Witness says Nunavut government deleted budget from its suicide plan

This chart shows that the Qikiqtani region suffers the highest rates of suicide in Nunavut, by a wide margin. Statistician Jack Hicks said he believes that may be because the people of the Qikiqtani suffered more trauma than others during the transitional years of the 1950s and 1960s and now suffers from a greater degree of inter-generational trauma.

A recent evaluation of Nunavut’s suicide prevention action plan shows the Government of Nunavut’s “uneven participation” in the group that created it and properly questions the GN’s leadership in implementing it.

That’s according to Jack Hicks, a suicide statistician who testified Sept. 16 at the coroner’s inquest into Nunavut’s high suicide rates at the Nunavut Court of Justice in Iqaluit.

An evaluation of the plan was submitted as evidence on Sept. 15, the second day of the inquest.

“The problem is not the strategy, the problem is the implementation of that strategy,” Hicks told the inquest’s six-person jury.

The GN needs to adequately fund its part of the action plan, said Hicks, who was involved in coming up with both the strategy and its attached action plan.

“It’s hard to imagine suicide prevention is a priority [for the GN], not in terms of what it says, but in terms of how it’s acting.”

Hicks’ testimony came on the third day of the discretionary coroner’s inquest.

At the end of the two-week inquest, a jury will be asked for recommendations on how to curb Nunavut’s sky-high suicide rates.

On Sept. 14, a representative from Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., Natan Obed, said the GN is “at least partly to blame” for the failed suicide prevention plan.

“The GN needs to decide if it wants be part of the partnership,” Obed said.

That partnership, between the GN, NTI, the Embrace Life Council and the Nunavut RCMP, released a suicide prevention strategy in 2010, and an action plan for the strategy in 2011.

But a backroom decision made between senior officials in the GN and NTI removed a crucial element of that action plan, Hicks said Sept. 16.

The draft action plan included a column titled “resources required,” Hicks testified, attaching dollar amounts to each action plan item.

The plan “disappeared inside the GN,” for a while and when it was released to the public, the “resources required” column had been removed without consultation with the working partnership, Hicks said.

“That meant we had an implementation plan without a budget,” he said.

An email obtained through an access to information request, and shared with Nunatsiaq News, shows the decision to remove the budget was made by Peter Ma, then the deputy minister of health, and the executive director of NTI in 2011, Terry Audla.

The burden of implementing the plan falls heavily on the GN’s shoulders, Hicks admitted—something all members of the partnership recognized throughout the process.

But Hicks, who has spent about 15 years studying suicides, especially in the circumpolar world, said he is unaware of any successful suicide prevention plan where public authorities responsible for health care, social services and education haven’t stepped up to the plate.

The first portion of Hicks’ testimony focused on his work collecting Nunavut-specific suicide statistics for NTI, which the Inuit organization released online Sept. 16.

One major weakness of Nunavut’s efforts to curb suicide rates is that no data exists on attempted suicides in the territory, Hicks said.

The GN has twice publicly committed to collecting that data, but has so far failed to do so, he said.

That data would help researchers and policy-makers better understand what leads people to form suicidal thoughts, Hicks said.

The statistics Hicks compiled in his study paint a picture that many in Nunavut are all too familiar with.

The average rate of suicide among Inuit in Nunavut is just under 10 times the national average, Hicks testified.

The frequency of deaths in Nunavut by suicide first spiked in the late 1970s and early 80s, then again in the late 90s and early 2000s, Hicks said.

“Basically, very few populations in the world have ever experienced anything like that increase.”

But very few modern societies have experienced the intergenerational historical trauma that Inuit society has experienced in recent decades, the researcher said.

And it’s that trauma that Hicks believes is at the root of Nunavut’s suicide problem.

Suicide rates across Nunavut vary by region, for example, with the highest rates recorded in the Qikiqtani region.

“The core of my hypothesis is that the process by which Inuit in the Qikiqtani region were coerced into communities for various reasons was more traumatic to the families than was the case by and large on the mainland.”

This theory challenges a misconception some have about Nunavut’s high suicide rates, Hicks added, namely that the problem is specific to Inuit.

Instead, any population in the world who’ve experienced that kind of trauma would have a similarly high rate of suicide, Hicks said.

Witnesses from the Nunavut health department are expected to testify Sept. 17, with witnesses from other departments and Inuit organizations slated to appear before Sept. 24, when the jury will begin deliberations on their recommendations.

Nunavut Historical Suicide Data by NunatsiaqNews

This chart shows that Nunavut Inuit suicide death rates began to rise above the national average in the 1970s.