Honourable senators, I wish to speak today on Senator Brazeau’s motion to authorize the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology to examine and report on suicide prevention and mental health needs among Canadians, including a particular emphasis on boys and men, and the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in suicide statistics, when and if the committee is formed.

Concerning Senator Brazeau’s motion, I will not give you a learned, detailed speech. This is a profoundly human issue that compels us to rise above the fray. However, some specifics, some facts, will be provided a little later.

I would first like to congratulate Senator Brazeau for his personal journey and the authentic testimony he gave on February 4. He spoke with authenticity and humility.

Many of us have been personally affected by the suicide of a loved one. The day Senator Brazeau delivered his speech was the first anniversary of our cousin Marc-André’s suicide. Marc-André was a man in his forties, a father of two, a force of nature, always smiling and friendly, the life of the party, a real live wire. Any party with Marc-André was bound to be great. But something invisible was eating away at him on the inside, and our cousin could not see a way out. He killed himself. As I am sure you can all understand, dear colleagues, a tragedy like that unleashes a tidal wave of emotions in the person’s loved ones.

Suicide is an extremely painful human tragedy, especially because, in most cases, it could have been prevented. Unfortunately, when it happens, the shock is massive. For every suicide, there are about 10 suicide attempts.

Every suicide and every suicide attempt has a huge impact on the broader community. Just think about what happens when a high school student commits suicide.

The Association québécoise de prévention du suicide estimates that, every year, over 800,000 people are affected by suicide in Quebec alone.

Here are some examples of such situations in Quebec.

In early 1997, every media outlet in Quebec converged on Coaticook, a small town in the Eastern Townships where five young people from the same high school committed suicide in just over three months. You can imagine the devastating impact that this crisis had, not only on that small town in the Eastern Townships, but also on Quebec as a whole.

On January 14, 1999, Quebec’s media community was left reeling when Gaétan Girouard, the well-known TVA reporter and co-host of the investigative journalism program “J.E.”, took his own life. In 2005, the Association québécoise de prévention du suicide published a study that showed a link between the media coverage of Gaétan Girouard’s suicide and an increase in the number of suicides during that same period. According to some data, there were approximately 200 more deaths by suicide that year.

If I stop and think about it, in addition to the suicide that I spoke to you about at the beginning of my speech, I have witnessed four or five other suicide-related situations in my immediate circle. That’s a lot. I’m sure each and every one of you has also experienced this type of tragedy.

However, one aspect that is very specific to suicide is that it elicits a myriad of often contradictory emotions in those who are bereaved. A husband whose wife has committed suicide will feel sad, angry, guilty, abandoned, discouraged and bewildered. Imagine, dear colleagues, a parent whose 14-year-old commits suicide. Losing a child is probably one of the greatest losses that a human being can experience. When this death was theoretically preventable, the despair is all the more intense.

How do you explain to a child that she will never know her father because he committed the final act of ending his life?

We can and must prevent suicide. As Senator Brazeau stated, the suicide rate among Indigenous people and among men is particularly alarming. To address this issue, we must understand it, and we must understand all aspects of it. Suicide is a multi-faceted issue, and suicide prevention requires an approach based on proven, evidence-based practices.

However, there is one fundamental principle everyone needs to understand. In the vast majority of cases, people who attempt or commit suicide are not choosing to die; rather, they are choosing to end their suffering. They are out of options for ending their suffering, and the idea of suicide becomes, in their mind, the only way out. I believe this principle must be the cornerstone of any preventive action. Since the person isn’t really thinking about dying, but rather putting an end to their suffering, it is up to society to have a safety net in place to prevent those individuals from dying.

Various suicide prevention strategies have been deployed by the provinces for many years now. These strategies, some of which are better developed than others, focus on primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, in other words, prevention, intervention and postvention.

I will give an example for each stage. Last month, Senator Brazeau told us that one of the primary predisposing factors among Indigenous people is isolation. Primary prevention will involve trying to end this isolation by establishing a system of peer helpers, for example, or providing gatekeeper training in remote communities.

Secondary prevention, or intervention, can be multi-faceted. For instance, hotlines for people contemplating suicide, crisis centres or meetings with mental health workers in hospitals are other possible avenues.

Lastly, there is tertiary prevention, or postvention, if you will. Earlier I gave the example of the spate of suicides that occurred in Coaticook in 1997. A large multi-disciplinary team was deployed to that school for several weeks. It is now known that people bereaved by suicide are at a higher risk of attempting suicide themselves, so they need closer monitoring and support.

We must also act consistently and in concert with the provinces and all community stakeholders concerned about suicide and suicide prevention.

Honourable senators, many of you are newly appointed to the Senate. The advantage of having senators serve until age 75 is that we can preserve the institutional memory of the Senate and the government.

Many of you probably don’t know that on December 14, 2012, the Conservative government adopted Bill C-300, the Federal Framework for Suicide Prevention Act. The purpose of the bill was to require Canada to develop a rigorous and effective framework for suicide prevention. It called for the Minister of Health to table a progress report four years after the bill passed and every two years thereafter.

If we want results, our actions must be consistent and orderly. Effective prevention measures will have to be reinforced by concerted, sustained efforts. Above all, we must avoid scattershot efforts. To that end, I want to support Senator Brazeau’s motion but also call on the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology to consider the work that has been done since Bill C-300 was passed.

I will also call on the committee to document the various initiatives based on proven, evidence-based practices that are being carried out in the provinces. The committee will then be able to proactively report on all the information it collected.

Once again, I thank Senator Brazeau for this initiative. I urge all our honourable colleagues to support this motion.