Maliiganik’s executive director departs

SARA MINOGUE
The executive director of Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik stepped down suddenly and unexpectedly on Monday, two days after the organization’s annual meeting in Iqaluit.

Brad McIsaac showed up for the annual meeting in a yellow Hummer H3, and indicated that the organization would be “trading up to a bigger vehicle.”

McIsaac first joined the Baffin legal aid clinic as a criminal lawyer in January 2002, and had been the executive director for the past three and a half years.

Susan Switch, Nunavut’s longest-serving family lawyer, will take over as interim executive director at Maliiganik, where she has been working since March 2002.

At Maliiganik’s annual general meeting on Saturday, McIsaac told board members that the clinic would be leasing a new vehicle, which he indicated by pointing to the H3 parked outside the Justice of the Peace courtroom in the Arnakkalluk courthouse.

“There’s more room for the files and the fact that we have to transport people [to the new courthouse],” McIsaac told the board. “And it’s still well within our budget.”

Yet Driving Force, the auto company that rented the vehicle to McIsaac, confirms that the H3 was never leased to Maliiganik, but only rented.

Phone calls to Patrick Smith, executive director of the Nunavut Legal Services Board, were not returned as of Nunatsiaq News press time on Wednesday, nor were calls to McIsaac.

Maliiganik board member Frances Piuggatuk said in an interview on Wednesday that he had not been informed about McIsaac’s departure.

Just five board members, McIsaac, an accountant with Iqaluit’s Mackay Landau accounting firm and a translator who works for Maliiganik showed up to discuss the past year at the annual general meeting.

No lawyers were able to attend because the AGM was scheduled at the same time as the Law Society of Nunavut held its AGM at the Frobisher Inn across town.

And no members of the public appeared to take an interest in the legal aid clinic’s activities.

The scenario was not much different from last year, when only two members of the public showed up, both of whom were people working with Maliiganik.

When the time came for elections to the board, all of the board members were returned by acclamation, Piuggatuk said, as they had been at the 2004 AGM.

Andrew Plunkett of Mackay Landau offered to answer questions about the financial statements, but there were none.

McIsaac gave a short update on Maliiganik’s activities, mentioning that the legal aid offices will be doubling in size when the Government of Nunavut offices presently adjacent to Maliiganik move to the new courthouse.

McIsaac also reported that the Maliiganik office in Pond Inlet is running smoothly in a newly renovated house, with a full-time lawyer and a courtworker/receptionist.

Piuggatuk, a board member who represents the Maliiganik board on the Nunavut Legal Service Board, gave a lengthier update on the legal services board by summing up the highlights of that organization’s 2004/2005 annual report.

Nunavut’s legal services board served over 5,000 Nunavummiut in 2004/2005, the report says. This is the first time that the group has accurately recorded the demand for services.

The legal services board received $4.4 million in federal and territorial funding in 2004/2005, and ended the year with a deficit of $198,637. The report traces the cause of this overspending to increased court circuits and the higher number of family lawyers, who now number three in Nunavut.