The federal government said on Thursday it is committing $1.55 billion to Jordan’s Principle for the coming year, but did not reveal any of the changes Liberals are promising.
Nor was there any mention of NWT schools as Indigenous services minister Mandy Gull-Masty made the announcement and took questions from Ottawa-based reporters.
In an interview with Cabin Radio last week, Gull-Masty said coming changes would be aimed at reducing the paperwork burden on families and simplifying the process of acquiring Jordan’s Principle funding, which is designed to ensure First Nations children can equitably access the same services as anyone else.
On Thursday, Gull-Masty said the detail of proposed changes was still several weeks away from being made public.
The $1.55 billion committed on Thursday will cover the period until the end of March 2027. Gull-Masty described the sum as being “on par” with amounts Ottawa has previously allocated.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
About $10 billion has been assigned to Jordan’s Principle since it was introduced in 2016. Last year, Ottawa ultimately budgeted about $1.8 billion for the program but only after an injection of supplemental cash.
The federal budget approved late last year initially specified a sum of just over $1 billion for the coming financial year.
Answering a question about the size of the fund set aside, Gull-Masty told reporters on Thursday that her experience of Jordan’s Principle “teaches a valuable lesson that when you are trying to offer a service, it is the responsibility of federal and provincial governments to work together to close that gap.”
“That’s what I’m focused on. I want to be sure there’s clarity in that space, that everybody around the table knows and understands they’re able to get access to these services with continuity and stability,” she said.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
“But for today, really, the first part of this announcement is to ensure that funding is in place and that it’s understood that it’s available to them.”
The NWT government has spent more than a year trying to convince Canada that territories should not be treated by Jordan’s Principle as though they were provinces. NWT ministers have repeatedly voiced the concern that Ottawa administers the program as though the territory has many reserves or the budget of a province, neither of which are the case.
What happens to Jordan’s Principle is significant to the NWT in part because changes made a year ago had the effect of stripping funding from various schools to pay for educational assistants.
Since those changes were announced, more than 200 positions in schools across the territory have been lost or jeopardized, with more losses possible at the end of this academic year. The GNWT has stepped in with emergency funding but did so expressly on the basis that it would not last beyond one year.
Ottawa has since said individual families should apply for assistance rather than school boards, though what the practical outcome of that would be – for example, in terms of school staffing – is not yet clear.
“While it is maybe not immediately responding to what the school boards are looking like, our intention is to make sure that the offer of service is still readily available to the children that are using that program,” Gull-Masty told Cabin Radio last week.
