As Ottawa looks to make use of military spending to accumulate infrastructure within the Far North, Inuit say they need Canada to take suggestions from Greenland — where a Nordic social model adapted to local needs has built health, housing and education services deemed superior to anything in Canada’s Arctic.
“There’s quite a bit that we will learn from them,” said Lukasi Whiteley-Tukkiapik, who leads Saqijuq, an Inuit wellness organization in Kujjuaq, Que.
Speaking last week on a charter flight from Montreal to Greenland’s capital Nuuk, where he attended the official opening of Canada’s recent consulate, Whiteley-Tukkiapik said services in his community — a hub for northern Quebec — are inferior to those available in Iqaluit.
Nuuk, meanwhile, is “generations ahead of us” in providing Inuit-led social services in well-maintained buildings, he said.
As a self-governing territory of Denmark, Greenland has universal health care and unemployment insurance, free dentistry for youngsters, subsidized daycare and education services generally offered without tuition fees.
Nuuk boasts modern schools and a hospital with 4 times the capability of the one in Iqaluit — though Nuuk’s population is simply about 2.5 times the scale of Iqaluit’s.
Greenland got 87 per cent of its energy from hydroelectricity in 2022, up from 59 per cent in 2000, in keeping with the British think tank Ember. Nunavut relies almost entirely on fossil fuels like diesel.
The 2021 census found 53.1 per cent of Nunavut’s population lives in overcrowded housing, while a 3rd live in homes in various states of disrepair. Nuuk has brightly colored houses, cultural centres and libraries — partly because bedrock is simpler to construct on than the permafrost present in Iqaluit.
The Danish territory still grapples with suicide and tuberculosis — social problems it shares with Inuit communities in Canada — but Whiteley-Tukkiapik said it’s doing more to enhance living standards.
“They’ve the identical social issues (but) there’s more of an importance and it’s more on the front burner for them,” he said.
“Their health network, the social programs, the best way that they tackle suicide prevention as well — they’ve a whole lot of good programs in place they usually are working on them.”
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Steven Arnfjord, a University of Greenland professor who leads the Centre for Arctic Welfare, said the most effective elements of the territory’s social model stem from Inuit leadership deciding tips on how to use social services funding coming from Copenhagen.
“We educate our own social staff in order that they understand the culture, the language, every thing, after they engage with clients. It’s not a social employee from Toronto or Ottawa or anywhere else that flies up or comes up and has to readjust,” he said.
“This will not be a territory. It is a nation.”
Greenlanders get most of their medical services at home, without having to fly to Denmark, Arnfjord said. After they do must visit Copenhagen, Greenland Inuit stay in culturally appropriate accommodations run by Inuit organizations, much like services offered in Ottawa and Winnipeg.
From the mid-Fifties until the early Seventies, Denmark made strides on fighting tuberculosis by sending a specialized ship along Greenland’s coastline to supply X-ray screenings. The boat brought sick patients to a specialized facility in Nuuk for treatment before sending them home with a radical recovery plan.
Arnfjord compared that to the previous practice in Canada’s Far North, where people suspected of being infected with tuberculosis were once routinely sent to southern hospitals, sometimes in cramped conditions. Lots of those patients never made it home because they died down south or ended up staying there.
Still, Arnfjord said, Greenland’s social system isn’t as responsive appropriately to changes within the population, in comparison with mainland Denmark or Sweden, where the federal government is always tweaking social welfare systems to deal with recent problems or changing demographics.
He added Greenland’s social services still put an excessive amount of emphasis on the person in addressing problems like addiction or homelessness, ignoring the impact of prolonged Inuit families.
Arnfjord said he attended a parent-teacher conference in Greenland that was framed the best way it will have been in Denmark — with the scholar having primary responsibility for learning. He said that clashes with the Inuit ethic that expects the family to work together to support a baby’s education.
“It’s not the group or the collective or the family we’re talking about. The entity becomes the only individual, and that’s hurtful for an Indigenous community,” he said. “Since it’s an installed version of welfare, it has this colonial history about it.”
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami president Natan Obed represents Inuit from 51 communities across the Canadian Arctic, where cancer care and childbirth almost all the time require flights to hospitals within the south.
While there may be a shortage of comparable data, Obed said Greenland has much more doctors per capita and more medical services than Canada’s Arctic.
“We glance to Greenland and see more indicators of equity — especially social equity — and the hallmarks of sustainable communities in a way that we have now yet to materialize completely here in Canada,” Obed said.
Andrea Charron, director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies on the University of Manitoba, said Ottawa might want to improve infrastructure in Arctic communities if it desires to expand its military footprint — because military bases and airfields only function well in areas with adequate housing and services.
She cautioned that Inuit communities are accustomed to empty guarantees from the federal government. She said a military buildup will only profit locals if it respects Inuit sovereignty and offers dedicated funding over years.
Ottawa, Charron said, tends to get obsessed with the North every few years before getting sidetracked.
“We’d like sustained attention and funding to this infrastructure, because what we are likely to have is what I call Arctic distraction disorder,” she said.
“You’ve gotten to be very clear about what the cash can and can’t provide.”
Charron said higher infrastructure also would shore up Canada’s security within the North against the chance of territorial or political incursions from foreign powers.
“Growing, healthy communities are a bulwark against foreign interference,” she said. “When you are lacking access to healthy food and also you don’t have web and also you don’t have clean drinking water, then it’s much easier for nefarious actors to say, ‘Well, we’ll provide this for you.’ But it surely often comes with strings attached.”
Arnfjord added that Greenlanders have taken on a brand new appreciation for his or her social safety net within the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for ownership of the territory and Washington’s talk of paying residents 1000’s of dollars.
“The extent of trust and investment in a great welfare system, the advantages from that type of thing — that’s something which you could’t complement with a lump sum of cash,” he said.
He recalled seeing dire treatment of Indigenous people and widespread homelessness while visiting Alaska in 2022.
“That’s not something that will likely be tolerated in Greenland.”