Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to speak to today's debate. It is very important that the House urge the government to work cooperatively with the provinces, territories, representative organizations from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people, and other stakeholders to establish and fund a national suicide prevention strategy, which among other measures would promote a comprehensive and evidence-driven approach to prevent this terrible cause of death.
Last Wednesday, when our leader suggested this topic, put in motion a week of reflection, a week of memories and regrets tumbling back into every one of us who was worried about what we would say today. I said to the leader this morning that there are certain stories that cannot be told because there is no way to get through them.
The impotence that one feels as a friend, as a family physician is immeasurable. The line of “What could I have done? Did I do all I could?” just kept coming back and reverberating into what we know is largely a preventable occurrence, and “What can we do as a society, a family, as communities to make this preventable tragedy as small as possible?”
I remember having to go to the morgue and open a drawer, and recognize a patient of mine who had jumped off her balcony, previously homeless, when her birth mother came to find her and she felt not worthy.
I remember a CEO of an arts organization who was on her way to the AGM to explain that there was no money and they might have to shut down. She jumped in front of the subway on the way there.
I remember one of my best friends, a prominent lawyer at Blake, Cassels, who I spent the whole summer trying to talk to and keep alive. A prominent lawyer, great job, great relationship, but those sirens that she described were calling her, to see over the other side, and she eventually could not hold back. She hung herself in her basement.
It is often in reaction to depression, to losing a job or losing a relationship or, as we sometimes see, somebody in trouble with the law who is afraid that people will find out. However, it is based on that horrible diagnosis of depression. It is this hopeless, copeless, worthlessness that is really almost 100% of the time quite separate from the facts. To not be able to get over those feelings, and for us as relatives and friends to not be able to unpack it and not be able to deal with the actual changes in the brain, make it impossible for some to get beyond that.
We have seen PTSD in soldiers and we have seen it in our veterans. At health committee we heard from the widow of the RCMP officer who had been told that his depression was over, given back his handgun, and who killed himself that afternoon.
This is no easy task. As the member for Cape Breton—Canso mentioned, it is even in our most revered hockey players. I have a Jordin Tootoo jersey in my office, when he was with the Brandon Wheat Kings. I remember how excited we were that he would be the first Inuit player to play in the NHL.
His brother, Terence, had played pro hockey, and shortly after Jordin was drafted his brother took his own life because he had been arrested for drinking and driving. Even in his final suicide note, it said, “Jor. Go all the way. Take care of the family. You are the man. Ter.” Even in that final note, there was hope, in a certain way, that we could not get at and we were not able to do what needed to be done.
Our leader wrote an article in La Presse:
Today, 10 Canadians will take their own lives, a per capita rate three times that of the United States’, largely due to the staggering number of suicides among aboriginal Canadians.
I keep thinking about a presentation I did that was entitled “What Could I Have Done”. The first slide was a quote from a youth from the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples. He said that he was strung between two cultures and psychologically at home in neither.
It is amazing that the statistics on suicide for our aboriginal people are so high. The statistics on suicide for our Inuit people show that they are 11 times greater than the rest of Canada at risk.
I remember Bill Mussell from the Native Mental Health Association explaining to me the importance of a secure personal cultural identity and how that builds self-esteem and resilience to handle things when bad things happen to good people. For some people, when bad things happen it just takes them down. As Bill Mussell said in his article in CAMH, “There has been some fine work by the RCAP and the senate committee”, but he also said:
According to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, good health is the outcome of living actively, productively and safely, with reasonable control over the forces affecting everyday life, with the means to nourish body and soul, in harmony with one’s neighbours and oneself, and with hope for the future of one’s children and one’s land--
Colonization brought changes that attacked, undermined and devalued the aboriginal world view, while at the same time drastically altering the conditions of life...Colonization brought negative, extreme and rapid changes to aboriginal life, while denying the validity of the tools traditionally used by First Nations to cope with change.
We have evidence to show what works and what does not. We are calling in the House for a strategy to have the audacity to fund what works and not fund those things that just make us feel better but do nothing to change the outcome.
Michael Chandler's unbelievable work at the University of British Columbia shows that the presence of self government in land claims, community-based education systems, health services, police and fire services, cultural facilities, getting back to ceremonies, women in government and child protection services have an impact on suicide rates. Community by community, those that have been able to get all of those things done have watched their youth suicide rate drop to virtually zero. His paper in Horizons concludes:
Taken altogether, this extended program of research strongly supports two major conclusions. First, generic claims about youth suicide rates for the whole of any Aboriginal world are, at best actuarial fictions that obscure critical community-by-community differences in the frequency of such deaths. Second, individual and cultural continuity are strongly linked, such that First Nations communities that succeed in taking steps to preserve their heritage culture, and that work to control their own destinies, are dramatically more successful in insulating their youth against the risks of suicide.
We want a real strategy and that means, what, when and how. We want it based in evidence and we want it funded properly. This means that there has to be an ability to use the research and knowledge, and translate that into effective policies, political will, effective programs and practices. It means ongoing applied research that takes us back to better research that can really identify best practices. We then have to have the nerve to put it in place.
In the health goals for Canada that all the health ministers approved in the fall of 2005, belonging and engagement was a very important one, but the government has yet to develop the indicators and targets.
Each and every person should have dignity, a sense of belonging and contribute to supportive families, friendships and diverse communities. We need to continue to learn throughout our lives through formal and informal education, relationships with others and the land. We must participate in and influence the decisions that affect our personal and collective health and well-being. As Nellie Cournoyea said in 1975 in Speaking Together: “Paternalism has been a total failure”.
We must work with our aboriginal communities, first nations, Inuit and Métis together to develop a real plan that will really address this national tragedy.