Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our guests for being here today. It's a great privilege to be able to listen to your testimony.
I guess my questioning can be broken into three areas. I'll ask all three of my questions, and then I'll let you all answer.
The first question is about technology. What effect do you think our interconnected world has on it? In every one of the communities that I go to visit, I notice that everyone seems to have a smart phone; everybody seems to be on Facebook. I know that's how I keep in contact with a number of the communities, through Facebook. I wonder if my estimation is correct. Does it play any part in this current crisis that we face in some communities, with perhaps online bullying, but perhaps also it provides a tool? I know that Facebook has an algorithm and they'll send you a message saying, “Hey, your recent posts look as though you're having trouble. Are you in fact having trouble? Do we have to find you some help?” There may be a solution there as well.
The other thing I'd like your comments on is I think an Ontario government program, called “I Am a Kind Man”. There's a different term for it, but I can't pronounce it.
Lastly, I wonder if you could name some role models whom we could hold up. I think that's a big thing, that the indigenous communities don't have necessarily a good role model. In some cases, some of these really good role models end up succumbing to suicide as well, and then we can't really hold them up as, “Hey, this is what you want to be,” because it has often ended in tragedy. Could you think about it for a few minutes maybe as well, whether there's a good role model or two that we can showcase to your communities in particular as we go forward from here?
Those are my three questions: the technology/Facebook kind of thing, I Am a Kind Man, and role models.