Chris Selley: Shining a light on aboriginal suicides – National Post

September 15, 2016

The demand for national strategies to combat every problem under the sun is a signature feature of the Canadian political landscape, and it can be wearisome. Not by accident, Canada is a relatively loose and diverse federation containing multitudes of lifestyles and their associated challenges. Rare is the problem for which there is a single, federally designed solution.

Recent demands for a national strategy on suicide prevention, however, have a certain logic — not because we’re “the only developed country without (one),” as the Toronto Star inimitably put it over the weekend, but because the most appalling subset of Canada’s suicide problem exists directly under federal jurisdiction: among the worst-off First Nations.

Addressing the problem “will require co-ordination among education, justice, employment and social welfare sectors,” Laura Eggertson and Kirsten Patrick plausibly argued in an editorial in the current edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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