Ottawa has stopped lending out pieces from its multi-million dollar Indigenous Art Collection after auditors found more than 100 works had gone missing — and after the department admitted police were never called to track down the loss.Blacklock's Reporter says Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty told the Commons committee on indigenous and northern affairs that the long-standing practice of sending artworks to federal offices has been shut down. She said new safeguards are being put in place after an internal audit revealed 132 pieces were “not accounted for” in a collection valued at $14.4 million.Conservative MP Jamie Schmale pressed Alty on what was being done to address what he called weak oversight and lax security. Alty acknowledged pieces had gone missing and said some losses dated back as far as the 1980s. In a few cases, she said, items were later “refound” due to sloppy paperwork or duplicate records..Alty would not say how many of the vanished works were suspected thefts but said the department has tightened its recordkeeping and inventory systems. She added that the collection is now stored in a restricted, climate-controlled facility with 24-hour monitoring and motion detection.Auditors, however, said the collection had long been vulnerable, citing storage areas with no functioning security cameras and other works kept in privately leased spaces in Gatineau that hadn’t been inspected. They noted some missing items had known last locations but could not be recovered, partly because recovery policies were unclear.The audit warned that the inability to properly monitor the collection increased the risk of theft going undetected. The department spends $1.2 million a year on storage and staffing for the collection and budgets roughly $100,000 annually for new acquisitions — even as more than a hundred existing pieces remain missing.
