In the development of the national Inuit suicide prevention strategy, we have worked with Health Canada, and hopefully on day one, on July 27, there will be commitments from the Government of Canada to work with Inuit on the first steps toward suicide prevention. Across the government there are responsibilities. This is not just a health issue. This is an issue that has many different aspects.
I also want to respond to the discussion about self-determination.
Our objective is self-determination. The link between our rate of suicide and relative self-determination or self-determination within a governance model is something that I would say does not have an evidence base within the Inuit reality. Perhaps in other jurisdictions there is a clear correlation between self-government or self-determination and the suicide rate, but for Inuit....Greenland has been self-determining for some time. Its rate is elevated and is similar to the Canadian rate.
I believe that self-determination demands self-government and free, prior, and informed consent and a number of different concepts that this government is struggling with in trying to understand what it actually means for the relationship. We should go full steam ahead on all of those discussions. However, to tie self-determination directly to suicide prevention, I believe, is a stretch. Perhaps with greater research and greater understanding of this issue, there will be more concrete ties, but there are many holes in what we know about evidence on this, which is why we have tried, in the development of our strategy, to have a foundation of evidence rather than a broad grasping of different things that may sound plausible.