Passengers board a plane at the Délı̨nę airport in the Northwest Territories in November, 2025, to access dental care.Tate Juniper/The Globe and Mail
Dental-care delivery in Canada’s North needs a massive overhaul to ensure better quality of services to people in remote communities, a leader of the Canadian Dental Association said.
In an interview Friday, Aaron Burry, the CDA’s chief executive officer, said inaction risks perpetuating inequities in oral health in Canada.
“This isn’t something that we need to study more. We know that certainly, First Nations and Inuit do not enjoy the same level of oral health as the rest of Canada. That’s been known for a long time … We need to look at strategies that work,” Dr. Burry said.
He was responding to an in-depth Globe and Mail story, published Thursday, which revealed that seven communities in the Northwest Territories have not had a dentist visit in six years or more. Many people have to travel thousands of kilometres for treatment. Others, particularly elders or single parents with child-care pressures, can’t travel, and have gone for years without access to a basic service in Canada.
First Nations group in Northern Ontario demands better fire service after child’s death
Dr. Burry, who has practised dentistry for 40 years, said he found the story “very difficult to read.”
Children, in particular, who suffer from chronic toothaches can see the consequences of lack of dental treatments in their ability to sleep, eat, learn and grow. “This is not just about toothaches. It’s much bigger than that.”
Ottawa’s non-insured health benefits, or NIHB, program, administered by Indigenous Services Canada, or ISC, covers dental care for eligible First Nations and Inuit residents across the country. Under a renewed 1997 mandate, its objective is to help them reach an overall health status “that is comparable to the health of the Canadian population.”
In October last year, the Auditor-General of Canada reported that ISC still didn’t know how much of an oral health gap existed between First Nations and Inuit populations and other Canadians. As a result, it said ISC didn’t know “which oral health services were needed most, where they were needed, and the number and type of oral health professionals needed to deliver the services.”
The whole NIHB program, developed decades ago, needs fundamental change, not just tinkering at the margins, Dr. Burry said.
That includes, at a minimum, closing the gap in NIHB rates so that dentists are compensated at comparable levels as in provincial or territorial standards. “Given the higher costs of delivering care in the North, I think it’s the least that can be done – the minimum.”
Indigenous program to protect Canadian wilderness aims to bolster First Nations’ economies
Over months of reporting, The Globe heard from community members in the Northwest Territories who described harrowing experiences, including a man in Tuktoyaktuk who pulled out his own tooth with a Leatherman multitool and a Tulita resident whose elderly mother had to fly three times to Yellowknife to get a painful abscess treated. One pediatric dentist in Yellowknife described needing to extract 12 adult teeth from a 13-year-old girl.
In response to questions Friday from The Globe, Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty acknowledged the troubles people are facing in accessing dental care. “This is the reality that in some spaces, there’s a lack of service,” she said at a news conference in Toronto.
She said she herself, as a Cree woman from Waswanipi, Que., has had to travel 1,000 kilometres to see a dentist when she is in her community. “I know that this is a harsh reality, but I’m happy to know that you’re sharing those kinds of stories to really showcase the barriers that people face when trying to receive health care,” she said.
She said the government is committed to building capacity. “We are going to continue building and ensuring that the service that we offer is quality, that we’re going to build that capacity, and … that we will work with communities to ensure that they develop the plan that they need.”
Tanya Talaga: Kashechewan First Nation faces a new problem in its decades-long water crisis
She did not mention specific concrete steps aimed at bringing dental services closer to communities in the NWT. A long-term objective for ISC, she said, is to tailor its programs to offer “the best, high-quality equal service that we can.”
Dr. Burry said there is a pressing need for reform. “We’ve got a good system of oral health access in the country. But then you move into communities where that’s not the case – it’s very sad. It’s heartbreaking.”
He said an oral health strategy is needed specifically for the North, one that involves input from community leaders along with dental professionals, and that is adaptable to each community’s needs and circumstances. He said all levels of government need to work together on this.
NIHB, he said, is “not a program that was well designed to comprehend or to think about areas like the North.”
When it comes to access to care, “we’re no longer in the 1940s or 1950s when many of the [Northern] clinics were established. You need to have proper infrastructure to do good care today. Canadians in the south, we have high expectations when we go to the dentist – it’s first class, it’s a lot of investment. And so I think we need those levels of investment.”