Worries linger about what comes when funding runs out at end of fiscal year
Joanne Charney said she was “overjoyed” when she found out she would be able to travel to Yellowknife from Fort Good Hope, N.W.T., to see her mental health counsellor again, at least for a few more months.
“When I heard the news, I was over the moon,” she said. “I’m very hopeful for myself and for others who need this program.”
Charney is one of many residential school survivors and their family members in the N.W.T. and Nunavut who access mental health counselling through Indigenous Services Canada’s Indian Residential School Resolution Health Support Program.
For some, like Charney, a key component has been the refund of travel costs to attend counselling in-person, either for clients to fly to their counsellors or for counsellors to fly into communities.
On Wednesday, Indigenous Services Canada told CBC in an email it had secured funding to keep paying for travel until the end of the fiscal year, after previously telling counsellors on July 24 that travel would no longer be paid for and facing criticism for the decision.
Funding for counsellors to take on new clients and approve more hours is also expected to expire in March 2027, according to ISC’s July 24 email. Some now worry about the fate of the program beyond that.
In an email to CBC, an ISC spokesperson wrote that the department is working on a plan for the coming years.
Charney has been in counselling since 2007, and said she still needs the program. She credits counselling she has received through it with helping her become a better parent.
“I loved my children with all my heart, I still do, but I just didn’t know how to parent because of the residential school,” she said. “There was no love and there was no caring, and so I was just so messed up.”
She said the counselling has also helped her through the various settlements and lawsuits that have come over time, like the ongoing Federal Indian Hospitals Settlement.
“We have to go back into the past and revisit the pain and the trauma, and it’s not easy,” she said. “But then when that happens, I have my counsellor. I’ve got a place I can go.”
Charney said she still sees many in her home community who also need this program and are still learning it even exists.
With the funding only secured to keep the program going until March 2027, however, she is thinking ahead.
“If I only got until March, then I’m thinking I will put in as much as I can into my healing.”
She said that whatever happens next should be communicated more directly to clients by the government itself, and should come with more advance notice so she is not “left in the dark,” as she felt over the past few days.
For Ruth Niptanatiak-Wilcox, the initial news that travel would no longer be possible had been “devastating” and “so hurtful.”
Niptanatiak-Wilcox lives in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and for the last fifteen years or so, has relied on counsellors travelling to her home community.
She said counselling has helped her not only to “become a better person” as a residential school survivor, but also to work through the loss of her son to suicide right around when she started counselling.
News of the new funding has eased her mind, but has also brought up mixed emotions.
