Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Oct. 5th, 2016

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you to both of the witnesses.

I want to note that Dr. McCormick is from Thompson Rivers University, which we're both very proud of in the riding of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.

I guess a whole number of things have piqued my interest. To some degree, in response to a crisis that's been very profound lately—I would say it's been a crisis forever—Health Canada created SWAT teams to go in, and what I'm hearing is that probably it won't be all that effective.

How is that going to help in terms of the response, from your knowledge and the research that you've done, versus what some other short-term crisis responses might be?

[Dr. Rod McCormick]

I would say you're right. Initially, to contain things is a good idea, but that SWAT team, or whatever, mental crisis team, is going to leave eventually, and that's not going to solve any problems. If there's a suicide, if there's fear of contagion and so on, it might contain that, but it's not a long-term solution.

I know the government has invested heavily just recently in the mental wellness teams, which hold more potential, if there are enough of them. But the idea there is you have a sustainable, community-based team that can provide this ongoing support. The difficulty is we have 600-and-some first nations alone, and then there are the Métis communities and Inuit communities, so one team is never going to have the local knowledge. At best, I think there were about a dozen that were based on already existing sorts of community projects that were pretty successful, based on the evaluation I read. But again, they struggled with human resources, with how to maintain those workers, some of whom didn't have much training; and once they had it they went off and found better jobs, full-time jobs. For others, burnout occurred.

Logistically, I just can't see bringing in outside people. No matter how many teams you have they're never going to have local knowledge because, at best, they're going to be representing 10 different communities, or trying to provide services to 10 or 20, whatever the math is. I just can't see how it's going to work. The needs from community to community vary so much.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I know there has been probably a lot of time and energy over a lot of years. From your research, are we having any impact on rates? For all the different programs and supports, have we done anything that's helping?

[Dr. Rod McCormick]

As far as—

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

In terms of rates....

[Dr. Michael DeGagné]

I don't know that we've had a tremendous impact. We're still talking about it significantly. If we look at the royal commission 20 years ago, we will see that we were talking then about the urgent need to train 10,000 new community-based health workers. We haven't achieved that yet.

It was an urgent need two decades ago, and the rates may have fallen in some parts of the country, but we still have a desperate need for locally trained people with local knowledge that will sustain a presence in communities.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

You both represent or are related to universities. Certainly I know there's a large indigenous population at Thompson Rivers, and I would presume at Nipissing, and we also know that we have young people who are perhaps fragile and vulnerable. Do your universities have specific program support services that are proactively looking at this issue? Are they being effective?

[Dr. Michael DeGagné]

Universities are very good now at making sure that there are all sorts of programs and services available for incoming aboriginal students. This is something that we've developed over probably the last 10 or 15 years. We've got bridging programs and mental health supports. We have opportunities for students to arrive early and be acclimatized to the university, and then a lot of follow-up, full-time aboriginal support people usually housed in some sort of indigenous student centre.

So we do a good job at it now, but we have the advantage of knowing that there will be more students next year and we can sustain our presence year after year.

[Dr. Rod McCormick]

I think the best intervention has been peer support programs. I developed, I think, one of the first ones 20 years ago for indigenous post-secondary, and then UNBC took it on. They've been training people, and I think they even have an annual conference now. It's indigenous peer support that's university based.

For me, that was my outreach. That got me my business. If I was working as a university counsellor, my business came from the peer support students because they were trained to identify, not to provide therapy, but how to refer and who to refer to. People who would never come and see me would end up on my doorstep with the peer support person who brought them there to see me.

It was tremendous outreach, because students tend to talk to other students first. That same model could be used, and I've used it, actually, in a high school in Whitehorse. There were no completed suicides the three years that I ran that because it was specifically to address suicide prevention. I think that's a really underutilized resource, but the universities are picking it up.

[Dr. Michael DeGagné]

Yes, quite aggressively.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thanks, Cathy.

The next question is from Charlie Angus, please.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you so much for this and your presence.

I want to say that every time I see on Facebook one of the students from Treaty No. 9 announcing they're going to university, that's a huge victory. That's the future. Certainly many are going to Nipissing. I want to thank you for that work.

Mr. McCormick, I'm sure it's the same in your area.

I'm interested in the issues of sustained funding. We had an example in the Attawapiskat housing crisis when the media came up for the first time to see the situation. They were shocked and outraged to find there was this beautiful healing centre. What were those people in Attawapiskat doing with that beautiful healing centre? There was lots of money to build a healing centre, and there was no money to run it, no money to staff it, no money to heat it. Both the feds and the province came, cut the ribbon, then left town, and we had a beautiful healing centre that sat there empty.

It's the March madness, where we go into schools that don't have math books and they'll suddenly have state-of-the-art gear and it's like, “How did you get that?” Indian Affairs called and said, “We have to spend the money within three weeks, buy something”.

My real deep concern out of this study is that Health Canada will announce, in response, that they're going to start a new program, and it'll be a carry on of this hamster wheel of programs.

How do we get to taking this money out of INAC and out of Health Canada and say, “ITK has a plan for suicide prevention, let ITK run it”, or “NAN territory has done the work, let them do it”, so we can start to do modelling that actually responds to the needs of communities as opposed to ticking the boxes for the bureaucracies here?

[Dr. Michael DeGagné]

One of the issues of creating the sustainable funding profiles is the idea of finding aboriginal organizations that will take this on, or creating those organizations.

The aboriginal community has little in the way of civil society. Most of the services we access are accessed through some sort of political body. If you go to a typical first nations community, you will find—and you know this, I'm sure, from other presentations—that most of the employment will be from the band itself. It's not unusual to have as many as one in 10 people run for public office whenever there's an election. You have everything, including businesses, journalists, and programs, all embedded within the band government.

It's one way to manage things, but there's nowhere that's non-political for aboriginal people to turn to for services and supports just like the rest of Canadians. We can go down to the Cancer Society if our parent has cancer, and then we can access information. We know it's not a government service. It's there for the support of cancer and cancer survivors.

What we need to do is regenerate what was decimated around the same time as the Aboriginal Healing Foundation closed. Most of the national aboriginal organizations that were non-political, such as the National Aboriginal Health Organization, the First Nations Statistical Institute, and all of these types of organizations were managed by and governed by aboriginal people, but they were for direct service provision to aboriginal communities, and they were apolitical. They were all done away with at the same time and often within a few months. It represents a strata of aboriginal society that was gone virtually overnight.

If we were to re-establish some type of program where aboriginal people can govern their own services, and which did not have to have the blessing of political bodies...certainly there would be liaison, but not everything in the world is run through our MPs, and not every health service is run through our MPPs.

Can you imagine a system where I had to go to my MPP in order to make sure I got adequate health service? It makes very little sense, but that is the world that is faced by most aboriginal citizens.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. McCormick, I want to talk to you about the historic transmission of trauma and what you have seen.

As I have seen in our communities with St. Anne's Residential School, Edmund Metatawabin says there's a direct road from that trauma to the children killing themselves today. You can see the physical trauma in the faces of survivors. You start to identify where the heavy trauma was just from the physicalities, and that's intergenerational.

The steps of trying to get people out on the land and the steps of trying to break that cycle have been really difficult, but it's deeply embedded now as intergenerational.

From your experience, how do we start to find the alternatives and the healing paths that are community driven and not outside driven?

[Dr. Rod McCormick]

I think there have to be the resources there. If you're going on a healing journey, then you have to gather your medicines. Whatever those resources are, whether they're traditional or a mixture of some western psychology and some traditional healers, there has to be a safe place for it, as well.

You can't have people coming in and offering these weekend workshops to rescue your inner child, and let's all talk about our abuse, and then leave. That's often because there's so little money within communities. With $20,000 for mental health, what are we going to do with that? We can't hire a counsellor, so let's get one of these people with their road shows to come in and open us all up.

I would say that what you see that's transmitted intergenerationally are ways of coping that don't work very well. One of them is disassociating. Your mom went to residential school for 15 years, and she didn't learn to identify and express emotions in a good way. Well, your kids aren't going to either. You need to be able to break that, but you also need to do it in a safe place. There have to be enough resources for it, as well as the safety that it's not going to be discontinued when the government feels like discontinuing it. Ownership of it is needed.

I can't stress the safety enough. I think that's one of the things the Healing Foundation has tried to ensure: that the safety was there.

There are so many things I can say to answer your question, but I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

I'm afraid we're out of time there, Charlie. Thank you for the question and response.

My apologies for the limitations of the time. We have time for one more question with this panel, and it's from Don Rusnak.

[Don Rusnak, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I worked for a time in northern Manitoba, and we dealt with the Aboriginal Healing Foundation through many of the community programs that existed at that time. The work of the foundation and the organizations that were dealing with the foundation was amazing. I am curious to know if you have numbers from communities in terms of the successes in what they were doing. Would that information exist, or has it all disappeared with the foundation going by the wayside?

[Dr. Michael DeGagné]

We transferred our resources to Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, so we have a number of research resources there, but all of the outcomes from those 1,300-odd community projects are also archived, so we have access to that. Strangely enough, we've never had a Ph.D. student come up to us and say, “Can I access all of these data? This would be fantastic.” We also have published resources that are...that legacy is continued on through the Legacy of Hope Foundation. We're trying to make those available.

[Don Rusnak, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I was going to suggest that the analyst grab some of the data from, at least, some of the projects throughout the years that the foundation did the good work that I saw on the ground. I was immensely upset when the previous government cut funding to that foundation because it did such good work.

I'm going to go off on a tangent and agree with my colleague from the NDP in saying that, yes, there are good things that could be done through organizations such as the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. It doesn't always have to come from government. Oftentimes when the federal government does something or one of its departments does something in terms of health, it's well meant but done in stringent boxes. It's not done with the flexibility that's needed in a lot of our first nations communities. And I say our first nations communities because I'm Ontario's only first nations member of Parliament. So I'm well aware of the problems in our communities and in the communities of Hunter Tootoo who is sitting here today. The communities experience amazing rates of suicides and other problems. Michael McLeod from the Northwest Territories just had a rash of suicides over the last couple of weeks in his communities.

I've said this a number of times at this committee: I don't want my successors 10, 20, 100 years from now sitting at another committee studying indigenous youth suicide. We need to do something now, and I believe that the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was doing was amazing work because I saw the work. But again, it's a two-part stage. In my mind, at least, and in the minds of a lot of the people I've talked to, we don't want to create this industry just on the misery in indigenous communities. We want to end that misery somewhere. I know that's what the foundation did so well. They were doing programs built within the communities that were finally putting a stop to the feelings of despair and the problems that lead to other problems in the community and cost all of society so much.

I see it in my community of Thunder Bay where we have a lot of people coming from the north who aren't adjusting well to the city of Thunder Bay. We have colonialist attitudes among institutions. We see it with an investigation of the Thunder Bay police force right now. I really don't want to see this continuing, and the work that the foundation did was a starting point but not an ending point.

Other than restarting an organization like the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, do you have any recommendations on how to help to at least start to end these crises?

[Dr. Michael DeGagné]

I think the work of Michael Chandler and Lalonde, in B.C., has probably come to this committee already. If not, it will.

It's the notion that any community that develops more and more self-efficacy or self-government, has its own agreements, has its own police force, all the way up to true self-governance.... The higher you get on that sort of scale, the more resilient you become, and the youth in that community become more resilient to suicide.

The idea, then, is that if we can't create structures—and that's fine—then what we can do is make sure that we act within at least a policy framework. That means, if we're going to act, we have to engender more empowerment. We have to engender more authority for people over their own lives. That's even if it's small things, small agreements, or opportunities for youth to meet and speak peer to peer and support each other. As long as it's supportive of empowerment, I think anything we do will be better than what we're doing.

[Dr. Rod McCormick]

I would add that in terms of empowerment, I don't know that necessarily governance...when I look at the experience of the Nisga'a in B.C., one of the first, at the Government of Nunavut....

I think it was Natan Obed who said that governance in Greenland and in Canada hasn't necessarily lowered our suicide rates. If what is reproduced in terms of governance is similar to the old government, people get pretty disappointed and disillusioned when they had high expectations. That's one variable.

We still have to deal with a lot of unresolved grief and unresolved trauma, and I think that we need to address that. What's being offered currently by FNIH just isn't doing it. It hasn't worked.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Fifteen seconds.

[Don Rusnak, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you for your time coming here and presenting on this important subject for us. I appreciate it.

[Dr. Rod McCormick]

Thank you.