President of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami Natan Obed joins Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as they co-chair a meeting of the Inuit-Crown Partnership Committee in Ottawa on Thursday, May 9, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA - The head of Canada's national Inuit organization is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step in to save a program that helps fund services for Inuit kids.

In a letter sent to Trudeau last week, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami President Natan Obed called on the prime minister to "clearly signal" his "government's commitment" to continue funding for the Inuit Child First Initiative (ICFI), which is set to end on March 31.

"We are alarmed by the growing likelihood of an abrupt curtailing of funding for the program and the consequences this will have for our families and communities," Obed wrote on Feb. 12.

"lf program funding is not renewed, many families will again be left vulnerable to the systemic racial discrimination that characterizes health and education service delivery in Inuit Nunangat."

The letter comes after Obed said Inuit treaty organizations have been negotiating with Ottawa on a long-term approach to funding the ICFI, which was launched in 2019 to support Jordan's Principle.

Jordan's Principle stems from a human rights complaint filed by the Assembly of First Nations and the First Nations Family and Caring Society in 2007. They argued First Nations kids were being denied services equal to those available to other children as a result of constant jurisdictional disputes between the federal and provincial governments.

Under Jordan's Principle, families are to apply for and receive funding as they need it, and the provinces and federal government are expected to sort out who pays for it later.

ICFI funds an array of services in Nunavut alone, including access to speech-language pathologists, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder treatment services and school food programs, said the Arctic Children and Youth Foundation (ACYF), which helps facilitate ICFI applications.

ICFI also helps fund food voucher programs. Eighteen of Nunavut's 25 communities are signed up, with more 13,000 kids enrolled. Food voucher programs give families $500 a month per child to help buy food, plus another $250 for kids younger than four.

On Tuesday, the City of Iqaluit warned its residents to prepare for the program's end.

The ACYF recently surveyed Nunavut communities on the impact of losing the program and shared the responses with The Canadian Press.

"A lot of people depend on ICFI now … If it stops, a lot of children will probably rely on the soup kitchen again,” said one senior administrative officer said in the ACYF survey.

"I have two kids with anemia. We haven’t gone to the health centre since the program started. That’s a nice change,” said another community member.

ICFI was always set to sunset on March 31, and with Parliament prorogued the government will have only a short window to get appropriations passed to keep the program alive into the new fiscal year.

But Obed said Inuit started worrying about the program's survival well before Parliament was prorogued on Jan. 6.

"We felt as though there was a distancing happening in the last six months that has become more acute in the last couple of months," Obed told The Canadian Press.

He said Inuit paused negotiations six months ago so they could get a clear direction from Ottawa on what it was willing to take on long-term, and focused on working out what a shared responsibility model would look like.

"It's been hard, though, to negotiate that shared model when we don't have the clear terms and conditions from the federal government about what they're willing to negotiate and what they're not," Obed said.

Obed said he's had good dialogue with Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu but the minister hasn't been able to give clear direction on the program either.

"I hope this is not just a cold calculation of political priority, where the country has decided that it has spent too much money on Indigenous peoples, and this is one of the areas where it would need to start tightening the purse strings," he said.

Nunavut Health Minister John Main said he's asked Hajdu about the program's future but has received no response.

"It's causing me quite a good deal of concern, not knowing, because I'm looking at the health aspects to it and all the benefits," Main said.

"Like on the nutrition side, we know one of the key things we're up against is food insecurity here in Nunavut."

Newly-elected Nunavut Tunngavik President Jeremy Tunraluk said he's also received no response from Hajdu's office on the file.

"We've reached out multiple times … It really is very concerning that we're not getting any responses from her office," Tunraluk said.

Anispiragas Piragasanathar, a spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada, said in an email that the department has been meeting weekly with ITK and Inuit treaty organizations since October 2024 to co-develop a long-term approach to the Inuit Child First Initiative.

Piragasanathar said a steering committee gathered in January for a two-day meeting that included ITK, Inuit treaty organizations and the federal department.

"ISC remains committed to the co-development process and will continue to engage Inuit partners with updates as more information is made available," Piragasanathar said.

The Canadian Press has reached out to the Prime Minister's Office for comment but has not yet received a response.

In a previous interview with The Canadian Press, Hajdu said Ottawa is committed to co-developing a long-term model for the program.

"I know that there's a lot of anxiety related to where the government is politically right now," she said.

"But I can tell you that the commitment of this government is to continue to support not only ICFI, but also the self-determined implementation."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 18, 2025.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2025