• Employment-related programs have a very narrow definition of what employment is, particularly within the context of the northern territories where the traditional subsistence economy is still important. For example Nunavut Arctic College would like to deliver a land skills program which would enable young men to learn from Elders how to survive on the land, how to hunt and trap, and be much more economically self sufficient. This should be considered an employability program but it is not under the federal government definition and therefore the college cannot access funding to run this program.
• The requirement of the LMDAs that only EI eligible people benefit from training programs is very limiting in rural and remote contexts with very high unemployment rates because there may not be many people in these regions who are EI eligible. This limits what colleges and institutes serving these regions can do with the federal funding that is available.
• In addition, HRSDC EI funds are allocated through students and are not project-specific or block funds; as such colleges and institutes must depend on having enough students in order to run the programs. However these must be EI eligible students and as the College of the North Atlantic pointed out, if Aboriginal students lack credentials and are counselled to quit their current jobs for retraining, they would not be EI eligible and thus would not qualify for HRSDC programs. For the most part colleges and institutes have to be creative in pooling resources to make Aboriginal projects happen. Projects that can be block funded are easiest to make happen however institutions often get into the complexities that policy will only allow a certain component of a project to be funded.
• It is often hard for institutions serving rural and remote regions to access federal funding for labour market development and training because the geographic and demographic reality in these regions does not fit the funding criteria. In order to access this type of federal funding, institutions are sometimes required to design a training program to meet the funder’s needs which is contrary to goals of education that programs be designed to meet learners’ needs.

• Number of Students in Programs

One of the challenges for regions of the country with small Aboriginal populations is that the small number of Aboriginal students enrolled in some programs does not make the programs financially viable but serve an extremely important need.