Local Jordan’s Principle backlog cleared
File photo
Staff at Onkwata’karitáhtshera have seen a marked improvement in the response time for Jordan’s Principle requests in recent months – though requests for reimbursements continue to see processing delays.
“There’s no longer a backlog, which is great news,” said Kirsten Sheridan, health programs liaison at Onkwata’karitáhtshera.
She said that the team is seeing response times of around 24-48 hours for Jordan’s Principle requests, a stark contrast from last summer, when Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) stopped processing Onkwata’karitáhtshera’s submissions.
Sheridan said that some approvals took more than six months to be cleared.
Delays of that nature could hurt families reliant on funding – Jordan’s Principle was created in memory of Jordan River Anderson, who passed away in 2005 in a Manitoba hospital having never spent a day in his home community of Norway House Cree Nation while the federal and provincial governments argued about who should fund his at-home care.
The premise of the program is to ensure that Indigenous youth can access the care and support they need without delays, with the government of first contact paying for the service upfront and the details of the bill sorted out between provincial and federal governments later.
While seeing Kahnawake’s backlogs cleared has been a positive step, Sheridan said there is still a lack of clarity about funding requests related to tuition.
Last July, ISC announced it would stop funding private school tuition, just weeks before the start of the 2025-2026 school year. $700,000 of private school tuition had been covered by Jordan’s Principle for students in the community over the previous fiscal year, which allowed students to access supports they might not otherwise have been able to find at Kahnawake Education Center (KEC) schools.
For many of those students, private school tuition means specialized care for learning difficulties or other educational support needs – Sheridan said that a large number of students who received Jordan’s Principle funding for their tuition attend Centennial Academy, which has additional resources to support students with specific learning needs associated with autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and more.
The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) stepped in to cover tuition in August, putting up more than $325,000 to support 25 students with special needs. Since then, MCK grand chief Cody Diabo has said that he fully expects ISC to reimburse those costs, but there has yet to be any commitment from ISC to repay the funds.
Sheridan said her team has not heard back from the federal or provincial governments with regards to future coverage of tuition at private school, and that she’s unsure what will happen in the next school year, given that MCK’s coverage of tuition fees isn’t intended to be a repeat occurrence.
She added that families submitting reimbursement requests for historic services are also seeing delays, with ISC often asking for additional documentation for requests associated with services from multiple years ago.
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Additional documentation is also becoming more of an expectation with requests in general, and Sheridan encourages anyone submitting a request to include as much detail as possible with their application.
“We want to really make the community aware that it’s coming down to very specific supporting documents that outline the needs of the kids,” Sheridan said. “With that, we’re going to get things approved a lot quicker.”
