To be quite fair the decision was reversed in about 24 hours but was everyone in the PEI Tory government asleep when this passed by their desks?
“How many times, when you get upset or worried or concerned about things, is it in the middle of the day? It’s usually at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning when you wake up,” said Joan Wright, executive director of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention based in Edmonton, Alberta. The hotline received about 1,400 calls a year and about 50 were from people contemplating suicide, health groups said. “One of the things I was hearing is the government felt there weren’t enough suicide-related calls,” Wright said. Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province with a population of about 137,000 people, is trying to tame its budget deficit. The hotline cost about C$30,000 ($24,000) a year to run. “It’s a very small amount of money in our view,” said Reid Burke, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
When there is a call for one in every hundred people a year, you would think that would be enough to keep such a cheap service going let alone raise flags. According to Stats Canada, in 1996 PEI’s suicide rate was at or slightly above (depending on the end of the range) the national average: 15/3,862 or 20/3,933. Given the cash-strapped government’s decision to become a casino site and the highly-arguable rise in suicides that follow, the original thought to cut the line could be taken as cynical as, say, cutting auditor-general funding when faced with a scandal related to government pointlessly propping up dying private enterprise.