Life is cheap in Canada in some contexts

Three separate articles on the front page of today's Globe and Mail all relate to Canadians dying for the "wrong" reasons (the only "right" reasons being old age and illness).
One describes a purported "suicide pact" among young people in Attawapiskat First Nation, a tiny, remote Cree settlement way up in northern Ontario, which has also been in the news in recent years for its housing crisis and its tainted water. A state of emergency has been established in the town after no fewer than 11 teenagers tried to take their own lives on Saturday night alone. There have been over 100 suicide attempts in the small community of just 2,000 inhabitants since last September, although thankfully just one actual death.
This may have been a deliberate conspiracy or pact (some of the children had apparently been overheard discussing some kind of a loose plan to commit suicide) in what passes for high jinks in the wilds of northern Ontario. Or it may have been a kind of mass hysteria more reminiscent of 17th century Salem than 21st century Canada. Or, I even wonder if some of the blame can't be laid at the door of the local water problems - Attawapiskat's water supply is laced with naturally occurring bromide and other organic contaminants, to the extent that the local water purification plant is not able to filter it, and even boiling does not fully fix the problem.
As I mentioned in a previous post on Cross Lake Reserve, another isolated community suffering from a plague of youth suicides, do we really need to have reserves in such inaccessible and inhospitable places in this day and age?
Another article deals with the burgeoning challenge of fentanyl overdoses after two more overdoses from the drug were reported in Winnipeg over the weekend. This is one I have real problems getting my head around. Fentanyl seems to be the drug du jour, even though (or perhaps because) it is forty to fifty times more potent than heroin, and has already led to hundreds in deaths in the short time it has been available (418 deaths in 2015 alone in British Columbia and Alberta, which is where the current craze began in Canada). Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate painkiller, a prescription drug that has became a "recreational" option, particularly after Oxycontin was discontinued in Canada in 2012 for the same reason. The illicit fentanyl currently doing the rounds in Canada is manufactured in China, and usually cut into cocaine or heroin, and it is gradually making its way eastward across the country. The fentanyl experience also brings into sharp relief the whole problem of the ongoing over-prescription of opiates in Canada. There are now apocalyptic warnings of a new drug called W-18 (I'm sure a better street name will be coined soon), which is apparently up to 100 times stronger than even fentanyl.
How can people be so desperate as to need this kind of "recreation"? This not some kind of a pleasant buzz, a way of forgetting day-to-day cares and concerns; this is more like being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, and about as safe. In my cocooned middle-class life, I am just completely unable to relate to this, and I wish someone would explain it to me.
The third article relates to pre-natal sex selection among Indian immigrants in Canada, the abortion of female fetuses out of a preference for male offspring. This arguably does not involve killing per se, depending on your definitions and beliefs, but is nevertheless a despicable custom. The practice is well-documented in India, but a couple of recent studies in the Canadian Medical Association Journal have shown the extent of the practice in Canada, something that was only hinted at by anecdotal evidence until now. The very idea of it has always been extremely contentious here in multi-culti, politically-correct Canada.
While couples in this demographic may accept a daughter as their first, or even second, child, this changes dramatically with the third child: one study showed 138 boys born to Indian-born mothers for every 100 girls, and 166 boys for every girl for a fourth child. The other study revealed even greater discrepancies of 196:100 for a third child after two daughters, and a huge 326:100 for Indian-born mothers who already had two daughters and also already had an abortion before their third child.
It is hard to know what can be done about the problem. Suggestions have included banning disclosure of the sex of a fetus until 30 weeks (after which abortions are only performed in rare circumstances), but this is heavy-handed and difficult to enforce. Targeting specific groups for practising sex selection is clearly discriminatory, however conclusive and justifiable it may appear to be in other respects. It also gives one pause to think what might transpire when genetic testing for other traits becomes widely available, as it probably will one day.
Canada, unlike some other countries actively encourages immigrants to bring their cultures with them, but this particular one we can do without, thank you.