Nearly 40 years after losing his older brother to suicide, Nunavut’s health minister will lead the territory’s suicide prevention efforts. Health Minister Paul Okalik will chair a cabinet committee on quality of life. The move is in response to recommendations of an inquest into the high rate of suicide in Nunavut. Nearly 500 people have completed suicide since the territory was created.
Premier Peter Taptuna and ministers of housing, education and family services will also sit on the committee. With the help of a new associate deputy minister, the committee will manage “new monies and a costing process to identify the needed funds” for new staff, training programs and other supports to implement the recommendations of the inquest and Nunavut’s existing suicide prevention strategy and action plan.
The premier did not, however, announce a specific amount for the strategy or programs to reduce the suicide rate in Nunavut, which is 9.8 times the national average. Instead, he indicated the money will come from existing budgets.
The coroner’s jury recommended that Taptuna declare suicide a public health emergency — something the premier did not do, although that designation could help trigger federal help. Among the jury’s other recommendations was giving a specific individual the responsibility for the suicide prevention file, with dedicated resources and a secretariat to implement the suicide prevention strategy.
Taptuna’s announcement appeared to adopt the broad intent of many of the jury’s recommendations. He committed to cross-governmental programs to reduce the risk factors that precipitate suicide, and to broadening the delivery of the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) program, which expert witnesses at the inquiry recommended as one of a suite of initiatives the territory should continue.
Taptuna also acknowledged that it is possible to prevent suicide, one of the first times a senior Inuit leader has done so. One of the critical factors in Quebec’s ability to reduce its suicide rates, expert witness Brian Mishara testified at the inquest, was a change in societal attitudes that had previously accepted suicide as a normal and inevitable aspect of Quebec society.
Mishara, director of the Centre for Research and Intervention on Suicide and Euthanasia at the Université du Quebec à Montréal, urged Nunavut’s leadership to issue strong statements rejecting suicide as an acceptable way to deal with pain. Taptuna and Okalik’s statements suggest they took Mishara’s recommendation to heart.
“There is no single reason why someone may try to end their life, but in large part, this is preventable,” Taptuna told the legislature.
For his part, Okalik promised that he and “many of his colleagues” would take an ASIST workshop in November, a recommendation another expert witness made at the inquest. “As members of this legislative assembly, we are each committed to doing our part in prevention and reducing the stigma,” said Okalik.