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

As Ottawa looks to use military money to build infrastructure in the Far North, Inuit say they want Canada to take tips from Greenland — where the Nordic social model has been adapted to local needs and has health, housing and education services that are considered superior to anything in the Canadian Arctic.

“We have a lot to learn from them,” said Lukasi Whiteley-Tukkiapik, who leads Saqijuq, an Inuit health organization in Kujjuaq, Que.

Speaking last week on a chartered flight from Montreal to the Greenlandic capital of Nuuk, where he attended the official opening of Canada’s new embassy, ​​Whiteley-Tukkiapik said the services in his community – a northern Quebec base – are less than those available in Iqaluit.

Nuuk, on the other hand, 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 health care and unemployment insurance, free dental care for children, subsidized day care and education services that are often offered without tuition fees.

Nuuk boasts modern schools and a hospital with four times the capacity of Iqaluit – although Nuuk’s population is only 2.5 times that of Iqaluit’s.

Greenland will get 87 percent of its energy from hydropower by 2022, up from 59 percent in 2000, according to British think tank Ember. Nunavut is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels such as diesel.

The 2021 census found that 53.1 percent of Nunavut’s population lives in overcrowded housing, with a third living in unimproved provincial housing. Nuuk has brightly colored houses, cultural centers and libraries – in part because the bedrock is easier to build on than the permafrost found in Iqaluit.

The Danish community still faces suicides and tuberculosis — social problems shared by Inuit communities in Canada — but Whiteley-Tukkiapik said it is doing more to improve living standards.

“They have the same social problems (but) something is more important and at the forefront for them,” he said.

“Their health network, communication programs, how they deal with suicide prevention – they have a lot of good programs that they’re doing and they’re working on them.”

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

“We train our social workers to understand the culture, the language, everything, when they interact with clients. It’s not a social worker from Toronto or Ottawa or anywhere else that flies in or comes in and has to adjust,” he said.

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

Greenlanders get most of their medical services at home, without the need to fly to Denmark, Arnfjord said. When they need to visit Copenhagen, Greenland Inuit live in culturally appropriate accommodations run by Inuit organizations, such as services provided in Ottawa and Winnipeg.

From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, Denmark made strides in the fight against tuberculosis by sending a special ship off the coast of Greenland to provide X-ray tests. The boat brought the patients to a special center in Nuuk for treatment before sending them home with a full recovery plan.

Arnfjord compared that to earlier practice in Canada’s Far North, where suspected tuberculosis patients were often sent to hospitals in the south, sometimes in overcrowded conditions. Many of those patients never returned home because they died in the south or ended up living there.

However, Arnfjord said, Greenland’s welfare system does not respond as well as it should to population changes, compared to Denmark or Sweden, where the government constantly adjusts welfare programs to deal with new problems or changing populations.

He added that Greenland’s social services still place too much emphasis on the individual in dealing with problems such as addiction or homelessness, ignoring the impact of extended Inuit families.

Arnfjord said he went to a parent-teacher conference in Greenland that was set up the way it would be in Denmark – the student is responsible for learning. He said that goes against Inuit values ​​that expect the family to work together to support a child’s education.

“It is not a group or a group or a family that we are talking about. The organization becomes one person, and that harms the indigenous community,” he said. “Because it’s an embedded version of socialism, it has a colonial history to it.”

The president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Natan Obed, represents Inuit from 51 communities across the Canadian Arctic, where cancer care and childbirth often require flights to hospitals in the south.

Although there is a lack of comparable data, Obed said Greenland has more doctors per capita and more medical services than the Canadian Arctic.

“We looked at Greenland and saw many indicators of equality – especially social equality – and signs of sustainable societies in a way that we have yet to fully see here in Canada,” said Obed.

Andrea Charron, director of the Center for Defense 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 base – because military bases and airfields only work well in areas with adequate housing and services.

He warned that Inuit communities are used to empty promises from the federal government. He said the military build-up would only benefit local people if it respected Inuit sovereignty and provided dedicated funding over the years.

Ottawa, Charron said, used to be enthusiastic about the North every few years before being interrupted.

“We need attention and funding for this infrastructure, because what we often have is what I call Arctic distraction disorder,” he said.

“You have to be very clear about what money can and can’t give you.”

Charron said better infrastructure would strengthen Canada’s security in the North against the threat of territorial or political intrusion from foreign countries.

“Growing, healthy communities are a buffer against foreign interference,” she said. “When you don’t have access to healthy food and you don’t have the Internet and you don’t have clean drinking water, it’s very easy for disrespectful players to say, ‘Well, we’ll give you this.’ But it usually comes with strings attached.”

Arnfjord added that Greenlanders have gained a new appreciation for their social safety net following US President Donald Trump’s demands for territorial ownership and Washington’s talk of paying citizens thousands of dollars.

“The level of trust and investment in a good social system, the benefits of that kind of thing – that’s something you can’t add to with a lump sum of money,” he said.

He recalled seeing the mistreatment of Native people and widespread homelessness when he visited Alaska in 2022.

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