Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I can speak to that briefly, Michael. I don't know if Michael summarized this. One of the factors we found was the participation of women in local governance; that is, when women formed a simple majority of the band council, suicide rates were lower in those communities than where women were absent or a minority.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you for taking the time to hear from us, and I apologize to the translators for how fast I talk.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, there isn't one single solution. I think that if you look at the kinds of solutions that we've found—or that the communities have found—that work, things like supporting elder-youth interaction, the form that takes in any community can be wildly different. The important factor is promoting that.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We looked at a number of economic issues, at least here in British Columba. We looked at average income in the community, percentage of income that comes from government transfers, levels of education, and labour participation, and there was no clear relationship between those variables and rates of suicide.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think the take-home message from our work is that when communities get control over their own lives, better things happen than when they don't. I think communities should be answering that question rather than us answering it. For some, the really imperatively important thing was to get their culture into the curriculum in their schools, so that if their young people could grow up knowing who they are, being taught in their schools, and supported in their communities, that would sustain them across whatever other adversities they might face.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think the short-term answer regarding crisis is to provide immediate on-the-ground support. What form that takes depends on what the crisis is and what the community needs. The longer-term problem is that we imagine that, if we just bring in some support workers for a week to talk to the youth, and then they go away, we haven't really done anything at all.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We didn't look specifically at friendship centres. At least in British Columbia, friendship centres tend to be located in cities rather than within communities, but I have no doubt that having a friendship centre in a community is what we would call a protective factor. Michael, I don't know if you talked about our work in Manitoba at all.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We did look at a measure of crowding and we found a slight increase in suicide rates as the number of persons per room in the house went up, but I think that's potentially misleading, because in some ways it's not the number of people in the house that matters; it's the quality of the housing and whether or not the people want to be there.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think that question would be better asked of the First Nations Health Authority because they have the data. I don't think we have any way of answering that question except to say that what really has changed is the level of engagement of communities in health planning and processes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We did look at some geographical analyses. The first thought was perhaps being an especially remote community is either a good thing or a bad thing in terms of youth development. When we looked at the data, we didn't see a clear relationship like that. The closest thing we saw was that it seemed that communities that were near urban centres, but not large urban centres, were at slightly higher risk or had slightly higher rates of suicide than either remote communities or urban communities.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I want to go back to your earlier question about looking at change over time. That, I think, is what Michael and I are very, very anxious to do, but again, it requires access to data that at the moment we don't have. With regard to not targeting suicide prevention necessarily, I was at a meeting in Ottawa on Thursday on men's suicide, with a partial focus on indigenous men's suicide.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think I'll just go to questions. I think that's more important than me probably repeating some things that Michael said.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It is there; it's kept. It's complicated for indigenous people because the federal government keeps status Indian records and the provincial government makes actual payments. So it's very difficult to actually access the data even if people are willing to share it. It's been made a little more complicated in British Columbia because we have the tripartite agreement, and the First Nations Health Council now controls what's called the client file.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you. Thank you for having me. I too want to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you from the territories of the Coast and Straits Salish peoples. Thanks for the opportunity to speak. I'm at a disadvantage here because I didn't get to hear what Michael said or the questions that were asked of him.

Health committee  This goes back to the earlier concerns about privacy. As researchers, we don't want identifying data. We don't want people's names. And all we really wanted here was the rate of suicide in this particular community versus that particular community. Now, there's been a huge movement, which I am strongly supportive of, for communities to have ownership, control, access, and possession of their data.