The federal government raised the prospect that northern aboriginals might seek more money if countries signed a climate-change treaty in Copenhagen last year, new documents show.
Officials at Foreign Affairs flagged the issue in a memo to Canada's former climate-change envoy before a major United Nations conference in the Danish capital.
"There is a possible link between an agreement at Copenhagen on international funding for adaptation and an increased demand for funding by indigenous groups in the Arctic," the document says.
Delegates from nearly 200 countries gathered in Denmark last December in the hopes of brokering an international agreement on climate change.
But the summit ended in confusion and disarray as delegates returned home with little to show for two weeks of what were often tempestuous talks.
The memo to former lead climate-change negotiator Michael Martin covers a range of Arctic issues that the Foreign Affairs Department expected to come up in Copenhagen.
Officials expected small island states to ramp up their calls for more money to cope with rising sea levels after the release of a report on Greenland's melting ice sheet.
But they didn't think northern communities in Canada would get the same kind of attention.
The memo says northern communities aren't seen as being particularly vulnerable to climate change because Canada is a developed country that can adapt to the effects of global warming more easily than other, developing states.
The Canadian Press obtained the memo under the Access to Information Act.
It also notes some aboriginal groups felt they weren't getting enough cash from Ottawa to cope with climate change, or to attend major conferences around the globe.
"Some aboriginal groups have raised concerns with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs that the various programs available do not provide them with core funding for climate-change work or allow them to participate in international activities," the memo says.
The document highlights Canadian spending to help northern and aboriginal communities adapt to climate change.
The Indian and Northern Affairs Department is spending $14-million over three years to help those communities cope with climate change, and the memo says some 44 projects were funded.
But the head of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources, a Winnipeg-based First Nations environmental organization, says that's not enough.
"Current INAC programs do not provide direct support to core fund [climate change]work by aboriginal groups," Merrell-Ann Phare wrote in an e-mail.
"Nor do they support aboriginal groups to participate in international activities."
A Foreign Affairs spokesperson would only say that "Canada continues to work closely with aboriginal and northern communities and governments to build capacity for climate change adaptation in that region."
The document was released just weeks before another UN climate-change summit in Mexico. That's where negotiators hope to resolve some of the more contentious issues they put aside in Copenhagen.
But Canada and the United States are already looking beyond Mexico to next year's gathering in South Africa, where they say a climate deal is more likely to be reached.