Thank you to the panel for presenting.
I'm from the Northwest Territories, so I've heard a lot about the issues you're talking about. I have a lot of similarities in my area. The suicide rate in the Northwest Territories is double the national average.
It's the year 2016, and suicide and self-inflicted injuries are among the leading causes of death among our aboriginal people. It is amazing that this is still happening.
As we start to talk about the whole issue of suicide, we know that people who die from suicide or who attempt suicide are people who are usually overwhelmed. They're feeling hopeless and helpless. They're in the pit of despair. Look at aboriginal communities and the high unemployment. A lot of communities I represent have well over 60% unemployment.
Also, we have people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol because of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and we don't have services to deal with that. On a daily basis in my community, I hear air medevacs coming and going. It's really scary to see that happening, because these are communities where I have relatives. These are my people.
I know why we don't have the services. We have people who come in, professionals who want to help, and they realize the health services are not there for their children. We have teachers who come for the short term and leave. The RCMP come and then leave. They're not going to stay in a community where there are no services and the education system is failing them.
The band councils in the communities right across Canada have been cut to the bone. NGOs have been cut to where they can't operate. Who is left to deal with the issues in our communities? The chiefs? All they're given is a title. They don't have a budget to work with, really. There's no pot of money you can dip into to help the communities. We share a lot of the problems.
One of the things that I was getting a little nervous about in your presentation was that were talking about the social side of things, but I think that in order to deal with some of the problems that have plagued the communities—and I heard this during my campaign—we have to face it and move forward with a multipronged approach. Economic development is one of the things that I would really like to see. We have good people in our communities. We have smart people in our communities. We have people who are wanting to work. We are lacking infrastructure, so why don't we try to approach it on that front? I'm really interested in hearing about how you would see the economic side of things helping communities to move forward and bringing pride back into the communities.
There are two ways to approach this. We can continue to subsidize communities and try to put in social programs, or we can build pride in our people by providing them work, developing skills, and creating opportunity for them so that they can build their own houses and can do a lot of things on their own. Right now, that opportunity is missing. I'm really keen to hear from you. You mentioned it a bit and it caught my ear.