Nunavut judge sentences young mother for 2015 arson

A Nunavut judge has sentenced a Cape Dorset woman to nine months jail time for her role in setting fire to her housing unit in December 2015. (FILE PHOTO)

A senior Nunavut judge has sentenced a single mother to nine months of jail time for setting fire to her family’s public housing unit in 2015.

Elee Ainalik was charged with arson following the Dec. 7, 2015, fire that destroyed unit 3015, located in a Cape Dorset fourplex where she lived with some relatives.

The 26-year-old woman pleaded guilty to a lesser offence in June 2017.

Senior Nunavut Justice Neil Sharkey’s judgement describes Ainalik as “drunk, depressed and in a state of despair” on the night of Dec. 7.

The young woman had been drinking with a friend that evening, to whom she expressed suicidal thoughts and threatened to burn down her home.

Shortly after friends brought Ainalik home that evening, police and firefighters responded to a fire at unit 3015. The fire destroyed the home and displaced Ainalik’s family members, though the other three units avoided major damage.

RCMP officers took Ainalik to the detachment, where she spent the night in a cell. The following day, the woman admitted to starting the fire and was released on bail with a condition not to drink.

Ainalik has upheld those conditions and sought counselling with a Cape Dorset elder, Sharkey said.

The court heard that, at the time of the fire, Ainalik’s infant daughter had recently been placed in foster care. The young woman’s first-born son had died of meningitis years earlier.

Ainalik’s own life was marked by abuse and neglect, starting from the time she was an infant. She was placed in foster care at age five. When she returned to live with family years later, she was physically and sexually abused by her own father.

Ainalik was living with relatives in Cape Dorset when she regained custody of her daughter in 2016. She gave birth to a second daughter in January 2017 and at the time of her sentencing Sept. 5, was two months pregnant with another child.

In his judgment, Sharkey called Ainalik’s crime severe, noting the wide-spread impact arson can have on small communities.

The fire took place just three months after a fire that destroyed Cape Dorset’s high school, he said.

“People in communities have a right to assume that when their neighbour decides to set fire to his housing unit, the courts take this type of activity seriously and are prepared to impose jail terms,” he wrote.

But Sharkey also noted Ainalik’s personal circumstances: her status as an Indigenous offender, her demonstrated remorse, and rehabilitative efforts since the fire.

“Clearly, Ms. Ainalik was under severe distress at the time she lit the fire,” he wrote. “I have no reason to doubt that her motive to start this fire was to go up in flames herself.”

Sharkey sentenced Ainalik to nine months imprisonment, or 260 days. Upon her release, Ainalik faces 18 months of probation and she is to seek further counselling for alcohol abuse and mental health issues with an elder in her community.

Sharkey said he will recommend authorities allow for an early release “so that your baby does not suffer the stigma in later life of being born while his or her mother was in jail.”

R. v. Ainalik, 2017 Nunavut Court of Justice by NunatsiaqNews on Scribd