Thank you, George and Karen, for appearing in front of us.
I'm from the Northwest Territories, as you know, and this is certainly an issue that we share in terms of jurisdiction across the north. We've been hearing presentations and talking about this issue for several months now as a committee. During that time I've been trying to put together numbers as we hear presentations and as we start to see the broad crisis situation that's developing and has been in place for a long time. It's important that we put it in perspective, and I think between Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Nunavik, Yukon, and Labrador, in the last 15 years we've probably seen well over 1,000 people commit suicide, and that is something that the nation did not recognize for the longest time. But I think now we have the attention of the nation on this issue.
We've had strong voices from youth across the north, from the leaders across the north, and we're certainly starting to have the political attention to this issue that it requires. I think it's no surprise to all of us that one of the factors that leads to the condition of despair is that people feel there's no way out. We have some challenges in the north. The high cost of living is one of them. Housing and socio-economic inequity are right across the north. Our youth are starting to experience cultural disconnect that is really causing a lot of confusion in our communities.
I think we all recognize that there is no magic solution. We've heard it in the communities that we visited. We were in Kuujjuaq and we were in Nunavut yesterday, and I think everybody recognizes that is the case. There are a lot of things we can do for prevention in this situation, but it's going to require adequate investment in the north, as you pointed out. We need to deal with the issue of housing. We need to increase the number of dwellings in our communities. We need to have more on site and better educational opportunities. The economy has to perform a lot better. We need more jobs. We need people to get to work.
We have to deal with the issue of trauma, physical and sexual abuse in our communities. That may be a result of a number of things, but residential schools have certainly been mentioned throughout our visits. We certainly need to find a way to deal with the addiction issues we have in every one of our communities, including mine. For the most part, we don't have the resources. We don't have the facilities to do so.
We heard many things during our visit. We heard about the need for crisis centres in the communities and cultural centres. We heard about the need for family centres. I would like to raise the program of friendship centres that we have in southern communities that seem to work quite well, and education-based programs for early childhood. Throughout our visits we have heard that people want to see community-based solutions by our own people, our own communities, and the people who live there.
So I wanted to ask you in your capacity, and I know you've been around for a while, what you have seen that works, what approaches work in our communities? What would you like to see happening in our communities to help us deal with these concerns that we're experiencing?