Nunavik House residents headed for the Y

Nunavimmiut receiving medical care in Montreal and their escorts will soon stay in a new location when they’re in the city.

While no new site has been found for a permanent patient boarding home for Nunavimmiut or for the patient services centre, the Module du Nord, the 55-bed Nunavik House and offices at 6177 St. Jacques St. must be vacated by early spring, said Larry Watt, the director of “out of region” services for Nunavik’s regional board of health and social services.

The Maison Gigi and Michelène boarding homes, with 18 beds, will remain open, mainly for pregnant women, he said.

Watt did not say whether the 28-bed Hampton House, located around the corner from the current Nunavik House, would continue to be occupied.

The plan is to use the YMCA at 4039 Tupper St. in Westmount as a “temporary measure,” Watt said in an email.

“We are still looking for a suitable location for Nunavik House,” Watt said.

Nunavik House on St. Jacques opened in 2000 in what was formerly a low-end motel for immigrants.

Due to the high cost of running smaller family-run transit houses, the health board contracted a local company to run this boarding home.

Its location was chosen originally for its proximity to McGill University’s future mega-hospital — which still hasn’t been started.

But the long-term lease at the current Nunavik House location expired last March 31, sending the health board in search of a larger residence.

Plans to transform a vacant Chinese hospital in the Villeray borough of Montreal were abandoned last September after months of sometime angry disputes with Anie Samson, the mayor of Villeray, and others in the borough who said they did not want an Inuit patient boarding home in their neighbourhood.

In anticipation of the move from Nunavik House, late last year, health officials began reducing the number of pregnant women and escorts going to Montreal by insisting that pregnant women in Ungava Bay communities deliver with midwives in Kuujjuaq and only go to Montreal — unaccompanied — if medically required.

Many pregnant women from the Hudson Bay communities already deliver in Puvirnituq, Salluit or Inukjuak with midwives.

The decision to start transferring patients and escorts to the YMCA has not been widely publicized, but it’s already under criticism.

“It seems it’ll be even more dangerous for poor patients who go to hospital. It appears the drug dealers have been giving away business cards… to receive calls for patients who might want to buy drugs, such as crack, weed, and all kinds of shit..how many will be ripped off… how many are going to be killed,” said an email received by the Nunatsiaq News.

The temporary home for patients and escorts from Nunavik will be the nine-storey Y residence at 4039 Tupper in Westmount, not far from the Atwater Metro station, a gathering point for Inuit in Montreal. (PHOTO/ GOOGLE MAPS)