I am working on planning a feasibility study for the Nunavut Heritage Centre in Iqaluit. We have been unable to do any community consultation related to that project, aside from telephone calls. It's really important to bring people together in a room, to have the elders speak to the community members, to have people listen to what they have to say, and to think about how to move the project forward. That's not able to happen right now.
Communities are extremely protective of their elders, and as you know, many indigenous communities are in dire straits. Nunavut has been really hard hit in the last few weeks. I understand the breakout in Rankin Inlet occurred because they were medevaccing somebody from Arviat who had to stay in Rankin for several hours at the airport, and then infected people in Rankin on the way out. These are really fragile communities.
They were fragile before. The loss of traditional culture among Inuit people is a really serious emergency situation for Canada. The importance of these heritage centres...One just opened in Labrador and another one is under development in Labrador. Ours is in Nunavut. Much like the small rural communities we were talking about before, they have an important role in terms of coalescing the sense of community identity and pride, and connecting people to the world.
We've been talking about developing virtual educational programming for the schools, but their schools haven't been able to go online. The teachers in their schools are writing up assignments. The kids come into the school, pick them up, and take them home to do. They don't have computers at home. They don't have that kind of access. It's easy for us in the south to just say, “Well, just go online.” It doesn't happen that way, so it's a very dire situation.
The federal government has announced some funding for additional infrastructure for indigenous centres, and we're hoping we'll be able to access that for our centre, but then, of course, it's the operating funding that will always be difficult to get.