Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Winnipeg for her very sensitive remarks regarding this compelling social crisis that we have, and I do not use the word “crisis” lightly because perhaps it is our greatest failure. The statistics that she outlined and that others have spoken to serve as our greatest social failure because there could be no more revealing or telling social indicator than the depth of despair it must take for a young person to take his or her own life. In many of these cases, mental illness is not the driving issue, especially in the first nation and Inuit communities where the prevalence is so high.
Next to the overrepresentation of first nations people in our prisons, the overrepresentation of aboriginal Métis and Inuit people in these suicide statistics should stop people dead in their tracks. Why do we tolerate numbers like this? There seems to be a wilful blindness, or maybe people put it on the too-hard-to-do pile because the statistics are so appalling and the problem is so complex that there has been an unwillingness for politicians to go there.
I would ask her to expand further on the points she made regarding these alarming statistics, just for the enlightenment of the viewing public who might be tuning in today.