Ottawa Inuit housing project still on life-support

The board behind the Maison Inuksuk proposal envisioned a 44-unit social housing complex for Inuit living in Ottawa, as well as programs offering employment counselling, health care and recreation, as well as an Inuit art shop and a deli selling country food. (ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF CSV ARCHITECTS)

The Maison Inuksuk project started as a simple plan by St. Margaret’s Anglican Church to build some apartment units that would generate some revenue for their property. But it expanded into an amibitious plan to provide affordable housing to Inuit in Ottawa within a big complex that would serve the economic, spiritual and culture needs of Inuit. (ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF CSV ARCHITECTS)

A housing project for Inuit in Ottawa now survives on life support after the loss of its planned location beside an Anglican church in the Vanier district.

The 44-unit Maison Inuksuk House was designed to provide affordable housing for Inuit beside St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood, an area of the city where numerous Inuit already live.

But with the withdrawal of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa from the project, it’s not clear if Maison Inuksuk House can be relocated.

“We were informed the proposal for the project was site-specific,” said Noel Lomer, treasurer of Maison Inuksuk House’s board of directors, and also of the Parish of St. Margaret’s.

Bishop John Chapman, head of Ottawa’s Anglican diocese, told the project’s board in a Jan. 26 letter that the diocese will withdraw its funding application.

Chapman said he fears the $8 million grant sought in the application doesn’t provide enough money to pay for the project, which had ballooned beyond a simple housing proposal into a full-blown social service proposal.

“…[O]ne undisputed matter looms over the entire project: I believe that the grant upon which we are currently waiting, if received, is insufficient to sustain the project,” Chapman’s letter reads.

Despite this major setback, the project’s board is continuing with government funding applications and looking for new sites.

“Last weekend [early February] I was looking at the fire and the fire had almost gone out,” Lomer said. “And now it looks like it’s getting warmer again.”

But the long wait for funding is one reason the diocese pulled out.

Correspondence related to the project suggests that church officials hoped to hear about the status of the funding application mich earlier than Feb. 15.

“My working date is Nov 15,” reads an email from Canon Bill Fairlie of the St. Margaret’s parish.

“The ruling I have from him [Bishop John Chapman] is that if the details he has asked for are not on his desk by Nov. 15 he wants me to proceed without any reference to MIH,” Fairlie said.

As of Feb. 18, Maison Inuksuk House was still waiting to hear from the First Nations Inuit Métis Urban and Rural Housing Program

Bill Prentice, former vice-president of the board and the diocese’s representative there, said the bishop further doubted whether there was enough demand for Inuit housing in Ottawa to consistently fill the building.

“He spent some time and reviewed the project over several years and his position is that there’s not sufficient demand based on the research that’s been done,” Prentice said.

On both counts, some board members and parishioners disagreed with the bishop’s assessment.

“Assuming the level of funding requested is approved, the analysis done by our development consultant… Peter Trotscha, shows that the project is sustainable on its own and will not be a drain on Diocesan resources,” reads an email from board member Gay Richardson to Chapman.

“In fact, it can operate completely independently from the Diocese. While MIH does not require financial assistance from the Diocese, the proposal does require approval by the Diocese to use the St. Margaret’s site as the location for the project.”

Trotscha, the consultant, wrote to Chapman that he should have been consulted on the financial feasibility of the project if Chapman had any concerns about it.

“It’s designed to meet ends,” said Rhoda Innuksuk, the treasurer of the Maison Inuksuk board. “It wasn’t going to cost the church money to run it.”

In a story published Feb. 8 in the Ottawa Citizen, Lomer slammed Chapman, calling the bishop’s decision “a failure of leadership.”

“The leadership of the diocese has not provided inspiration on this, and the communication has been very poor,” Lomer later told Nunatsiaq News.

During 2009, Lomer said the board came up with numerous ideas for services that the residence could eventually include to help urban Inuit: employment counseling, health programs, a clinic, and a recreation centre.

Other ideas included a shop selling Inuit art and a deli offering Arctic country food.

These growing ambitions for the project seem to have spooked St. Margaret’s canon, Fairlie.

“If MIH is now a social service project, something not on the books when I arrived in January, then that is a whole different initiative with a heck of a lot more support needed, mainly from govt, to make it happen,” Fairlie wrote.

In response, Lomer accused Fairlie of providing the diocese with “misinformation.”

Calls to St. Margaret’s Parish seeking comment were not immediately returned.

At first, it looked as if the loss of the church’s participation might have scuttled the whole project, but the board now plans to keep the idea alive and seek a new location.

Innuksuk said she sees an upside to the the church’s withdrawal:

“There’s still a lot of residential school victims who are a little uncomfortable with having it go through a church,” she said. “I don’t think it was meant to go through St. Margaret’s.”