KSB move may take seven years to finish

The Kativik School Board won’t be vacating its head office in Montreal for a new home in Nunavik anytime soon.

According to the KSB, the long-awaited relocation to Nunavik “may take longer than planned.” The most recent forecast from the school board is that it will require at least seven years to complete.

School board officials feel sorely let down by Quebec’s education department.

In 1998, Pauline Marois, then Quebec’s minister of education, assured Nunavik’s leaders that she was committed to moving Nunavik’s school board to northern Quebec.

Then, two years ago, François Legault, who succeeded Marois as education minister, sent a letter to the KSB in which he reconfirmed his government’s support for the board’s relocation plan. Legault acknowledged the move was “important to the population.”

And he also promised to ask Quebec’s Treasury Board for money by March 31, 2000, so construction could start up sometime in 2000-1.

But Quebec was unwilling to approve the request for the entire $45 million needed to move the school board north.

It did allot $6.2 million for the first phase of the school board’s relocation, which led to the construction of 11 duplexes in Kuujjuaq in 2001, presumably to house employees transferred from the South.

Paul Rémillard, who oversees native affairs for Quebec’s education department, said the KSB will have to find the money needed for relocation through the education department’s annual capital budget.

This budget amounts to a total of $17 million a year for the Cree school board, the Lower North Shore’s school board and the KSB, and generally pays for school renovations or expansions.

Rémillard said the best way to engineer new offices for the KSB in Nunavik may be to buy them “piece by piece.” He suggested the KSB’s new offices in Kuujjuaq and Kuujjuaraapik could be built in a prefab modules, which could be expanded every year.

“This would permit us to stay within our budget,” Rémillard said.

Meanwhile, KSB plans to lobby the Parti Québécois government, so it keeps its former education ministers’ promises to move the school board north.

“The KSB doesn’t accept the education department’s decision,” said KSB spokesperson Debbie Astroff. “The MEQ [le ministère de l’éducation du Québec] is going back on its commitment.”

Astroff said the KSB still plans to keep moving personnel and services to Kuujjuaq and Kuujjuaraapik as planned, by using existing housing and renting space for offices.

“The school board is not giving up,” Astroff said.

Astroff said school board commissioners would discuss their next step when they meet again in March.

Rémillard said he’s aware the KSB wants to move more quickly, but he said the school board has to be realistic. He favours the cheaper, slower pace for relocation.

“It’s not good to change the entire structure in one fell swoop,” Rémillard said.

However, under the proposed Nunavik regional government, the present structure of the KSB would change dramatically. The school board would be dissolved and be replaced by an education department.

Rémillard denied this scenario played any role in Quebec’s reluctance to fund a move for the KSB.