John Amagoalik launches lawsuit, says he won’t return to Embassy West
Health Department won’t cover former Nunavut leader’s care in Iqaluit
John Amagoalik’s wife Evie Amagoalik, left, and daughter Lily Amagoalik at Iqaluit’s airport on June 10. He flew home then after living at Embassy West Senior Living in Ottawa for 16 months. (Photo by Mosha Folger)
John Amagoalik has filed an application for judicial review at the Nunavut Court of Justice in response to the territorial government’s refusal to fund his medical care and housing.
Steve Kelliher, his lawyer and longtime friend, said the Government of Nunavut has betrayed not only Amagoalik but also his dream of Inuit self-determination.
“The colonial control from above is gone, and in its place is a form of a recolonization from below,” Kelliher said. “By that I mean the emergence of an executive class within Nunavut that the Inuit legislators give absolute deference to.”
Amagoalik’s family members paid for his care when he returned to Iqaluit earlier this June but needed more long-term support. The department informed them last month that wouldn’t be possible, since privately arranged care falls outside of its mandate.
“They do have legislative authority to do this, they just chose not to,” Kelliher said.
Kelliher argues the government’s actions contravene Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, aimed at protecting citizens from being deprived of their rights to life, liberty and personal security.
He is also requesting an urgent hearing through a separate application. He’s asking that Amagoalik immediately be provided with ongoing medical care and housing, which he says the family currently cannot afford.
“It is not possible to continue to pay for John’s home care and accommodation from private donations,” said Mark Stiles, also a friend of Amagoalik, in an affidavit. “John and his family’s financial resources are sufficient to cover their food and necessities only.”
Prior to returning to Iqaluit, Amagoalik had been living at the Embassy West long-term care home in Ottawa. He first informed Health Minister Janet Pitsiulaaq Brewster of his intention to return to Iqaluit through a letter signed on March 31, court documents show.
“When I moved to Ottawa, I did not understand this to be a permanent relocation for the rest of my life, and I did not knowingly consent to being moved to Embassy West on a permanent basis,” Amagoalik said in his affidavit, submitted to the court on Monday.
While staying there he had no hearing aids or eye glasses, and he felt incredibly lonely, according to his affidavit. He had little to do besides watch the highway outside his window.
“I came to feel that my life in Embassy West was like living in a prison,” he wrote, adding his mental outlook has greatly improved since returning to Iqaluit. “I will never agree to return to Embassy West.”
The retired politician, revered by many as the “Father of Nunavut,” dedicated decades of his life to advancing Inuit rights. Beginning in 1974, he worked on what would eventually become the Nunavut Agreement, which allowed for the creation of Nunavut as a territory.
Kelliher said Amagoalik, who is 79, may only have a few months left to live, and that he will be doing so on his own terms.
“He wants to die in his homeland,” said Kelliher, who worked alongside Amagoalik in the 1970s.
Amagoalik was born in 1947 in an outpost camp along Hudson Bay. At five years old, he and his family were forcibly relocated to Resolute Bay, where he remained for the next 19 years. He also attended multiple residential schools, in Resolute Bay, Iqaluit and northern Manitoba, after he was sent to Edmonton to receive tuberculosis treatment.
Since the 1970s, he has lived in Iqaluit with his wife Evie, until a surgery resulted in him being sent to Embassy West in February 2025.
The territorial government declined to comment.
Nunatsiaq News previously requested an interview with Nunavut’s Health Minister Janet Pitsiulaaq Brewster to ask her whether she would consider using her executive power to override existing policies for Amagoalik’s situation, but she declined.
Instead, on Sept. 8, a spokesperson sent a statement saying that the “same legislative, regulatory, program and financial requirements that govern the department also apply to the minister.”
“A minister may exercise only the authority provided within those frameworks and cannot set them aside to create an exception in an individual case,” Charmaine Deogracias wrote in an email then. “Independently arranged private care cannot be publicly funded.”
The family is currently requesting about $16,000 a month.
Evie Amagoalik told Nunatsiaq News that she supports her husband’s decision to appeal to the court, but declined to comment further.
What a way to live your final times in life, GN needs to be more compassionate.
that is your prerogative John. We all hope that our family can be home during their final days. I know how hard of a decision it is, we also have family who stay at Embassy West and it is difficult to have them so far away.
We do thank you for your hard fought battles along with countless others in the Kivalliq and Kitikmeot Region, along with friends from the south who sacrificed time away from family to allow Nunavut to come to fruition.
Everyone sympathizes with John Amagoalik’s desire to spend his remaining days at home in Nunavut, and his legacy is beyond dispute. But looking at this lawsuit strictly through a legal lens, the application is fundamentally flawed for several key reasons:
1. Misapplying Section 7 as a Positive Right
Canadian jurisprudence has consistently held that Section 7 of the Charter (life, liberty, and security of the person) is a negative right, protecting individuals from state deprivations, not a positive economic right requiring governments to fund tailored, privately chosen care or housing. Modern health-care challenges, courts have repeatedly declined to interpret the Charter as a mechanism to force governments to pay for private social services or specific individual delivery models.
2. Administrative Law & Ministerial Discretion
Counsel claims the GN has the authority to grant an exception, but in administrative law, a minister’s discretion is strictly constrained by statutory and financial frameworks (such as the Financial Administration Act). Demanding that a minister ignore existing program guidelines to issue a bespoke, $16,000-a-month private voucher is asking the court to order political favouritism. If ministers could arbitrarily override procurement and regulatory caps on a case-by-case basis, public administration and equal treatment under the law would break down entirely.
3. Housing vs. Health Mandate
The Department of Health’s mandate covers clinical care, not private residential rent and day to day expenses. Conflating housing costs with medical needs in a court claim against the Health Department ignores basic administrative division of responsibilities. There is no statutory framework allowing Health to redirect institutional long-term care operational funds into private residential leases.
4. The Precedent and Equity Problem
The real flaw of this litigation is equity. The legal question isn’t whether Amagoalik is the “Father of Nunavut”, the law must apply equally to every elder in all 25 communities. If the court rules the GN has a constitutional obligation to hand out $16,000/month for unregulated, privately arranged home care and housing in Iqaluit, what happens to elders in Gjoa Haven, Sanikiluaq, or Kugaaruk where private care providers and housing don’t even exist?
Creating a self-directed home-care framework with proper credentialing, auditing, and provincial-style caps is an urgent legislative and policy task for the Legislative Assembly, not something that can be improvised through an emergency court injunction. Turning a systemic policy gap into an individualized Charter claim sets a legally dubious precedent that circumvents the very democratic institutions Amagoalik fought so hard to build!
This is a copy and paste ChatGPT response.
We see you “Rule of Law”. You are a bureaucrat,
If the Minister really want to do this, they would tell the public service: “Find a way”
There are many contracts over many years on the books in Health and in Family Services which do exactly what you are saying the Department cannot do.
Look at the records of sole source contracts in the CGS reports to the Nunavut Assembly.
Nope. The Ministers are just as bound by the law as the bureaucrats are. They cannot provide a benefit to an individual unless permitted by statute. But good for you for trying to vilify public servants! Always a go-to scapegoat for Nunavummiut.
“Chat is this real?”: No, this isn’t AI. It’s what an articulate argument looks like when you actually understand public governance instead of relying on emotion.
“We see you”: Calling someone a bureaucrat doesn’t change reality. Go read those procurement reports you cited. Sole-source contracts are awarded to vetted, licensed, insured corporate entities to deliver defined services to the public, not personal, monthly cheques handed to private families because of their “political status”.
What is being demanded here is a $16,000/month private subsidy for an individual family to decide who to hire and procure with zero oversight, while billing private rent and non medical expenses to a health budget. That is the literal definition of preferential treatment.
A Minister telling staff to “find a way” cannot break the Financial Administration Act or invent an unlegislated voucher program out of thin air for one person. We need legitimate elder-care legislation for all 25 communities, not illegal, ad-hoc political favours.
Even if it was, was anything wrong in what was said? Dismissing it just AI generated doesn’t automatically mean you win.
For instance the first statement about the Charter. This is a quote directly from the Department of Justice website: “To date, section 7 has not been interpreted as imposing a positive obligation on the state to ensure the enjoyment of life, liberty and security of the person”. So, the writer, whether real of AI, is correct.
Legal analysis is nothing more than a tool that judges can easily contort or manipulate one way or the other to get the result that they desire. Mr. Amagoalik will win his case and there is no doubt about it. Any of the local judges who will hear this case are dying to play hero here by helping the father of Nunavut get what he wants/needs while at the same time dumping on the GN and the perceived heartless bureaucracy. It’s a judge’s dream to do that and the law will be manipulated and contorted to get to that result. Just you wait and see!!
Where is NTI and QIA?? They have loads of money.
I do hope when I am no longer able to care for myself I can remain in my home and be cared for. And I k ow the GN and NTI will not support me. So I will take this as a sign that I need to increase my savings and planning for the future. Or I will be stuck with what ever others can do to support me. And that probably means dieing away from home.
There is a certain irony here that is hard to ignore.
Maybe someone should go back to 1974 and calculate just how much economic activity John Amagoalik’s life’s work has generated for lawyers, consultants, advisors, negotiators and professional-service firms over the last 50 years.
The Nunavut Agreement eventually led to organizations administering and investing hundreds of millions of dollars, a $255.5-million settlement with Canada in 2015 alone, and now a new implementation agreement involving $1.5 billion over 10 years.
One can only imagine the cumulative legal and consulting bill attached to negotiating, implementing, interpreting, litigating, reviewing, studying and advising on everything John and others fought to create.
It would probably be an impressive number.
So here’s an idea: figure out every law firm and consulting company that has billed NTI and the institutions created through the Nunavut Agreement since the beginning. Ask each of them to kick back 0.01% of what they earned from the industry that is Nunavut John helped create.
At $16,000 a month for his care, I suspect John could stay comfortably at home for quite some time.
There would be something rather poetic about it: after spending decades building institutions that have supported an entire ecosystem of lawyers and consultants, the lawyers and consultants pass the hat around for the guy who helped make all those billable hours possible!
Call it the John Amagoalik Consulting Fee Rebate Program.
No consultants required to design it, please.
This is a tough one. Whether in the north or south, we all face the same. However, more prominent in the north as the distance is so great. All i can say us good luck and godspeed.
My mother, who died at age 96 last year in Arizona, had a long-term care insurance policy that was supposed to provide her lifetime in-home care. She had two strokes in her eighties and needed aides, although she was coherent and somewhat mobile. However, the insurance company went bankrupt after a few years of coverage, and the state took over, but only for three years. When the “lifetime” benefits ended, she was left with only her own resources, which were not enough, nor were mine. We cannot rely on families, private insurance, or distant facilities to provide care for elders in need. Only government can, and it is time they did. Whether John Amagoalik wins this case or not, he is still fighting battles until the end. Bravo!