How to make tragedies preventable

On June 7, 2011, a young Iqaluit family of four was annihilated.

A woman and two children died by homicide. The fourth, a 44-year-old man who was the apparent perpetrator of the first three killings, died by suicide.

The dead cannot tell us why or how this happened. That’s how death works. It’s final. Many of our most pertinent questions will remain unanswered.

It’s natural to respond to such an enormity with shock and bewildered grief, as so many of us have. But that’s no reason to lapse into the paralysis of despair. There is no excuse for helplessness.

Volunteers in Iqaluit have already organized fundraising drives to help surviving family members, in an encouraging display of generosity and compassion.

But for the long-term, this incident raises numerous public policy issues, many of which have been ignored for too long.

They include:

• The Family Abuse Prevention Act

There’s much that we’ll never know about the four Iqaluit deaths. But interviews with family members and friends suggest this was the kind of tragedy that Nunavut’s Family Abuse Prevention was intended to prevent.

The abuse prevention law, like similar laws in other jurisdictions, provides for the removal of a threatening or abusive person from the family home, even before he or she has been convicted of an offence, through the use of emergency protection orders granted by a judge or JP. Another part of the law provides for “community intervention orders” that require couples to attend counselling.

An evaluation report released earlier this year found that in Iqaluit, the family abuse prevention law actually produced “good work.” But we now know that for one Iqaluit family, the provisions of this law did not reach them. Why?

We’re not raising this to suggest that anyone in government could have predicted or prevented Iqaluit’s June 7 tragedy or that anyone in government is to blame.

However, this incident does raise questions about whether those who the family abuse law is set up to protect actually know how to gain access to its protections. Those responsible for implementing the act should consider that question.

• Addictions treatment

The connections between intoxication and violence are obvious. So are the connections between intoxication and child abuse, depression and other sources of social distress.

So it’s astonishing that in the year 2011, Nunavut possesses no residential addictions treatment centre.

But a service did exist in Nunavut once: the Inusiqsiuqvik centre, which operated between 1991 and 1998 in Apex. It failed because few clients were willing to attend voluntarily and because no one in government or anywhere else was willing to promote, encourage or compel such attendance.

The lesson? Those who suffer from substance abuse rarely volunteer themselves as treatment centre clients. If the new treatment centres proposed for Cambridge Bay and Iqaluit are to work, health workers, employers, and the courts must use interventionist tactics to get people into them.

• Child protection

We know, or ought to know, that abused and neglected children often grow up into troubled adults, plagued frequently by depression, substance abuse and criminal proclivities.

We’re now learning, as Nunavut’s homicide rate continues to climb, that such children can also grow up to be killers. As the failures of past generations now visit themselves upon us, so will our current failures haunt those who succeed us in the future.

A recent report by the Auditor General of Canada on child and family services in Nunavut, along with evidence that’s seeped out of various family and criminal court cases, reveals that the GN is not protecting vulnerable children to nearly the extent that it should. It ought to be obvious now that the GN take action on this long-neglected issue.

• Mental health services

The Nunavut suicide prevention strategy released this past October — not to be confused with the action plan that the Government of Nunavut has yet to make public — contains eight “commitments.”

The second of these commits the GN to “strengthen the continuum of mental health services, especially in relation to accessibility and cultural appropriateness of care.”

In plain language, this means too many distressed people in Nunavut can’t get good help when they need it and that the government must do more to give it to them.

Sadly, the action plan, which would give provide bureaucrats with the marching orders they need to make the suicide prevention strategy work, appears to be mired in bureaucratic sloth, petty infighting and typical GN immobility.

Enough. It’s now time for the GN to treat this matter with the greatest urgency. JB