Does this province have a clear and comprehensive plan to combat youth suicide?
It depends on whom you ask.
Monday afternoon during question period, Minnedosa MLA Leanne Rowat did her level best to get a straight answer from Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Minister Oscar Lathlin.
She wanted to know what the NDP is going to do about the stunning number of youth suicides and attempted suicides on the remote northern reserve of Shamattawa.
Last year, more than one-quarter of the youth on the reserve either attempted suicide or threatened to end their lives. So far this year, 37 kids and 10 adults in Shamattawa have attempted suicide. Another 52 told health-care workers they were going to kill themselves.
Rowat might as well have been asking the organ grinder to care because his monkey had run out of peanuts.
Lathlin responded with the same vigour he'd displayed when I posed that same question last week. He said nothing. Instead, Eric Robinson, the MLA for the vast northern region that includes Shamattawa, stood to answer. He assured the house that much progress has been made to address this issue.
If there has been, it's not apparent to the four Shamattawa children who attempted suicide in a one-week period earlier this month, nor to the desperate health-care workers who sent me a detailed fax illuminating the depth of the anguish on the reserve.
So Rowat tried again. What concrete steps would be taken?
Lathlin stayed glued firmly to his seat.
Robinson, who was aboriginal and northern affairs minister back in 2002, when it was learned 39 people had tried to kill themselves in six months on the reserve, stood again.
"I wish they hadn't have to happen anywhere in this province," he assured Rowat of the current suicide attempts.
But they did.
The government opened a much-ballyhooed healing centre in Shamattawa in 2002. Robinson was northern affairs minister then. Six years ago, he stood in the house to declare that prevention and counselling services need to be "better co-ordinated, be more culturally appropriate and accessible to aboriginal Manitobans."
But the funding for the Leonard Miles Healing Centre ran out after only two years. An arena in the community sits unused because of a court dispute. Robinson could point only to a basketball court built with the assistance of Manitoba Hydro as a positive step to help the young people of Shamattawa.
In an interview late Monday afternoon, Robinson said he's also frustrated with the deaths in Shamattawa and across the north.
"This is a community in perpetual crisis and it's still the same," he said. "I wish I could say that things have changed."
He could -- but he'd be lying.
Robinson talked of a Shamattawa chief who had to cut down a child who had hanged himself in the bush. He talked of the sniffing parties. He talked of the sour spread of youth suicides to other reserves.
"Why does this happen?" he said rhetorically. "Your guess is as good as mine." But that's not an answer. I don't want Eric Robinson's answer to be as good as mine, anymore than I want the minister of aboriginal and northern affairs to stay parked on his butt while questions are asked about his portfolio.
Monday afternoon, Healthy Living Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross told Free Press Ottawa bureau chief Mia Rabson Manitoba is close to having a new suicide prevention strategy that will be the talk of the land.
The NDP was forced into this early announcement in an attempt to seem proactive even as aboriginal children ponder death by their own hands.
Eric Robinson told me that "we, as a society, have to look at each other" for an answer to the ills of Shamattawa. When we're done looking, I believe,we have to ask the NDP government exactly when it's going to help the children of this province move away from killing themselves as a solution to their miserable lives. Let's hope this new strategy is more effective than the short-lived healing centre in Shamattawa.
Oscar Lathlin did finally heave himself to his feet in the house Monday. He allowed that the suicides and attempted suicides of aboriginal kids is "not a good situation."
No kidding, Mr. Minister.
No kidding.
lindor.reynolds@winnipegfreepress.mb.ca
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