Something ancient from my notes(1996) that may be interest: Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, Greenland, which is Danish territory, was regarded by some Canadian thinkers as a model of how we should do things in our own Canadian Arctic. I visited Greenland at about that time and came away appalled at what I had seen. Under what was called the "G-60 Plan" which was supposed to both develop Greenland and make it more efficient to operate, small villages had been phased out, their people moved into large multi-story apartment complexes in Godthob (now Nuuk), Jacobshavn, and other larger centres. Some of the villagers had brought their dogs with them and had tied them up behind those huge buildings. The dogs, having nothing else to do, howled all night. The villagers' children, meanwhile, roamed the streets at all hours.
I came away from Greenland marvelling both at the Danish government's penchant for efficiency and its inhumanity. I wondered why Denmark had treated its Arctic people so differently from the way we had treated our own. In discussing this with Canadian officials, I concluded that we were not trying to treat our Arctic all that differently, it's just that the Danes had succeeded where we had failed. Because of our perpetual muddle, we were incapable of doing what they had done. Meanwhile, our small Arctic villages survived and in some cases thrived largely because we were unable to focus on putting them out of business. I've always felt that there was a lesson here for the larger Canadian picture. Ed
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