Northern Canada - Demography

Demography

Using the political definition of the three northern territories, the North, with an area of 3,921,739 km2 (1,514,192 sq mi), larger in size than India at 3,287,263 km2 (1,269,219 sq mi), makes up 39.3% of Canada.

Although vast, the entire region is very sparsely populated. As of 2006, only about 101,310 people lived there compared to 31,511,587 in the rest of Canada and 1,028,610,328 (2001) in India.

The population density for Northern Canada is 0.03 inhabitants per square kilometre (0.078 /sq mi) (0.06 /km2 (0.16 /sq mi) for Yukon, 0.03 /km2 (0.078 /sq mi) for the NWT and 0.01 /km2 (0.026 /sq mi) for Nunavut) compared to 3.5 /km2 (9.1 /sq mi) for Canada and 312.91 /km2 (810.4 /sq mi) for India.

It is heavily endowed with natural resources and in most cases they are very expensive to extract and situated in fragile environmental areas. Though GDP per person is higher than elsewhere in Canada, the region remains relatively poor, mostly because of the extremely high cost of most consumer goods, and the region is heavily subsidised by the government of Canada.

As of 2006, 52.8% of the population of the three territories (25.1% in Yukon, 50.3% in the NWT and 85.0% in Nunavut) is Aboriginal, either Inuit, First Nations or Métis. The Inuit are the largest group of Aboriginal peoples in Northern Canada, and 61.5% of all Canada's Inuit live in Northern Canada, with Nunavut accounting for 52.8%. The region also contains several groups of First Nations, who are mainly Chipewyan peoples. The three territories each have a greater proportion of Aboriginal inhabitants than any of Canada's provinces. There are also many more recent immigrants from around the world; of the territories, Yukon has the largest percentage of non-Aboriginal inhabitants, while Nunavut the smallest.