Nunavik will fix storage sheds to combat suicide

AUPALUK — Can plywood or padlocks really bring down the number of suicides in Nunavik?

No one is really sure, but the Kativik Regional Government’s council wants to make the region’s 2,000 or so sheds less accessible to Nunavimmiut who use them as places to take their lives.

More than 75 per cent of Nunavik’s suicides take place in these modest little storage units, which stand behind all social housing units in the region.

Making them safer and more secure is seen as one way to prevent suicides.

That’s why the KRG has proposed covering up the sheds’ open rafters with plywood or putting padlocks on the doors.

The sheds are owned by the Quebec’s housing bureau, la Société d’Habitation du Québec, and managed by the Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau. They’re widely used by tenants of its social housing units, which still compromise the vast majority of Nunavik’s dwellings.

At its meeting last fall, the KRG regional council asked the regional housing bureau to lobby Quebec to pay for structural repairs on these sheds as a way of preventing suicides.

When the council met again last week in Aupaluk, the KMHB offered to pick up the tab for plywood to cover up open rafters. This would be made available on a trial basis to social housing tenants in two Nunavik communities.

“The KMHB’s contribution to suicide prevention would be to supply plywood sheets to the tenants of social housing who wish to cover the rafters in the shacks supplied to them. The community’s contribution would then be to organize the labour that will install plywood in the shacks,” proposed housing bureau director Watson Fournier to the council.

Tenants may also choose to lock up their sheds instead, and have padlocks supplied rather than plywood.

The KRG council decided to offer plywood to social housing tenants in Puvirnituq and Kuujjuaraapik. It also moved that other social housing tenants in Nunavik should be supplied with padlocks.

All new shacks built in Nunavik for social housing units will have a revised design featuring closed ceilings.