Inuit look to Greenland’s social model as Canada pursues military buildup in Arctic

As Ottawa looks to use military spending to build up infrastructure in the Far North, Inuit say they want Canada to take tips 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 is a lot that we can 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 new 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 children, subsidized daycare and education services generally offered without tuition fees.

Nuuk boasts modern schools and a hospital with four times the capacity of the one in Iqaluit — even though Nuuk’s population is only about 2.5 times the size of Iqaluit’s.

Greenland got 87 per cent of its energy from hydroelectricity in 2022, up from 59 per cent in 2000, according to 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 third live in homes in various states of disrepair. Nuuk has brightly coloured houses, cultural centres and libraries — in part because bedrock is easier to build on than the permafrost found 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 improve living standards.

“They have the same 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 way that they tackle suicide prevention as well — they have a lot of good programs in place and they are working on them.”

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Steven Arnfjord, a University of Greenland professor who leads the Centre for Arctic Welfare, said the best aspects of the territory’s social model stem from Inuit leadership deciding how to use social services funding coming from Copenhagen.

“We educate our own social workers so they understand the culture, the language, everything, when they engage with clients. It’s not a social worker from Toronto or Ottawa or anywhere else that flies up or comes up and has to readjust,” he said.

“This is not a territory. This is a nation.”

Greenlanders get most of their medical services at home, without needing to fly to Denmark, Arnfjord said. When they do need to visit Copenhagen, Greenland Inuit stay in culturally appropriate accommodations run by Inuit organizations, similar to services offered in Ottawa and Winnipeg.

From the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, Denmark made strides on fighting tuberculosis by sending a specialized ship along Greenland’s coastline to offer X-ray screenings. The boat brought sick patients to a specialized facility in Nuuk for treatment before sending them home with a thorough recovery plan.

Arnfjord compared that to the former 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. Many 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 as it should be to changes in the population, compared to mainland Denmark or Sweden, where the government is constantly tweaking social welfare systems to address new problems or changing demographics.

He added Greenland’s social services still put too much emphasis on the individual in addressing problems like addiction or homelessness, ignoring the impact of extended Inuit families.

Arnfjord said he attended a parent-teacher conference in Greenland that was framed the way it would have been in Denmark — with the student having primary responsibility for learning. He said that clashes with the Inuit ethic that expects the family to work together to support a child’s education.

“It’s not the group or the collective or the family we’re talking about. The entity becomes the single individual, and that is hurtful for an Indigenous community,” he said. “Because 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 always require flights to hospitals in the south.

While there is a shortage of comparable data, Obed said Greenland has far more doctors per capita and more medical services than Canada’s Arctic.

“We look to Greenland and see more indicators of equity — especially social equity — and the hallmarks of sustainable communities in a way that we have yet to materialize completely here in Canada,” Obed said.

Andrea Charron, director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, said Ottawa will need to improve infrastructure in Arctic communities if it wants 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 promises from the federal government. She said a military buildup will only benefit locals if it respects Inuit sovereignty and offers dedicated funding over years.

Ottawa, Charron said, tends to get enthusiastic about the North every few years before getting sidetracked.

“We need sustained attention and funding to this infrastructure, because what we tend to have is what I call Arctic distraction disorder,” she said.

“You have to be very clear about what the money can and cannot provide.”

Charron said better infrastructure also would shore up Canada’s security in the North against the risk of territorial or political incursions from foreign powers.

“Growing, healthy communities are a bulwark against foreign interference,” she said. “If you are lacking access to healthy food and you don’t have internet and 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 often comes with strings attached.”

Arnfjord added that Greenlanders have taken on a new appreciation for their social safety net in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for ownership of the territory and Washington’s talk of paying residents thousands of dollars.

“The level of trust and investment in a good welfare system, the benefits from that sort of thing — that’s something that you can’t supplement with a lump sum of money,” he said.

He recalled seeing dire treatment of Indigenous people and widespread homelessness while visiting Alaska in 2022.

“That’s not something that will be tolerated in Greenland.”