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The five suicides that occurred within a nine-month period in 2015 in a small indigenous community in northern Quebec were avoidable and fundamentally the result of Canada’s “ancient apartheid system,” a Quebec coroner wrote in a searing report released Saturday.

“I believe and see evidence that the great fundamental problem lies with the ‘apartheid’ system into which aboriginals have been thrust for 150 years or more,” writes coroner Bernard Lefrançois in his 50-page report on the public inquiry he conducted last June in Sept-Îles at the request of Quebec’s Minister of Public Security.

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“It is time to put an end to this apartheid system, and for all of the authorities concerned to confront that challenge.”

Lefrançois goes so far as to suggest abolishing the reserve system outright would benefit both aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities, and reduce the disproportionately high suicide rates in some aboriginal communities.