Thank you very much for coming here. I have enormous respect for your work, and I want to thank you for your work with EMAT. I don't know if we met at the emergency ward, but I went there a couple of times to see the work.
I want to talk about suicide contagion and clusters, because when we had the Attawapiskat state of emergency and we had to fly in an emergency team, across Canada that same month, there were states of emergency declared in Neskantaga and Cross Lake, and three in Saskatchewan. Imagine three non-native communities declaring a state of emergency because their kids were killing themselves. The government would turn itself upside-down, but we get an emergency response.
No offence to the great work that was done, but this crisis didn't just happen. None of these crises happened accidentally. They are clusters.
I just want to walk you through this. In 2008-09, we lost 13 kids in James Bay in a winter, and they were laying off the front-line staff. The government was going to come in with a program to get kids to play, but they were cutting off the front-line workers. In 2012, they cut them off. When Sheridan Hookimaw died, we couldn't get her home for four or five months. The contagion started then. They were surprised that all of these children were starting to self-harm? I find that shocking.
I want to ask you this. If we know that suicide is a contagion, and if we know that we have to move in, and if we know that we have to have those supports, then why now when a 10-year-old girl has killed herself in Saskatchewan are we still scratching our heads at the federal level and saying, “Oh, my God, what are we going to do? Maybe if we got a program. Maybe if we got them to fill out a form to get some of kind of youth thing happening, they'd be better off”?
It's a band-aid after a band-aid.
I would like to hear what you, given your experience on the ground at Attawapiskat, see as a long-term solution so we don't have to fly in emergency teams anymore.