Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 9 - Evidence - June 7, 2016
OTTAWA, Tuesday, June 7, 2016
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 9:01 a.m. to study best practices and on- going challenges relating to housing in First Nation and Inuit communities in Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Northwest Territories.
Senator Lillian Eva Dyck (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning. I would like to welcome all honourable senators and members of the public who are watching this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, either here in the room or listening via the web.
I would like to acknowledge, for the sake of reconciliation, that we are meeting on the unceded lands of the Algonquin peoples. My name is Lillian Dyck and I have the privilege and honour of chairing the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples. I invite my fellow senators to introduce themselves starting on my left.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Sandra Lovelace Nicholas, New Brunswick.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
Senator Ataullahjan: Salma Ataullahjan, Ontario.
Senator Enverga: Tobias Enverga, Ontario.
Senator Tannas: Scott Tannas, Alberta.
The Chair: Thank you, senators. The mandate of this committee is to examine legislation in the matter relating to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada generally. This morning, we are continuing to hear testimony on the northern housing study with a mandate to study best practices and ongoing challenges relating to housing in First Nation and Inuit communities in Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Northwest Territories.
We are very pleased today to have representatives of Nordregio via video conferencing from Stockholm, Sweden to speak to us on the northern housing conditions of different countries. We have Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, Senior Research Fellow, he specializes in regional development, regional analysis, statistical analysis, GIS, Arctic and Northern regions. We also have Ryan Weber, Senior Research Advisor.
As I said, they are joining us by video conference.
Gentlemen, if you would like to proceed with your presentation, please go ahead, and then the senators will ask you questions. Thank you.
Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, Senior Research Fellow, Specialised in regional development, regional analysis, statistical analysis, GIS, Arctic and Northern regions, Nordregio: Thank you for this opportunity to talk about issues we are working on in Nordic countries, including Greenland, Faroe Islands and other regions in the North. My name is Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, and I am senior researcher here at Nordregio but I also have been working in Greenland for many years, doing statistics, analysis on development, among other things, in connection with the organization processes that take place in Greenland and in the Faroe Islands.
Ryan Weber, Senior Research Advisor, Nordregio: My name is Ryan Weber. I would also like to thank you for the opportunity to join you today. As Rasmus mentioned, as a senior adviser my main tasks are related, in fact, to land use planning and regional development more broadly. However, I have worked on a number of projects both with Rasmus and independently dealing with the issues of housing and specifically urbanization processes, service accessibility and quality of life in the Arctic context.
I'm happy to join Rasmus here and support him and to answer the questions that you have for us today.
Mr. Rasmussen: If it's all right with you, I would like to start with some comments on the three issues that are essential for the Aboriginal Peoples Committee and to try to provide some perspective on, first of all, Greenland and the Faroe Islands but also the other Nordic countries with regard to these questions. I think these issues have been key in connection with housing development for the governments in the Nordic countries.
I should mention that Nordregio is a research institute owned by the Nordic Council of Ministers, and one of our tasks is to provide comparative analysis between and from the Nordic countries and thereby providing data that could lead to best practices in connection with the issues that we are dealing with and, in this case, housing issues.
I don't know how much of the material you have been provided with — for instance, the report on housing development in the Arctic — but the first of two issues that I would like to bring forward is that of changes in the settlement structure. Urbanization processes are leading to a concentration of population in fewer settlements, and the reduction in their size, especially of the smaller places. Of course, these two aspects create very different challenges for the communities in this situation.
Another issue is the availability of skills, crafts and knowledge about local housing development, and to what extent it is actually possible to rely on local companies and people in developing new infrastructure, new housing structures and new kinds of buildings. Here we can see, again, in the case of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, for instance, that the major challenge you would find in the smaller places is that handy craftsmen would be very much needed in connection with the larger places. But that attracts these persons away from smaller places and thereby limits the possibility of innovation and new technologies from being applied in those smaller places.
Mr. Weber: I would add an additional perspective to this. In a lot of the research that we have been focusing on specifically dealing with the issues of planning for development in Arctic communities, specifically in the Nordic region, a main issue for us has been how we conceive this issue of supporting the development of housing.
Do we see it from the relatively narrow perspective of being a housing issue or are we integrating this issue of housing more broadly within the local development perspectives? What I mean by that is: Are we simply providing new housing stock, or the development or improvement of housing stock? Or are these being integrated with opportunities to address broader development challenges that are being faced by these populations in these communities?
Specifically, we are dealing with issues of accessibility to daily and public services, recreational opportunities and knowledge and development opportunities. So how can we look at the issue of housing as being a good or a public right but very well integrated with the perspectives of providing a quality of life and the basis of opportunity, especially for the youth in these populations to be engaged both locally in society and in their own personal development? When we have looked at this issue from the urban development perspective, this has been a main focus for us: How do we look at the issue of housing and integrate that with the other main local issues that are facing development? Rasmus highlighted a key point in that perspective, which was this issue of providing local skills and local jobs in the development of the housing stock. This is only one example of how you can ensure that the benefits of these types of investments are not only felt locally but are supporting the local economy, both specifically in the actual projects themselves and, more generally, within the broader development and growth perspectives.
Mr. Rasmussen: I would like to follow up on this by looking at question number 2 on our list. This is about the financing opportunities and challenges in connection with the development of housing. If I could give a very short, historic view on this, the development during the 1950s and 1960s and up through the 1970s was, in all of the Nordic countries, very much related to company development. That is on three levels: on the regional level, national level and, last but not least, on the municipal level. Up through the 1980s and 1990s, this was the backbone of the whole financial policy in most of the countries, but, since the late 1980s and up through the 1990s, a delegation of responsibility to the local population in the different settlements has developed, which means that if you, for instance, in the case of Greenland, go back 30 years, most of the houses, most of the dwellings, were owned either by municipalities or by the government in Greenland. It has changed significantly during the last 15 years, so that today the ownership of houses, ownership of apartments and, in the end, also collective ownership of larger dwellings has changed a lot. The housing situation has increasingly moved towards the private ownership of apartments or houses. These people are thereby owners and are jointly responsible for the maintenance of the places, and this seems to have had a very positive effect on the towns, cities and villages.
This is definitely a key issue in connection with development in the North in the Nordic countries and among, for instance, Sami people in Norway, Finland and Sweden, but also among the inhabitants, the Greenlanders, living in Greenland.
Do you have any questions in this regard? We have a few more comments to add, but we would like to follow up on any questions in this context.
The Chair: Okay, thank you. We will now turn to the senators who wish to ask questions, and we'll start with Senator Oh.
Senator Oh: Thank you, gentlemen. My question to you is: Throughout this study our committee has heard about examples of new and innovative housing technologies developed by the private sector to address the housing needs in Northern communities.
Can you tell the committee: In Greenland, what is the role of the private sector in developing new and innovative housing technologies to meet housing needs?
Mr. Rasmussen: Well, if we look at the last 15 years, the connection between the building and construction industries and the owners — that is, the people who are going to live in the apartments or in the buildings — has been extremely important. First of all, it creates good jobs and good opportunities for families that are related to the construction industries. Furthermore, there are good examples of development of new building materials that relate to the local conditions for the communities. In that way it limits the import of building materials from other parts of the world and then it makes sensible use of local raw materials that are available. For instance, instead of bricks, ordinary bricks that we know from most of the world and definitely from Canada and from the southern part of Nordic countries, in Greenland, a building block called siku block has been developed locally and used in more recent construction in order to take advantage of the local material and of the local people involved in the construction sector.
Senator Oh: Any more comments?
The Chair: Additional comment? Okay. Do you have another question, Senator Oh?
Senator Oh: Yes. In your view, to what extent is innovative technology essential to housing sustainability in the North?
Mr. Rasmussen: If we take a view, a broad view of all of the Nordic countries, this has been a key issue for community development in the North, simply, again, because it provides jobs. It provides the possibility of adjusting the construction according to the local material and, again, enables people to reconstruct or add to existing buildings in one way or the other. It goes for most of the Nordic countries, in the North, that wood is a major building material, and the good thing about that is the simple thing that people living in houses are able to maintain and develop, add to the construction and add buildings to the construction in the North.
Mr. Weber: I would like to follow up on that point with a question to you, Senator Oh. Which specific technologies are you referring to? Are you referring to specific building technologies in terms of the construction of new housing or a more broad perspective on technologies?
Senator Oh: Perhaps you can talk about the materials that are used. Is it brick construction or mostly prefabricated?
Mr. Weber: I think, to answer those types of questions, it would be best for your committee to have those discussions with architects and building design specialists. Our background is in the planning process and the policy and development locations of those processes, and we can certainly point to the technological perspectives seen as the technological perspectives in terms of planning of these housing developments.
Rasmus mentioned funding and support from the public and private sector in the development of these housing projects but also from the urban development perspective, innovative approaches to looking at the issue of housing development and specifically in relation to not seeing this only as a housing issue per se but linking this together with other more typical notions of land use development or urban development, where you're ensuring that these housing projects are being developed with the appropriate and suitable services and amenities that are needed to support daily life in these communities.
That's on the physical basis of ensuring that distances are short enough to respond to the weather and climatic conditions of the region in question but also that the basic services are there so that these people are meeting their daily needs, as well as intellectual and personal development needs, with this availability of recreational opportunities, after- school opportunities and these types of issues.
You can take this issue from the perspective of hard technologies or building technologies but also the issue of innovative and technological developments in the planning, development and policy process are very important to consider, as well.
Mr. Rasmussen: I would like to add just in relation to Greenland. Knowledge is an important issue in this connection and there is a general university in the capital of Greenland. But I would like to point to a branch of the Technological University of Denmark that is situated in Sisimiut on the west coast, because that's one of the places where there is the inclusion of new technologies and materials, and training of local youth in Greenland for applying these materials and these techniques in further development.
I would also like to mention that one of issues that's very hot in this connection in Greenland is the development of renewable energy sources. There is access to hydro power, but during the last couple of years, solar panels, windmills and things like that have been added to a much broader view of how new energy resources might be applicable in connection with new constructions in villages, towns and cities.
Senator Raine: I have a supplementary question. I would like you to clarify the type of brick that was developed up there. What is it called?
Mr. Rasmussen: It's called siku, which means "ice'' in Greenlandic. They are not constructed with ice, but it's a construction where you have a core of insulation material and a cement block around that, which makes it stable and easy to build with. At the same time, it has a high quality of insulation in connection with cold areas in Greenland.
Senator Raine: And the material for the cement for the concrete in the brick comes from local sources?
Mr. Rasmussen: Unfortunately, it's imported mainly from Denmark, but all the gravel and whatever is used in making this concrete are from local sources. So far, it has not been viable to establish a plant for producing cement in Greenland.
Senator Raine: Our construction is mostly made with wood frame, so we're not so familiar in Canada with building with bricks, but I know that's very common in Europe. I guess it has the advantage of being more finished, if you like, locally, so the transportation of the building materials could be less.
Mr. Rasmussen: I would like to point to one more thing in that connection, because usually when you build in Greenland, there are not any forests in Greenland, which means this is not a source commonly available — you need to import it — while most of the materials for construction with concrete are available. Furthermore, when you build a wooden house in Greenland, you need to have the basement built by means of other materials; otherwise, it might rot and create problems in this connection. So the basement part is with blocks, the concrete blocks are siku blocks, then on top of that you will have a two- or three-storey-high building made out of wood. Or they might be individual houses.
Senator Raine: In terms of technology, our study has looked at building modular houses off-site in the South and perhaps shipping them to the North fully built. So those are different perspectives. Also, our study is finding that there is a shortage of skilled workers to work in the construction. Thank you very much for that further information.
Mr. Weber: I would like to point out that we have worked and done research with the issue of modular housing, which has become an increasingly popular solution, not only in the Arctic perspectives but throughout Northern Europe in the development of our building stock. There is a range of research showing both the possibilities and positive aspects that you touched on in relation to this, but also the potential negative implications that can be associated with the development of modular housing. This work stresses the importance of paying attention to the architectural characteristics that would result from using such an approach and what the implications of those would be on the local landscape and fitting in with the existing building stock that may or may not be in these areas.
It is an approach not without its merit, but it has to take into consideration the ancillary impacts on the local development process.
Senator Tannas: I want to make sure that we've got our terminology straight and that we completely understand the brick. I thought I heard you say that cement is not available locally, but they would use the other materials — the aggregate, if you will — the gravel, sand, et cetera — to make the concrete locally; is that correct? The only importation coming is cement and I suppose the insulation material — foam or something like that — for the middle of the brick; is that correct?
Mr. Rasmussen: That's totally correct, yes.
Senator Enverga: Thank you for your presentation. As we seek some solutions in regard to our housing problems in the North, we try to look at other ideas. I was struck by the information in regard to your housing cooperatives. Can you tell us more about it, please, and explain to us how it works, if you could?
Mr. Rasmussen: Yes, I'll be happy to do that. Typically, a number of families come together and decide that they, by joining forces, might be able to construct a number of single houses that are connected in one way or the other. They apply for permission through the local government. Then the state offers cheap loans for such an organization, which means that the burden is not put on individuals but on the co-op, in general. Then they find entrepreneurs who will be willing to contribute to the production of these houses.
For instance, if you drive around in Nuuk, you will see each time a new initiative has been taken, you will find a number of pretty similar houses next to each other. The cost of the loan will depend on the local government's decision on what level the rent should be for the people living in these houses.
This process has taken place over the last 15 to 20 years. During the last five years or so, a new way of dealing with these houses has come about in that it has been possible for each individual to buy his or her own house out of a cooperative for a sensible price. The reason could be that a family wants to expand his or her living space or would like to install, for instance, solar panels. By paying a fee to the government or the bank which has loaned them the money for the construction of the home, they might establish themselves as single house owners with co-op ownership as a starting point.
Senator Enverga: Can you tell me more, please? To what extent did this housing cooperative help the housing problems? Did it help a lot? Was there anything special about it with regard to housing?
Mr. Rasmussen: First of all, I would say that it has been a very important part of new housing development in Greenland's larger settlements, simply because the local population had the possibility of having savings with their income, and at the same time, the opportunity to get reasonable loans from the government or from the community.
I would say that probably 60 to 70 per cent of new construction over the last 10 years has been based on these housing co-ops, but I need to check the precise number on that.
Senator Enverga: Do these housing cooperatives create home ownership? Did it help people with their savings? Is it an incentive to buy houses?
Mr. Rasmussen: The important incentive is, of course, the cheap loans that co-ops are able to get. If you want to create a number of houses and then earn money on that, it would be much more expensive to do the building. The state and the municipality together support the idea of having co-ops, first of all, in order to enable the people to accrue the savings that would be needed, and then later on to go for ownership of a single-family house, or a house with one or two apartments inside.
It has been, I think, extremely important to have a sufficient supply of dwellings available in the larger places. You might know that the capital Nuuk has, during the last 20 to 30 years, approximately doubled its population from around 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants, and, of course, a lot of construction is needed in order to do that. They have managed to cover the demand for houses.
Senator Enverga: Have you encountered any challenges with regard to this?
Mr. Rasmussen: Do you mean in the process up until deciding on having this co-op arrangement, or the present challenges?
Senator Enverga: Both.
Mr. Rasmussen: Okay. The challenge, of course, when they started the process, was to convince people that the past history of municipalities, government and national governments was supposed to make housing available for everybody. Why spend money on your own arrangement when the government makes sure that you have an apartment?
But the point which became very clear for most of the people who went for this idea was, simply, that they were in charge of how the house should look, what equipment should be in the house and where it should be situated, et cetera. Thereby they slowly became less dependent on the government's decisions.
Furthermore, having this was a way of creating capital savings that could be used later on in their life if they wanted to move to another place or to go for full private ownership of the houses.
I think that's one of the issues that is a bit hot in the case of the capital. People, of course, need to agree on splitting up a cooperative if you want to go for private ownership, and that's one of the issues that is very much debated among people living in Nuuk, whether the co-op should be separated into a number of individual, privately-owned houses.
Senator Tannas: Could you comment on the current state and whether the shift from government ownership to more private or other solutions, like collective ownership, has had an impact? Were there ever issues with overcrowding and maintenance of homes? We hear a lot about overcrowding here. Sometimes a normal home here houses an average of eight people when it was designed for three, four or five.
Is that issue alive and well in your part of the world, or has it been dealt with through the changes in the ownership structure over the last number of years?
Mr. Rasmussen: Thank you very much for that question. I think this is and has been a major issue in, for instance, Greenland, but it's also the situation in the northern part of the other Nordic countries.
A lot of improvements in the housing conditions in Nuuk, Greenland, took place during the 1950s and 1960s through the construction of huge concrete buildings from prefab material, and coming up through the 1970s and 1980s these places decayed because of poor maintenance. During the last 10 years, a lot of these big blocks have been removed and replaced by new construction.
I think the fact that being part owner of a building puts more responsibility on the people living in these buildings. It's there, they own it, they run it, they maintain it and if the maintenance is good, then it keeps its value. If you don't maintain it well, then you basically lose money on the construction. At the same time, you would also be living in a not-well-maintained environment.
When it comes to the first part of your question about overcrowding, it's a little bit the same. If you have a private or semi-private home for a family, that should be a good reason for allowing other people to move into your house or apartment. At the same time, I think the focus on maintaining good living environments has developed in parallel with the development of these new housing types and new ownership forms.
What you will see is not the same level of overcrowding that you just mentioned. When you have overcrowding, it might be due to family members living in a village far away or close to the city. Some of them might go to, for instance, to Nuuk. If members of a family want to have health control in the major hospital in Nuuk, then they're moving in with their families. At the same time, whenever their health is back and okay, they might move back to the villages where they came from.
Mr. Weber: I will just add a couple of points. My colleague Rasmus was talking about the quality of housing stock. We also refer to them as super-block style apartments, with an individual building or construction potentially housing up to hundreds of individual units. This is where I was going with the issue of modular housing and the importance of paying attention to the local characteristics, the current buildings located in these areas, ensuring that the solutions are not going to enable a problem to potentially happen in the future and where you can do things like promote part of the policy or investment is promoting these types of co-op housing to help mitigate against the potential for short-handed or one-stop solutions to these housing challenges to be developed through these modular-type projects, or through a very basic type of housing stock, because it does lead to the potential for enabling these social challenges — any social challenges that may already be there but then can be extended further.
The second point I wanted to touch on with the issue of crowding is that, in some areas, not necessarily in Greenland but, in particular, in Norway and Sweden, this is a very recent issue in the past six to eight months with the increase of refugees coming to Sweden and Norway. Many of these people are being — "sent'' is perhaps the wrong word — but are being placed in available housing, and that available housing is located in our northern rural towns where former natural resource production took place and where there was a housing stock in these towns. Now these municipalities are expanding just in the past eight or nine months by over 100 per cent. That's due to this increase of a very specific type of population.
So there are, indeed, many recent issues that we're facing with the issue of overcrowding in these housing units. It's something that not only the Nordic Council of Ministers but the ministries responsible for the individual countries are very eager to gain more information on, because it's a challenge we're facing.
Senator Patterson: Mr. Rasmussen, we have in Northern Canada a similar challenge to what Greenland faced, where the government built homes to encourage Inuit to live in settlements and offered artificially low rents. I understand in Greenland, the Danish government, the GTO, similarly built homes in settlements and towns in the 1950s and 1960s.
The state owned nearly 90 per cent of homes in the late 1980s and now you've transitioned to cooperative housing and from there to what we call private home-ownership.
We've heard that people in Northern Canada are scared of home ownership, because they don't know how to maintain homes. They don't know how to change filters. They don't know often how to manage their money so they can cover the costs.
How did Greenland and other Nordic governments encourage people to make this big transition from being dependent on the state to being more self-reliant? You said the joint ownership and responsibility for maintenance has had positive effects. How did they get people into this new frame of mind?
Mr. Rasmussen: There has been this, I would say, "evolution'' from the big concrete blocks established during the 1950s and especially the development during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when a lot of young people from Greenland went for higher education in Denmark, for instance, and, in some cases, Norway. They came home with ideas and ambitions on how they would like to construct their common future by establishing the home rule government in 1979 — being responsible for the housing market but also issues related to housing development.
I would say it has been in the whole construction of the home rule and the development after that, the focus on joining forces on these issues. There have been some bad eggs in the nest with doing disruptive things to hold up the building of things, but at the same time making sure that the local government, through different parties are represented in the local governments had, and has had since the 1980s and further on, a lot of say in connection with how should our town and city look in the future — having opened debates on the planning issues in this connection.
In the last three or four years, the planning process in the capital of Nuuk has been web-based, which means that people have been able to go in, commenting on the ideas, coming with suggestions for improvements and changes in connection with the local situation, thereby contributing to an open and good discussion background for developing the cities and towns.
Senator Patterson: I think I heard you say education was a big factor. We can learn from that in Nunavut.
The other thing I'd like to ask you about is community capacity to construct and maintain homes. I'm sure Nuuk is well-equipped in terms of trades and construction capability, but I'm thinking more of the smaller communities. We have probably at least 20 smaller communities in Nunavut, and we seem to have problems like a lack of tradespeople and a lack of capacity generally in construction and maintenance.
Was this issue tackled in Greenland? You mentioned the technical school in Sisimiut. Has Greenland been successful in developing indigenous trades and maintenance and construction capacity?
Mr. Rasmussen: I would say yes, to some extent. I think the training of young people both in connection with, let's say, general universities but also technical universities and training facilities for nurses or kindergarten professionals, for example, has actually been quite successful. But of course, these larger places, with a variety of job opportunities, also attract young people away from the smaller communities.
I'm not able to give a very simple answer to this question. You talked about something like 20 small communities. Well, in Greenland, there are more small communities than that — that is, places with fewer than 250 inhabitants — and there are even places with as few as 10 or 20 people living in a settlement.
These places are often not very attractive for skilled and trained craftsmen, but at the same time, Greenland was historically organized around 18 municipalities and within each municipality there would have been a large town and around that there would be a number of villages. The point of this old structure is that the town was the central place with all the facilities and craftsmen, and shops where you could go and buy whatever is needed in the smaller places. Then there would be a member of each of the smaller settlements sitting on the municipal government and, thereby, able to express the smaller places' interest in what should happen in the future.
Eight years ago, municipal reform merged these 18 municipalities into the four that exist today by simply combining these smaller communities with a central town and a number of villages.
Of course, this has been a challenge for some places, but that structure still exists, only now with the four municipalities. Then, there are anywhere from three to eight of the previous municipal centres inside those areas with villages situated around the medium-sized places.
This hierarchical structure has, in my point of view, made it possible to maintain contacts. Even the smaller places are not isolated somewhere out in the countryside but have connections to the place the next level up, then further on to the municipal government seat and lastly to Greenland, as such.
I think, again, this evolution from many smaller units up to the present situation has enabled the maintenance of a lot of services being delivered even to the smaller places.
I should say that, largely, most places in Greenland have a helicopter landing pad in order to enable transport of very ill persons directly to the larger communities where hospitals will take care of whatever services are needed.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Thank you for being with us this morning. Is home ownership in Greenland a success for the indigenous people?
Mr. Rasmussen: First of all, Greenlanders indigenous peoples. When we are talking about Greenland, it might be a bit different from the situation in other parts of the Arctic, because the whole population is basically indigenous. Of course, there are people coming into the country that might not be indigenous, but in general, you could characterize Greenland as being a place of and for indigenous peoples.
Home ownership is definitely a very important issue in the small communities in order to keep the family together, and in the larger settlements to develop new forms of social and family structures. Again, I mentioned before that many young people go, for instance, to Denmark in order to get higher education and learn about what the world looks like outside of Greenland. Then, they bring those experiences back to Greenland and try to mimic some the issues they have learned not only in Denmark but also in Canada, Norway and other Nordic countries. That openness to globalization has added very much to the processes that we have been talking about.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Who was involved in the planning of this housing development project?
Mr. Rasmussen: First of all, that was done at the government's Ministry of Housing situated in Nuuk, the capital. Each of the municipalities also has its own department for local development where the focus is on the housing situation and providing statistics on what expected development might be happening in connection with housing needs in the different places.
Finally, as I mentioned, each of the villages has a council to take care of local needs and interests. There will be a municipal council consisting of situated inhabitants from the village, and finally, the municipalities are represented in joint municipal committees where, every year, they discuss what good ideas and experiences have been realized and new ways of moving ahead.
Mr. Weber: I would just like to add that apart from Greenland, it's also the case in Norway, Sweden and Finland where the local municipal or regional government is primarily responsible for the development of housing. So national policies are certainly developed, but those national policies are seen through the lens of, and administered most often by, the local municipalities themselves.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Just one more question, chair. So, in your view, are the housing programs better in your part of the country than this part of the country?
Mr. Rasmussen: Well, if the question is for us, I would say that it's very difficult for us to evaluate such a question. We know from the Nordic countries that there have been a lot of discussions on how to move ahead and which steps should be taken, and I think I will stick to commenting on that. My knowledge about the situation in other parts of the Arctic — Canada and Alaska — is, on this connection, limited. I have been living in Montreal for a couple of years and enjoyed visiting some of the places in the North, but I have never done, let's say, comparative analysis on this connection.
Mr. Weber: I can only add that, based on the discussions today, as a Canadian, having a background in and growing up in Canada and then also now having an awareness, in my professional career, working in the Nordic context, there does appear to be, at least in some cases, a higher level of engagement in terms of the local populations in developing and participating in the development of the housing stock and of their lives associated with the question of housing in the Nordic region in general and in Greenland in particular.
Senator Moore: Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. With regard to the construction of housing and other buildings, I'm thinking about the foundations. Do you have a permafrost issue, and how are your foundations done? Are you drilling pilings into rock, or are you finding places where you are just going into the soil like down south?
Mr. Rasmussen: I would like to mention, first of all, that a starting point in answering this question would be the disaster in East Greenland back in the 1950s, when this extremely heavy wind — piteraq — wiped out a whole community into the ocean. It was a very heavy wind coming from the inland ice and blowing down. Since then, it has been required for any development of new housing that they should be built on rock material, which means that almost all of the houses are built on rock, thereby preventing, first of all, the consequences of thawing of permafrost but, furthermore, also making sure that these heavy winds that might appear from the inland ice and blow down to the communities don't blow houses away or create huge damage.
There are a couple of situations, especially in South Greenland, where you have farms that are not standing on the same building requirements. It means stables for sheep farming that might be put on top of the grass turf and thereby affected by any changes in the subsurface conditions, such as thawing of permafrost.
These are the only situations where I would say that there would be very difficult hazards to the buildings. Since the 1950s, there has been this requirement that any building where people are living should be on rock.
Senator Moore: I have two other questions.
I heard your comments with regard to government involvement in ownership, and I am wondering: Do you have freehold ownership of real estate, and do you have condominium law so that these apartments and so on can be owned? I fully understand that maintaining equals value and all of that. I would like to have some sense of what the cost is of a house or a dwelling unit if it's in a highrise.
Mr. Rasmussen: It depends on when the houses have been built in Greenland. If you go back to, again, the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the cost was fully paid by either the national government, the Greenland government, or the municipal government, which means that the social organizations in that municipality would make decisions on the cost of any dwelling inside these houses.
When you are talking about freehold, I'm not sure if I know the concept. Could you please explain?
Senator Moore: Yes. You have a deed, a warrantied deed, whereby you own the land on which your dwelling sits, or, in a condominium, you'll own from the Gyproc inward. The condominium corporation owns the outside shell and the land on which the building sits. It sounds like you don't have that. When the government pays, do the tenants have a leasehold interest? Do they have like a 99-year lease? How do they accumulate value or respond in a positive way to looking after the unit?
Mr. Rasmussen: First of all, private ownership of land doesn't exist in Greenland. According to the foundation of the country, land is a common type of the life in Greenland, which means that the whole country and its population owns the land, and they are able, then, to make it available for projects such as establishing new housing.
Then, the pricing of housing would not depend on the cost of land, because you cannot sell land. You cannot buy land. It's the cost of the construction of the house or the condominium or whatever kind of building you might talk about that determines the price. It would be the cost that would decide what would be the cost for each tenant inside such a unit.
Again, you might have a lease on the place until you die or for a specific number of years, but it will always be up to the Greenland government or the municipal government to make such decisions. If you apply to leave a place, you will be able to get money from the new owner because of improvements you made to the place; you can take that with you if you want to move to another place. But, again, you cannot capitalize the ground in any way. I'm not sure if I answered all your questions.
Senator Moore: That helps. Can I ask one more?
So if you are the tenant, it sounds like you apply to some central registry to get a unit, and you get it. Do you pay for it then so that, when you do leave it, you said the new person coming in behind you would pay me? Is that an open market concept, or is there a set sum that is stipulated by the central registry as to what I'm going to be paid when I depart?
Mr. Rasmussen: If it's a private house, then it would be kind of market price deciding what should be paid by a new owner, but, as soon as we talk about these co-ops, it's the co-op that basically owns the whole building, let's say 5 or 10 houses next to each other. Then it's up to the co-op to decide the cost for newcomers, but still only after consultation with the local government in order to prevent situations where, let's say, some housing loses its value and other housing will increase in value.
It's only in the situations when such a co-op is split up into individually owned units that you might talk about market price development.
Senator Moore: Is there a pretty solid resale market for housing in the capital and other communities in Greenland?
Mr. Rasmussen: Yes, I would say that. But, again, some of the fully private-owned houses might be very big and equipped with a lot of facilities and things like that. These will be very expensive and might not necessarily attract the same group of people as the cheaper places. But there is an open market and development as long as we are talking of the bigger, urbanized places that are attracting people.
When we go to the smaller villages, I would say that not many houses are costly. There will be joint — there will be flats available in some larger houses but owned by the municipality or there might be individual houses that were established, let's say, 30 or 40 years ago, based on extremely cheap loans from the government. They wouldn't cost much in this connection.
Senator Moore: You cannot leave a house to your children, say, in your will, because there is not that private ownership?
Mr. Rasmussen: No.
The Chair: I would like to ask a couple of quick questions. One is with regard to servicing. Who pays for the servicing of the buildings? Is that paid by the municipalities? I mean sewer hookup and that kind of thing.
Mr. Rasmussen: There is a sewage system in the town or village, and it's paid for by the local government. The same goes for the system of supplying water and electricity to the houses. In the small villages, it is done by governmental institutions. In Nuuk, it would be a major company delivering power from a nearby hydropower plant. Sewage will be taken care of through sewage lines in town. These services will be provided by the local government or the national government, depending on which of these services we are talking about.
When it comes to questions of maintenance of the houses, if it's a co-op, the co-op organization takes care of the outside maintenance. When we are talking about inside maintenance, it would be up to residents to do the maintenance.
The Chair: The second question is with regard to home ownership. You said you have evolved in the last 50 or 60 years to more home ownership. In order to own a home, you have to have a fairly good income. There must have been an increase in the earning capabilities of individual people. What has happened? Has the local economy expanded? Has there been new development? Why is it that people now have better incomes than they did 50 or 60 years ago?
Mr. Rasmussen: First, due to the fact that the increasing part of the population gets higher education, training in technical service development and things like that, it means that there are reasonably good incomes and there has been reasonably good increase in incomes in most of Greenland.
I would say that one of the major problems has been in the fisheries, which used to be the main economic opportunity in Greenland. Due to world market price declines, incomes in this sector have declined. There is a situation where big offshore trawlers provide those working on these boats with pretty good incomes. They might be able to go every second month on monthly trips, fishing for shrimp, and they might be able to own one of the larger private houses in the one the bigger towns.
Again, though, an increase in the qualifications of the people of Greenland — being able to provide the services that are needed and wanted by the population — has meant that incomes have increased for the last couple of decades.
The Chair: We only have about 10 minutes left. Senator Raine has a question. Then I think the presenters may wish to have another short presentation; is that correct?
Mr. Rasmussen: Yes, please.
Senator Raine: I just want to follow up on the job situation. Are most of the jobs in the administration of the municipalities, the villages and the capital, and jobs in things such as health and education coming now from the local workforce, or are there still a lot of people coming from Denmark to work in Greenland? If there are people coming from the south or outside to work in Greenland, are they provided with staff housing and does that come from a different housing stock, or are they obliged to find housing on the open market?
Mr. Rasmussen: If I could start with the last question first, during the last five to 10 years, staff housing has not been provided to newcomers to Greenland. They have to compete with other people living in Greenland for the houses or the apartments that they need.
Another thing with the question of people coming from the south — coming from Denmark, for instance — you should be aware that, in Greenland, people are not registered according to ethnicity but according to place of birth. That means that, at present, there are 56,000 inhabitants in Greenland and out of these, approximately 10,000 are not born in Greenland. It means that if young Greenlanders go for higher education in Denmark, have a child there and come back to Greenland with that child, this child would be still Greenlander but also registered as being born outside Greenland.
This ethnic division between, let's say, Greenlanders and non-Greenlanders is extremely difficult to comment on because most members of families in Greenland would at some point in time have been in Denmark and given birth to a child and then returned, or vice versa. Danes might move for a couple of years to live in Greenland and have a child there. That person — for instance, one of my sons — is born in Greenland and, therefore, statistically registered as born in Greenland. It is also the same in the Danish statistics, and he is living there in Denmark right now. So it is a little bit complicated to give this precise line of division between those who are Greenlanders and those who are not Greenlanders because my son is statistically a Greenlander, but he is not ethnically a Greenlander.
Back to where the money comes from. That was more or less what I heard your question was about. The fisheries are still a major issue in Greenland, and it means that approximately half of the GDP in Greenland is based on outcomes from fisheries. There are people living in Greenland who are hoping that mining might take off at some point in time and generate more incomes, but the fisheries are a still a major contributor to the economy. Besides that, since home rule was established in 1979, Greenland has taken over more and more responsibility for maintaining and regulating the fishing quotas, the fisheries activities, et cetera. Each step during the process, up to today, has been covered by funding and thereby transfer payments from Denmark to Greenland. In Greenland, as I said before, up to half of the national product is coming from fisheries and the other half is based on transfers coming from Denmark. But all of the money is managed by Greenlanders in Greenland. So that means that the welfare state that Greenland often refers to, similar to the welfare states of the Nordic countries, is simply based on the services provided in the smaller places and the larger places in the nation, as such, being covered by income from fisheries, in the future maybe from mining, and then the transfer payments from Denmark.
The Chair: Gentlemen, we only have about five minutes left. If there are some concluding comments that you would like to make, could you please do that now? Maybe, if there is one burning question from one of the senators, we would conclude with that.
Mr. Rasmussen: I would like — and maybe Ryan will give a comment also — very much like to comment on the question of diasporas, the fact that there are Greenlanders living in Greenland but that there are, presently, around 25 per cent of Greenlanders living in Denmark and all other Nordic countries. It means that, as to the division between Greenland as a separate country and Denmark as a separate country, when it comes to people who, at some point in time have been living in Greenland and working in Greenland and have been living and working in Denmark, they consider themselves more or less a joint community, and it shows every year. You might not have heard about the park in the centre of Copenhagen called Tivoli, but from August 1 to August 3 each year, approximately 200,000 people meet there to celebrate this as a community. In the Jewish world, "Next year in Jerusalem'' is the saying, and Greenlanders and people who have been working and living in Greenland and Denmark say, "Next year in Tivoli,'' because it's a meeting point. Up in the Northern part of Norway, a group of Sami people make similar arrangements to congregate each year. Some Sami people are living in the North, but a lot of them are living in the capitals of Norway, Finland and Sweden. The diaspora is a very important concept on this connection.
Mr. Weber: I would just like to add that, prior to the discussion today, we just had a very short overview of the discussion points, and those have obviously been expanded a great deal through the questions that you had for us today. In a way, we could only provide some general responses. If there was follow-up information and content behind some of our answers that you would like clarified, going, for instance, beyond the literature or material that we already provided for you, we would be happy to work with you to get some more specific examples or specific statistics and content as you develop this work toward October.
The Chair: Thank you for those comments and, certainly, thank you for the offer that we can contact you later with any questions that we may have as we continue on to the drafting of our report.
I don't see any burning questions arising from the senators, so I would like to thank both of you, Mr. Rasmussen and Mr. Weber, for appearing with us today by video conference all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. It was interesting to hear some of the similarities but also some of the differences between what goes on here in our North versus what goes on in your northern countries.
I would like to take the opportunity, on behalf of all of the senators, to thank you for providing us with the material. With that, we will adjourn the meeting.
(The committee adjourned.)