Public Safety committee  Yes, absolutely. At the heart of some of these challenges with the inclusion of Inuktitut, our language, in the services being provided is that Inuktitut is not an official language of Inuit Nunangat or of Canada. In our homeland, over 75% of Inuits' mother tongue is Inuktitut.

Public Safety committee  For Inuit to access the full benefits of this particular piece of legislation, communications in Inuktitut are essential to achieving that end goal.

Public Safety committee  One of the long-standing challenges with policing in Inuit Nunangat is that we largely have people who are not from Inuit Nunangat who are given a small amount of training and then put in communities where they really don't have a lot of cultural competency. It also has an element of indigenous and non-indigenous interaction.

Public Safety committee  First, in relation to our work plan with the RCMP, the number one item is in relation to accessing data for suicide and suicide attempts and self-harm. In trying to implement our national Inuit suicide prevention strategy, to date we have not had a comprehensive picture of deaths by suicide that is disaggregated, Inuit-specific data.

Public Safety committee  I don't have that information in front of me. I can task Chris with going to talk to our counterparts at the RCMP and try to give a comprehensive point-in-time answer to this committee.

Public Safety committee  Our starting point is that there would be provisions that would systematically allow for Inuit-specific participation within processes that would create the best possible outcomes for the commission, not necessarily that there would be a need for distinctions-based Inuit, first nations and Métis representatives on the commission itself.

Public Safety committee  We run into this challenge of ambition versus the practical ability to implement across a whole host of different issues with the federal government. With this piece of legislation, as a group that would potentially benefit from it, we aren't necessarily 100% sure how the funds will be found to use this, but we certainly would have the expectation that our community would be serviced alongside all the other interests.

Public Safety committee  We still have a vacuum in data, so we don't necessarily understand the complete picture of complaints in Inuit communities across Inuit Nunangat. We do in Nunavut, because it is a jurisdiction, and there are just Inuit communities in Nunavut. For the Northwest Territories and for Newfoundland and Labrador, we would have no way of understanding how many of those complaints come from Inuit communities in any given year.

Public Safety committee  They're essential. We have such small populations that it's so important to understand in an aggregated but Inuit-specific way what issues are Inuit-specific and what issues are from other parts of the population. We really don't have a good sense of how to approach some of these and how to advocate for particular changes in legislation or particular interventions in our communities—for socio-economic issues, for mental health issues, for policing—if we have just a basic understanding or no understanding of...and can't interpret the data that is already being collected.

Public Safety committee  First and foremost, you think about a citizen, a person in the community, and when they see an RCMP officer they don't know the status of that particular person. Therefore, I don't think it would behoove anyone to feel as though they are not protected. How are they going to maintain trust throughout the process if something could be thrown out because—by an asterisk or some technical issue or something they had no idea about—they can't bring a complaint forward?

Public Safety committee  If you look at data from Nunavut—again, the only jurisdiction in which we can clearly state that there are Inuit complaints—there are roughly 30 per year, and they are in roughly half of our communities, 25 of 51. We don't have any more detailed information. Like the Grand Chief has echoed for his community, we and Inuit representational organizations channel any concerns that come to us back to these processes and hope that these processes will ensure that those complaints are meaningfully addressed.

Science and Research committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's great to be here with all of you. I'll start with Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which means “Inuit United in Canada”. Kanatami means “in Canada”. Hopefully, that helps you with remembering. I've thought of many ways to spend my five minutes here with you all this afternoon.