're in crisis situations right now. From the health standpoint, when you're in a crisis situation—an outbreak, for example—you need to attack it with a lot of resources, get it under control, and then put in place long-term resources to maintain a certain level. Would you agree that's part of what's missing here today? If we have a crisis there from a mental health standpoint or from an addictions standpoint or an abuse standpoint, we need to attack it with resources very specifically within the community.

[Jack Hicks]

We attack it in partnership, yes, and there is absolutely no reason we can't start investing in the well-being of children at the same time. There's no reason.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you.

The next question is from Arnold Viersen, please.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Natan and Jack, for being here. I appreciated your presentation today. It's been informative.

I don't have a lot of questions for you today. I think your presentations have been amazing. I've been reading this piece of paper right here, particularly on the risk factors. That's probably the number one thing, if we can mitigate the risk factors.

We've worked really hard on the protective factors for a while, specifically mental health. Every time there is a suicide crisis, there's a call for mental health workers. That's entirely a Band-Aid solution. We need to get past that. There is a culture of suicide, and we have to work to change that culture a little bit.

Natan, can you just explain or broaden that out a little bit for me? Is that the correct terminology to be used, “culture” of suicide? I have no experience with what you're talking about. It's foreign to me. Perhaps you could just broaden that out a little in terms of communities suffering from suicide.

I read here about family strength, and to me that seems obvious, but when you write it on a piece of paper, it's suddenly, “Oh yes, we have to worry about family strength.” How does that work, and how does community cohesion play into it? When I look at my own life, those things exist in my own life, and I can't see a reality without them.

Could you speak to that a little bit?

[Natan Obed]

Thanks.

We say that suicide is “normalized” in our communities. We say it that way because, as I said in my opening statement, everyone is affected. Everyone, from a very young age, understands very graphic details about it, how it happens and how a person is affected. The life courses of people are altered. The life courses of whole families and whole communities are altered by suicide in a way that envelops all of us.

That's just something that does not happen in most of Canada. It may happen in specific families, or perhaps there's a high-profile death by suicide, but it is not an environment that children grow up in and understand as just a part of how their community functions or does not function.

The root of this, stemming from the 1970s, when the rate of suicide increased, and the dysfunction in many cases in our communities, passed down from generation to generation, all play into that factor of why we are the way we are today. Families were being broken up because people didn't have mental health services. People couldn't heal from the things that tore them apart, whether it was physical or sexual abuse as children or whether it was that they were in residential school from the time they were five to the time they were 18. Many different things that happened in our society over a short period of time led to people not being able to deal with the things that we all take for granted.

Love of your partner, love of your children, love of your family, the ability to overcome difficult situations in life—these are all things that need to be created when there is a vacuum in an individual. That is the reason there is hope for us. You can build resilience. You can build coping mechanisms. You can heal from things that you've gone through.

What we have been saying is that we have not been given those opportunities. We don't have the mechanisms to do that. We've been asking for them for generations now, and we still don't have them.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

That's my 18 seconds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

You're done.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

I swear it's shorter for me. It always seems that way.

Thanks so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you both. I apologize.

The next question is from Gary Anandasangaree.

[Gary Anandasangaree, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge Park, ON]

Thank you, Jack and Natan, for being here.

Natan, welcome back.

I want to probe a couple of statements you made earlier with respect to the execution of the strategy.

From what I understand, ITK is the lead on the strategy, but in terms of execution, will it be through different agencies or will it be through governments? How do you envision this rolling out once you make the announcement on July 27?

[Natan Obed]

In many ways the communication with all Inuit and with all Canadians about why suicide presents itself the way it does and what we all need to do to prevent suicide is one of the key parts of this initiative. As I said earlier, we don't have that unification yet. I believe that we need to have that unification in order to all push in the right direction to prevent suicide.

Our strategy imagines different concepts. Some will be our advocacy to government. Some will be our network of suicide prevention strategies, from the community level to the regional levels to the national level, that all work together to provide supports for Inuit wherever they may be. Some are going to be specific actions that ITK can take to adopt programs or facilitate the creation of different resources that can apprise Inuit regions or Inuit communities.

In many cases we are in the middle, facilitating change, advocating for change, and working with communities and Inuit regions to ensure those things are possible and that we imagine them in the same way and that we approach them together.

At the centre, we are going to play a lead role in that advocacy work but also in filling in the key gaps in knowledge. The idea that we don't have ethnic identifiers in any of our jurisdictions except for Nunavut, and the idea that in the creation of our own strategy in 2016 we had to hire outside help to work directly with coroners' offices to get Inuit-specific suicide data that just does not exist, because the data that does exist is community-structured data, not Inuit-specific data on the national level.... We need to create those changes to ensure that we have an understanding of how our communities are affected and an understanding of what works, and we need to create an evaluative process over time to ensure that anything we are doing and doing together is having a positive effect. If it is not having a positive effect, then we need to adapt it to ensure that we see a difference in the population over time.

This, of course, isn't a three- to five-year thing; this is a generational push, but we can understand how we're doing along the way.

[Gary Anandasangaree, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge Park, ON]

In terms of the government's involvement through both Health Canada and indigenous affairs, what do you see their roles being in supporting the strategy, keeping in mind that there is a longer-term nation-to-nation relationship that needs to be developed? In the absence of that relationship right now, how do you see them supporting your work?

[Natan Obed]

First and foremost, I would like a change in the way government respects Inuit in how it articulates this issue.

There are questions every day in the media and there are statements made on a very regular basis about suicide prevention and how it will happen for indigenous Canadians. For the Inuit component, we need to work on those together. We need to have shared perspectives on moving forward. It is the only respectful way to address this issue.

Specific interventions and investments are going to be necessary from different federal departments. Also, the time that departments need to take to understand those issues in an Inuit-specific context can't be overlooked either. Many federal departments still function as though all indigenous people live on reserve or as if the obligations or the realities are the same for Inuit as they are for other indigenous Canadians.

We have a long way to go, but I imagine a reality in which we can work together to find investments that make the most sense and that change the reality in the way we all want it to change.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thanks.

We can just squeeze in a final three-minute question from Georgina Jolibois, please.

[Georgina Jolibois, NDP, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

When you speak about the true partnership, the nation-to-nation relationship, from your perspective, and from the youth, the families, the elders, and the leaders, how does that look?

[Natan Obed]

The renewed Inuit-to-crown partnership—that's the term we as Inuit have used—starts with a respect for Inuit land claim agreements and the Inuit governance structures that have been created under land claim agreements.

In our four regions, we have different governance models, but they are all based on these comprehensive land claim agreements with the crown. Our populations are all invested in those agreements. In many ways, the shared future that we imagined when we signed those agreements still has yet to come. As Inuit leadership and the federal government and jurisdictions in which Inuit reside move in this path together, it has to come with that shared sense of partnership.

That can be seen through the Government of Canada working with our leadership to create this change, and not going beyond it in cases where it can, and just having relationships with public governments in jurisdictions in which Inuit reside, or with Inuit organizations or community-based organizations that are not the representatives of Inuit. That is a way in which everyone can feel as though there is this new change.

Within the Inuit democracy, if you will, we have youth organizations and we have women's organizations. We are structured in such a way that our voice can be utilized in a very specific response to specific questions. Seeing all that function is an ongoing challenge for us, because we don't have the historical connections to success. We haven't been recognized in the same way that perhaps other indigenous representation groups have, and our land claim agreements have not been implemented in the way in which many Inuit have felt that they need to be, so we look forward to this shared path moving forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Would you like to make a comment?