It seems like a stupid question, but given that it seems to be Russia that's heralded as the superpower of the North I'm not sure it's an unfair one. Lately I've been Gulag: A History, and it's what brought the comparison to mind. At the moment by and large the arctic is a region that seems to survive on the basis of subsidies with the aim of eventually extracting resource wealth at some high environmental cost. The majority of the budget of Greenland comes from Denmark. For 2014-2015 federal government transfers to the Canadian arctic territory of Nunavut are expected to be about $40000 per person - government spending in Nunavut for 2009 was roughly 11 times the territory's tax revenue.
How about the Russian case? It largely seems to be a relic of Stalinism and the gulag system:
it was Joseph Stalin – having been subject to repeated northern exiles to Siberia in his own youth – who seized the commercial potential of Russia’s Arctic. He sent hundreds of thousands of political prisoners north to work in mining camps that grew into today’s cities. The ghosts of the gulag linger over them. The Russian north doesn’t inspire the imagination the way Canada’s Arctic does for many. It is simply a place of suffering and punishment. Murmansk, a gritty port on the Barents Sea that is by far the world’s largest Arctic city, will be the nexus of Mr. Putin’s plan. During Soviet times, it was the subsidized home to more than 500,000 people, who made the Kola Peninsula a hub of mining, military and scientific activity. But when the economic incentives disappeared after the fall of the USSR, the population began to shrink with an exodus south. The city numbers barely 300,000 today. "Anyone who can is trying to leave," says Alexander Serebryanikov
A recent article in The Economist spoke of "the highly inefficient industrial structure of the old Soviet economy, based on misallocation of both resources and people" yet it seems precisely this misallocation that advocates for changes in Northern policies seem to argue in favour of.
Though not quite as harsh, in many ways Canada's North seems almost like a mild version of a gulag, though one in which people are at least allowed to leave. Consider these figures:
If Nunavut were a country, it would, measured within a list of 187 countries, sit at number 38 [in human development], well below all other Canadian provinces and territories. Worst of all, Nunavut’s life expectancy at birth is ranked on that list at 100. ... Behind these numbers, there lies widespread deprivation, in every sense of the term. That includes, of course, cash poverty, limited access to good jobs, affordable housing and affordable food. This is demonstrated by the 49 per cent of the population who need welfare payments to get by. Or that 70 per cent of families are reported to be food insecure for at least part of the year.
Much of the current population has historical ties to the area which makes leaving the area a difficult choice, though not an impossible one. It reminded me of an Edge Answer suggesting that cities may have grown up in certain places for historical reasons - using as an example river portages in the US - that now subject the resulting cities to floods and make the land difficult to develop. It seems to me that an extremely low density hunter society can survive in the northern regions of the globe, but it doesn't seem to me as though the region is capable of sustaining much more than that. Even with federal per-capita spending in the Northern region at about 10-30 as much as other provinces you're still wind up with three-quarters of kids never finishing high school and a suicide rate among the Inuit in Nunavut 13 times the national average.
Reminds me of a recent episode of EconTalk wherein someone suggested that there might be parts of the world best not lived in. Rather than subsidizing the choices of people to live there perhaps we need to start subsidizing a move away.
