In many ways the communication with all Inuit and with all Canadians about why suicide presents itself the way it does and what we all need to do to prevent suicide is one of the key parts of this initiative. As I said earlier, we don't have that unification yet. I believe that we need to have that unification in order to all push in the right direction to prevent suicide.
Our strategy imagines different concepts. Some will be our advocacy to government. Some will be our network of suicide prevention strategies, from the community level to the regional levels to the national level, that all work together to provide supports for Inuit wherever they may be. Some are going to be specific actions that ITK can take to adopt programs or facilitate the creation of different resources that can apprise Inuit regions or Inuit communities.
In many cases we are in the middle, facilitating change, advocating for change, and working with communities and Inuit regions to ensure those things are possible and that we imagine them in the same way and that we approach them together.
At the centre, we are going to play a lead role in that advocacy work but also in filling in the key gaps in knowledge. The idea that we don't have ethnic identifiers in any of our jurisdictions except for Nunavut, and the idea that in the creation of our own strategy in 2016 we had to hire outside help to work directly with coroners' offices to get Inuit-specific suicide data that just does not exist, because the data that does exist is community-structured data, not Inuit-specific data on the national level.... We need to create those changes to ensure that we have an understanding of how our communities are affected and an understanding of what works, and we need to create an evaluative process over time to ensure that anything we are doing and doing together is having a positive effect. If it is not having a positive effect, then we need to adapt it to ensure that we see a difference in the population over time.
This, of course, isn't a three- to five-year thing; this is a generational push, but we can understand how we're doing along the way.