The Need, The Obstruction, The Failure

"My sister didn't sleep for [a] few days. She told me the dead person was frozen in her arms. My brother and my cousin took turns doing CPR, they could still taste the dead person."
"The front-line workers who've had to witness so many young people [have] inadequate [support after witnessing so many deaths of young people]. They're just living with it now and just hope to move on."
"... It's madness. Parents are going crazy blaming everyone, schools are closed because of it [youth suicides]. The only help we have is the community, but we are not mental health professionals trained to help trauma."
"Music is my therapy. I think we are resilient and we are strong and we can find help in each other. For some people, it's just about going on the land, hunting, fishing, being out on the territory."
"But there is only so much we can do for ourselves. We need resources and we need them now."
Sevin Ilgun, Inuit youth leader, Quaqtaq, Nunavik

Natalie May, 22, was one of the young people from northern Quebec who ended her own life in recent weeks. (Submitted by Natalie May's family)

"We feel the situation requires urgent collective action at the regional level."
"As front-line workers in education, our staff witness daily a broad spectrum of issues related to the well-being of children. ... One of the victims was as young as 11 years old."
Robert Watt, president, Kativik council of school commissioners

Mary Simon, a longtime Inuit rights advocate, said Nunavik is in a state of emergency. (CBC)

"This is a tragic situation that no community should live through."
"I offer my most sincere condolences to the families and to the communities affected by this tragedy."
Sylvia D'Amours, Indigenous Affairs Minister, Quebec

Natalie May loved to be out on the land and was friendly with everyone, according to her Aunt, Mary Simon. May died last week. (Submitted by Natalie May's family )

It is a heart-breaking mystery why some of  Canada's Indigenous communities are suffering a plague of suicides by young people. It seems to start with one young person committing suicide, leading to a contagion of fever suicides as others emulate the first. Their deaths are tragic, stunning their communities, casting a lethal pall of hopelessness over all. When teens are discovered to have attempted suicide the call goes out to local paramedics who rush to the scene in a frantic effort to revive the suicidist.

When it happened in Quaqtaq, Nunavut, youth leader Sevin Ilgun's sister, her brother and her cousin happened to be the on-duty responders that day. In the region of Nunavik this year fifteen people have committed suicide in a network of 14 villages located in geographic isolation along the frozen northern coast of Quebec. The population there may be living in their traditional regions dear to their heritage but the very isolated conditions in which they live ensure that medical expertise in dealing with mental health issues will never be close at hand.

Nigel Adams said he keeps speaking out about how youth in his community are struggling, but it feels like no one is listening. (Nigel Adams)

When it becomes an absolute necessity to seek out the professional mental health services required it takes a plane trip to Kuujjuaq, a regional remote administrative centre; alternatively flying south to Montreal. Many villages are tight little enclaves comprised of extended families; cousins, distant relatives where everyone is acutely aware of the presence of others they are related to by blood. In the past month most recent deaths have occurred in the village of Puvirnituq.

There, leaders call on the federal and provincial governments for their intervention to solve the crisis. Several years ago a similar suicide crisis had occurred with Quebec responding to leaders' calls for action resulting in temporary deployment of mental health workers. Dozens of representatives from the Nunavik Regional Board of Health were called to an emergency meeting in Kuujjuaq last week in hopes they could address the crisis and help to resolve it.

Kativik school board general director Harriet Keleutak was 14 the first time someone she knew killed themselves. (CBC)

As they were meeting, several funerals of young suicide victims were taking place in the town. Isolation, life in crowded housing, lack of incentive, a sparsity of employment, the plagues of addiction and child neglect all add to the toll of misery felt by the children and young adults. As usual the bugbear of residential school history haunting the descendants of those whose grandparents were taken to be educated in centres dedicated to 'assimilating' native children into the majority social stream are cited as an aggravating factor.

Yet even as these horribly unsettling living conditions and deadly consequences occur, the regional population of 12,000 continues to experience population growth, leading to a struggle to keep pace with required funding for those additional required social and infrastructure resources. Again, their very geographic isolation is responsible for lack of direct access to medical help related to waiting lists for access to basic mental health care.

Perhaps the irony is that even in the nation's national capital, complaints are rife about long waiting lists for access to clearly inadequate mental health care for non-aboriginal juveniles whose population has also been plagued with youth suicides, albeit not in the numbers experienced by their Indigenous counterparts.

This overhead photo depicts the community of Akulivik, a peninsula on the Hudson's Bay, home to approximately 507 people. (Photo courtesy Nunavik Tourism)

The federal government recently allocated another half-million in additional funding for crisis intervention measures. And the regional health board partners with the federal Employee Assistance Program meant to offer group and individual therapy to front line workers. An additional one hundred interveners have been trained in the past few years in the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training Program.

Which leads to an entirely other contentious situation which impacts on this crisis as it does many others; recognizing the low employment and employability rate of First Nations people. Canada's Auditor General has been harshly critical of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) as an "incomprehensible failure". As an arm of the federal government it funds Indigenous "agreement holders" to deliver training in occupational skills, employment counselling and wage subsidies to employers.

First Nations are emphatically averse to having 'outsiders' deliver services directly to their constituents, insisting that they be funded to be enabled to provide all needed services through their own auspices. Almost three billion dollars over the past ten years has been spent funding the program, and it remains without fiscal accountability. No reports studying their positive effects on Indigenous employment. In 1996 the Indigenous population stood at 799,000, but doubled to 1.5 million by the 2016 census.

When Graham Flack, the new deputy minister at ESDC was asked why the bureaucracy that he represented remained reliant on outdated data in the provision of services that couldn't be seen to be effective, his response was that on two occasions a significant effort by officials was made to update the formula in use, occurring in 2003 and 2014. Both failed because the Indigenous partners who happen to be the agreement holders, resisted strenuously -- since any change would result in funding cut off to some recipients.

His testimony saw members of a committee struck to find a way to overcome resistance and provide meaningful and accountable service to First Nations in employment, taken aback, in its raw admission of failure. "OK, we're spending $342 million (current year) based on previous commitments and we still don't know how effective it is. Now, we are putting another $100 million into this. Shouldn't we hold on until we see how to really set up something to measure it before spending it?"

"In Nepean (Ottawa) I haven't had any infrastructure funding. We have one railway crossing that is required where an accident occurred and six people died. For us, every single million is very, very important. Here we have spent $2.4 billion, plus about $300 million and we don't know if that has been used effectively and if any good has come out of that. Don't you think that is sort of unacceptable?" asked an incredulous Chandra Arya, Member of Parliament for Nepean.