Funding foul-up leaves Nunavut Sivuniksavut shy on cash

ALISON BLACKDUCK

IQALUIT — Board members of Nunavut Sivuniksavut claim a miscommunication with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs over funding has left the Ottawa-based school scrambling to find $100,000 for the next fiscal year.

That $100,000 would have accounted for almost a fifth of the school’s new $481,000 budget.

“In the past, we received $100,000 per year of funding from DIAND but it didn’t come from any specific program,” Raurri Qajaaq Ellsworth said in a telephone interview from his office in Ottawa on Wednesday.

Ellsworth is the board chair.

“This year, with the reorganization of DIAND and the offices moving up North, we were dealing with different people who weren’t familiar with the program,” he said. “So our funding proposal got lost in the shuffle.”

That’s not so, DIAND spokesperson Jennifer Lilly said. Instead, she said, the program that funded the school came to an end.

“The school received funding from the Nunavut Unified Human Resources Development Strategy, which everybody knew was being sunset on March 31, 2000,” she said.

Lilly said nobody at DIAND received any funding proposals from Nunavut Sivuniksavut representatives this year, a fact Ellsworth disputes.

“We sent four copies of the same proposal to DIAND eight to nine months ago,” he said.

Regardless, Ellsworth said the confusion over the funding won’t stop the school from operating.

He said the board is lobbying Inuit organizations currently funding Nunavut Sivuniksavut to increase their contributions to make up for the loss of the DIAND money.