ICC eyes Ottawa for Inuit summit early next year

(Updated 4:20 p.m., Oct. 1)

The Inuit Circumpolar Council may choose Ottawa as the venue for an Arctic-wide summit on resource extraction issues they’re planning to hold early next year.

The proposed dates were originally Feb. 18 and Feb. 19, but an ICC press release issued Oct. 1 said the meeting “will in all likelihood be held in Canada next March.”

The press release also said the exact location of the summit will be announced “in the next few weeks.”

A source told Nunatsiaq News the summit will likely focus on three issues:

• mining, especially uranium mining;

• offshore exploration and drilling;

• regulatory processes.

Aqqaluk Lynge, the new president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said Sept. 22 that Inuit have an urgent need to discuss resource development issues, especially in light of Cairn Energy’s discovery of oil off western Greenland on Sept. 21.

As well, the Greenland government eased a longstanding ban on uranium mining earlier in September, when it changed its regulations to allow the extraction of uranium, subject to certain limits, as a byproduct at the Kvanfjeld rare earths field in southern Greenland.

Rare earths at the Kvanfjeld site, which are being developed by a company called Greenland Minerals and Energy, cannot be extracted without also extracting uranium.

In an interview, Lynge said last month that he favours a “cautious, careful approach to development that “includes the human dimension.”

ICC’s executive committee has just completed a meeting in Nuuk, its first meeting since the organization’s general assembly this past July.

In the press release, Lynge said the summit on resource development is the most urgent of all the issues that ICC’s executive discussed in Nuuk this past week.