AKLAVIK - Hundreds of NWT residents have signed a petition to save Aklavik's long-term care centre after the territorial government announced two months ago it would shutter the facility and cut 14 jobs in the community.

Alannis McKee, a Grade 9 student in Aklavik, has been circulating a hard copy of a petition to keep the community's long-term care facility open. The online and hard copies of the petition have collected more than 400 signatures. - photo courtesy of Alannis McKee

Eight full-time and six part-time employees will be out of work once plans take hold to turn the Joe Greenland Centre into an independent living seniors' home, but the number of jobs at stake is not all that has residents protesting the closure. They're worried for their elders and, ultimately, for the future of a historied hub that has promised to "never say die."

Now with more than 400 signatures, the petition is the brainchild of Robbie Pascal, a Yellowknife resident who is originally from Aklavik. He fears the shutdown of the centre's eight long-term care rooms will trigger another exodus of residents young and old from the community.

"A lot of people from Aklavik have had to move out already because there is no work there and now the people that will be laid off, they may just have to do the same," he said. "It's really not a good thing, not just for the community, but especially for the elders. There are elders from the community who may want to stay home but now they can't because they do need care."

Built in 1977, the Joe Greenland Centre has for the past 40 years housed elders from across the Beaufort Delta. Of its 15 total units, seven are currently owned by the NWT Housing Corporation. Although the housing corp. doesn't yet have a renovation timeline, it plans to remodel the building as a seniors' home once the long-term care portion is shut down. The government hasn't said when that will be.

Stephen Pretty, the housing corp.'s manager of strategic planning, policy and communications, said renovating the building is the best way the corporation can provide more public housing in Aklavik, where 25 per cent of all elders' public housing – 18 units – was found to be inadequate according to the NWT's 2009 Community Survey.

"We don't have any plans in our current capital plans to do a replacement seniors' housing facility so it really meets an immediate need in the community for a housing option for seniors and, in this case, public rental housing," Pretty said. "It's something we can take advantage of given that those units are being shut down."

But with limited resources for home support, most Beaufort Delta residents requiring future long-term care will be shifted to the already overloaded Inuvik Regional Hospital – a bothersome prospect for 14-year-old Alannis McKee, whose mother stands to lose her job as manager of the Centre. The Grade 9 student at Aklavik's Moose Kerr School is helping circulate a hard copy of Pascal's online petition and in the past month she has collected more than 300 signatures in Aklavik alone.

Though her family will be affected by the closure, McKee said she's also trying to save it to keep yet another piece of Aklavik's history from slipping away.

"It's really important to have the voices heard of many elders as well as the youth, because those are their grandparents. That's the history of Aklavik and if that closes then a lot of it is going to have to leave here," she said. "Lots of elders, they chose to stay there (at the centre) and they don't really want to go to Inuvik because it's a different kind of setting there – it's more of a hospital. It's really important to the community and a lot of people are feeling bad that they're trying to close it. They're saying that it's a lot like residential schools again."

A spokesperson from the Department of Health and Social Services had not returned calls before deadline to further explain its decision to shut down the long-term care units or to provide the date they are scheduled to close.

The Union of Northern Workers has spoken out in support of efforts to save the centre, posting on its website Jan. 5 that it would back petitioners attending a to-be-scheduled public meeting with MLAs in Aklavik.

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