OTTAWA: Canada will soon open a consulate in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland – the world’s largest island and an autonomous dependent territory in the Kingdom of Denmark, which President Donald Trump has talked about taking over by the US along with Canada as the 51st state.
Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand told CBC News that Canada’s new diplomatic presence in Greenland is “unprecedented in terms of expanding our Arctic footprint” and that Canada is playing its “role as a key Arctic country at a time when the geopolitical environment is volatile.”
Anand’s first trip to open the consulate on Thursday was canceled due to bad weather, but she is expected to visit the island soon.
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Traditional Greenlandic dwellings are seen from the Myggedalen viewpoint in Nuuk, Greenland on March 28, 2025. (Leon Neal)
On his way to the G7 leaders’ summit in Canada in June, French President Emmanuel Macron stopped in Greenland, where he said the Arctic island “should not be sold, should not be taken,” and while addressing Greenlanders, he said that “when a strategic message is sent to you” – without directly mentioning President Donald Trump’s ambitions – “the Europeans literally see this as being directed at a European country.”
Last December, the Canadian government – led by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – unveiled a foreign policy for the Arctic, which included plans to open consulates in both Nuuk and Anchorage. No date has yet been set for the Canadian diplomatic mission in Alaska’s largest city.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance poses with Second Lady Usha Vance, former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his wife and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright as they tour the U.S. Army’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on March 28, 2025. (Jim Watson/Pool via Reuters)
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“This is Canada taking the North American Arctic more seriously and putting some political and diplomatic pieces in place,” Dalziel said.
“Everything Canada does in the Arctic to strengthen its security has the domino effect of strengthening American security.”
Last month, Trump announced that four companies – one each in the US and Canada, and two in Finland – had been selected to design and build six Arctic icebreakers.
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of the G7 Summit, Monday, June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Canada. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The US has had a consulate in Nuuk since 2020, after the first one, which opened in 1940 after the Nazi occupation of Denmark, closed in 1953.
But in advancing its economic interests in Greenland, Canada will have an advantage over the U.S. “given the connections between the peoples of Greenland and Canada,” Dalziel said.
Military ship HDMS Ejnar Mikkelsen of the Royal Danish Navy patrols near Nuuk, Greenland, Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP Photo)
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The Inuit comprise most of the inhabitants of both Greenland and Nunavut, Canada’s largest and northernmost territory, which shares a border of less than a mile with Greenland on the uninhabited Hans Island – also known as Tartupaluk in Greenlandic.
Canada’s foreign policy in the Arctic is committed to implementing a Canada-Denmark border agreement on the island — as well as beginning border negotiations with the U.S. over the Beaufort Sea, which lies north of Alaska and two of Canada’s northern territories.
“There have been overlapping claims between Canada and the US,” Dalziel explains of a decades-long dispute over part of the sea.
“There was some progress in the Biden administration to move the discussions forward, but in the current context I think it is unlikely that progress will be made,” Dalziel said.
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“Canada and the US have lived with this, as well as their disagreement over the status of the Northwest Passage – whether it is an internal historic waterway as Canada claims, or an international strait as the US claims.”
