Housing Policy, Aging, and Life Course Construction in a Canadian Inuit Community

The provisioning and administration of social housing has been a continuous problem in the Canadian North since the 1960s, when the Canadian government began taking an active role in the welfare of Inuit. Some of these problems are quite basic and include high costs for construction and maintenance of units. An examination of the development and evolution of Canadian housing policy in the North demonstrates that changes to the administration of social housing programs and, since the mid-1980s, development of formal privatization schemes have steadily shifted housing costs onto local residents. These shifting costs, however, are borne unequally, with Inuit born and raised in the context of permanent communities (the Settlement Generation) facing the greatest burdens.