I’m assuming that it would be a matter of the prevention and promotion services. In here it’s indicated that programs assist with emotional and social problems such as suicide, homelessness, and dealing with residential school issues. The majority of those, homelessness and residential school issues, are of course something that I recognize the department has to pay some
attention to. I know that it is difficult to address the homelessness issue because it’s difficult to find absolute homeless people in the small communities because relatives take them in and they end up becoming relative homeless people, which is an actual term. So there are people that don’t have their own home but kind of drift from home to home. It’s a difficult area to work in.
Suicide prevention, on the other hand, I think is something more emphasis has to be put into. I think it actually virtually devastates a family. Even it happened a handful of times in Tu Nedhe since I’ve been elected as MLA and I’ve seen the devastating impacts on the families. It’s an area that’s difficult to work in and a lot of people just don’t know how to deal with that area. The department has resources to maybe explore some options, explore some services outside of what’s available now and put some extra resources into this area in order to assist the families.
I don’t remember the program CBC runs on Friday afternoons. Edts’ula or something like that. Actually, they had a program on people that were affected by suicide. This particular individual spoke on there that had two incidents in the family and said that had they actually received some support in between, they may have saved the life of the second individual in their family that committed suicide. I guess one life is worth more than anything else that we hope to save in a budget. To that family, it’s not an issue of cost.
I guess, again, I’d like to know if there is no increase, then the department may feel that there is a sufficient amount of money and resources, human and otherwise, human and financial to address this area. I’d like to know if that’s the case, if the department feels that they have sufficient resources.