Criminal groups have been smuggling drugs into communities in Quebec’s Far North and threatening and harassing Inuit in Montreal to keep them quiet, said Nunavik police at a press conference Monday morning.
The police force for Nunavik, the semi-autonomous region in northern Quebec, is teaming up with the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) in a pilot project that will deploy joint patrols in the metropolis over the next two weeks. The goal is to meet with members of the Inuit community in Montreal to build trust and reinforce their sense of security.
“This is about having governing bodies be proactive in risk mitigation,” said Hilda Snowball, chairperson of the Kativik Regional Government at the press conference.
“What we’ve seen with the rise of criminal activity is that the point of impact is on the entire community, not just one person.”
In May, an organized crime group brought illegal drugs, mostly crack cocaine, and alcohol to Akulivik — a town on Hudson Bay — and tried to recruit people to sell and transport these goods. The same thing happened two months later further north in Salluit.
Police have intercepted some of those goods and arrests have been made in both Nunavik and Montreal, said Nunavik Police Service (NPS) Chief Jean-Pierre Larose.
Criminals have since retaliated in Montreal by threatening and harassing Inuit there who might be able to identify them, he said.
“Unfortunately, in the Inuit community, victims or witnesses of situations compromising their safety or the safety of others do not tend to report these incidents or make complaints to the police,” Larose said.
He said two weeks is a short amount of time for the project, but that it’s a start.
Eight NPS officers will pair up with the SPVM and patrol certain areas in the city’s downtown and Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, as well as the municipalities of Westmount and Dorval until Oct. 4. They will also be collaborating with organizations that work closely with the Inuit community to take stock of the situation on the ground.
Why are the drugs going north?
Nunavik is a profitable market for the drug trade, said Larose. Plus, criminals operating in Montreal are protected by over a thousand kilometres separating them from the region, relying instead on others to move the goods.
Nicole Janis Qavavauq-Bibeau, research co-ordinator with the Iskweu Project, says she isn’t surprised by the news.
“There’s a big lack of services in the North, but also in a lot of Indigenous communities, for mental health,” she said. “I feel like people use drugs as a way to kind of self medicate from the pain that they’re feeling and the trauma that they’re carrying.”
She says she’s skeptical of the SPVM’s ability to develop trust with Inuit communities and hopes the investigation doesn’t result in over-criminalization of Indigenous people, women in particular.
“There’s a huge difference between someone who’s causing a lot of harm to the community [and] someone who’s surviving and just trying to get by and they have a lot of trauma and no resources to help themselves,” she said.
The Kativik government covers over 500,000 square kilometres and over a dozen villages in Nunavik. Inuit make up about 91 per cent of the 14,000 people living there.
“As Inuit, mastering our circumstances is an important life lesson,” said Snowball. “I often say that the Arctic is like living in another world with challenges that are not easily understood in the south.”
City of Montreal officials and police say they will be travelling to Nunavik soon to better understand the realities of the region.