CamBay’s Arctic college campus gets a boost

Nunavut Arctic College’s Kitikmeot campus is slated for a new building: a $6.5-million residence and daycare centre in Cambridge Bay, Dan Shewchuk, the minister responsible for Arctic College, said Oct. 25 in the Nunavut legislature’s committee of the whole.

This new building will support the development of future mine training centre, he said.

And it “also provides us with great opportunities to build relationships with the Canadian High Arctic Research Station,” he said.

When members of the CHARS development team visited Cambridge Bay in September, they suggested the new residence could double as a short-term residence for visiting researchers at the station due to open in 2017.

But that plan to share a residence doesn’t appear to be in the works, with MLAs saying they had been assured “these residences will be allocated to students and not to visiting researchers and professionals affiliated with the new research centre to be built in Cambridge Bay.”

However, MLAs questioned why the project, Arctic College’s biggest proposed project for 2013-14, was also identified as a “Mine Training Centre” — the first they’d heard of such a project.

And they wanted to know why the residence and the centre weren’t considered as two separate projects.

Eric Corneau, the coordinator of policy and planning for Arctic College, said the mine training centre doesn’t exist yet, but, if or when it does, it would share the NAC campus.