In the face of Arctic warming, the defence of Canada’s far-flung polar regions is again on the front burner. By Ken Coates

CONSIDER THIS SCENARIO: AMERICANS SWARM Canada’s North with little warning, drawn by a lust for resources, or, perhaps, by urgent security needs. They don’t ask permission, they ignore national laws, they disrupt the local environment. Yet despite these outrages, Canada’s politicians are powerless to do anything but politely complain. Northern residents bear the brunt of the influx and have little chance to register protests. The outsiders keep coming, and Canada’s hold on its vast and symbolically important northern territories is thrown into question.

Is this the inevitable outcome of neglecting our Northern reaches? Many fear so. In these times of global terrorism, global warming and worries about access to oil and gas, Canada’s Arctic sovereignty and security are suddenly hot topics. For one thing, the retreat of the Arctic ice pack is opening the Northwest Passage for potential commercial navigation. This is particularly unnerving given the vulnerability of Arctic regions to major environmental damage if there were an oil spill or the grounding of a fully loaded ship. Furthermore, the presence of diamonds, oil and gas deposits and other valuable resources in the North is sure to spark renewed international interest in an area that Canada only symbolically claims as its own.

In recent years Canadians have gotten in high dudgeon over perceived slights to our Far Northern claims. Politicians, editorialists and ordinary citizens were infuriated by the audacity of Danish flag-staking on Hans Island – an icy speck that not one Canadian in a million could have identified before 2005. Equal offense was taken at the U.S. ambassador’s recent insistence that the Northwest Passage is – contrary to Canadian conviction -- an international rather than domestic waterway. Though Canadians seem not to like the North much (citizens of other countries are probably more likely to visit our North than are Canadians) we certainly don’t want anyone else to have it.

In addition to prompting outrage over slights from afar, Canada’s newfound attention to Arctic sovereignty has spurred internal hand-wringing. Once more, we’re embarrassed by our lack of military presence in the North. We’re ashamed about our meager icebreaker capacity, which in turn limits our ability to respond to environmental, economic or military threats in the Arctic. We’re bothered by the relative absence of troops in the territorial North, and thus our tiny capacity to react to any significant challenge to Canadian sovereignty. There is talk of militarizing the North. The overlap of sovereignty issues and growing alarm about global warming has given the question of Northern defense an urgency that it has rarely had in the past.

IN A SHOWY DISPLAY OF Canadian sovereignty, defence minister Bill Graham stirred a minor uproar this summer when he took a chopper to a forlorn speck of rock between Ellesmere Island and Greenland.
By stepping on Hans Island, Graham revived a decades old spat with the Danes, who say the island is part of Greenland, and accordingly Danish territory. Since the 1970s both counties have periodically sent a delegation to the barren rock to plant flags and flaunt their dominion. “Welcome to the Danish Island,” read a note Denmark’s minister of Greenland affairs left on a visit in 1984, stuck to a bottle of brandy.

In the weeks following Graham’s foray, Internet sites hosted impassioned declarations over Hans, many by Canadians who saw the island as a sovereignty test, whose outcome would influence other, more critical challenges.

“If a little insignificant piece of rock was our only disputed area, we could all have a good laugh,” says Rob Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

An expert on Arctic sovereignty, Huebert warns that “if we appear weak on this, I’m afraid we’ll send the wrong message about other ones, which are much more substantial.”

While it seems uncharacteristically loutish to squabble over a pile of rock, global warming adds a new sense of urgency to the question of Canadian hegemony in its last frontier. Recent literature and media coverage on Arctic climate change declare that the notoriously ice-choked straits of the Northwest Passage are melting to eventually clear the way for international shipping, leaving Canada with the environmental fall-out and political wrangling over sovereignty. This summer, some newspapers reported that as early as 2015 the Passage would be regular course for ships from the U.S., Russia and Japan, countries that don’t recognize Canada’s ownership claims over the Arctic shipping lanes.

But as ice experts compile more data on Arctic melt patterns, they are finding evidence that global warming may just keep the Passage its inhospitable old self, and the promise of a reliable trade route locked in ice for a century or more.

In reaction to these concerns, the Conservative government has made all of the expected statements about Canadian ownership of the Arctic and its determination to protect sovereignty in the area. Yet Northerners, no doubt, find such pledges less than convincing: After all, these promises are nothing new. Moreover, Northerners do not share the sovereignty-obsession that occasionally rears its head in the South. Canadians rededicated themselves to Arctic defense when the USS Manhattan sailed through the Northwest Passage in 1969 – and then again in 1985, when the USS Polar Sea did the same thing. The Mulroney government in 1986 declared the Northwest Passage an internal Canadian waterway; the Americans rejected such talk, and have rejected it ever since.

Yet despite these successive affronts to Canadian Arctic sovereignty – and the vexation and anxiety that ensue -- real commitment to the North in terms of dollars and “boots on the ground” has diminished. In the 1960s, Canada actually had a military presence in a few places in the territorial North. No longer. Sure, the Inuit Rangers play an extensive and important role in Arctic surveillance, but it’s no slight on this group to point out that they would be ineffective in monitoring, let alone stopping, a determined intrusion into Canada’s North. All in all, over the past 40 years Canada’s interest in Arctic defense has been more rhetorical than substantive. The word-play may be heating up, but along our Northern border, real efforts to protect Canadian turf seem very much on ice.

Among some readers, discussion of Canada’s Northern inaction may prompt a shrugging of shoulders. After all, the scenario outlined at the beginning of this article seems, at first glance, farfetched. Americans will never overrun our North – don’t be silly! But think again. The description of an American invasion is drawn from the past, not the future. And it happened not once, but twice. The first time was the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896; the second time was World War II.

After the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896, thousands of prospectors swarmed into the Yukon. They were controlled by several hundred North West Mounted Police officers and a small Yukon Field Force. It turned out the Americans wanted our gold, not our land. And we let them take it, few questions asked, so long as they recognized our sovereignty and allowed the police to enforce our laws. We made them respect the Sabbath and keep handguns out of Dawson City. They got most of the gold.

The lesson was not well-learned. In 1942, within months of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans invaded again. This friendly occupation, completed with very little Canadian input and no effective supervision, resulted in the development of the Norman Wells oil field, the laying of a pipeline to a new oil refinery in Whitehorse and, of course, the construction of the famous 2,200 kilometre Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, B.C. to Fairbanks, Alaska. At the peak of construction activity there were nearly 40,000 soldiers and construction workers in the area north and west of Edmonton. (Some of the construction workers were Canadians; all of the military personnel were Americans.)

Canadians paid little attention to matters of sovereignty in this instance. After all, there was a war on and the country, fully occupied with the conflict in Europe, lacked the resources and will to send a sizable contingent into the North. During the crucial period of 1942-1943, when the United States Army made key decisions about the location of highways, pipelines, airfields and the like, Canada basically left them alone. Northern residents complained about environmental disruptions, dislocations in the small towns, difficulties with American soldiers and construction workers, and the dramatic overturning of the local economy. Canada had no capacity in the region to respond.

In a curious twist, Canada became minimally interested only with Malcolm MacDonald, the British high commissioner, ignored diplomatic protocol and sent an alarmist note to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King about American long-term designs on the Canadian North. Only then – after the future of the region had been recast by the U.S.’s Northwest Defense Projects – did Ottawa send a senior official north to monitor American activities. In an ironic twist, post-war concerns about future American designs on Canadian sovereignty and independence convinced the federal government to pay the United States back for the cost of constructing the Alaska Highway, even though the road was far from finished, did not go where Canadians wanted it to go, and did not meet any Canadian military objectives.

The Americans came and went on both occasions with little interference from the Canadian government. During the Klondike Gold Rush, Canada insisted on attention to national sovereignty, but did little to staunch the flow of gold south of the border. In World War II, the country allowed the United States to lay the foundations for the post-war North through the construction of roads, airfields, communications systems and other facilities – even though the projects were not designed to meet local needs. Much the same happened again during the Cold War and the construction of the Distant Early Warning radar stations across the Canadian North. Canada has learned its lessons very slowly.

The current debate, then, represents little that is new. Certainly the recent rhetoric about sovereignty, security, northern defense and the national interest in the Arctic sounds distressingly familiar. Southern Canadians discover the North only sporadically, generating earnest debate and making profound statements about the centrality of the region to the country’s future before quickly forgetting about the region when the immediate crisis has passed.

But this time, we’re told, the matter is different. The opening of the Northwest Passage could raise the strategic importance of the region, usher in a new era of northern transportation, and present both challenges and opportunities to the people in the North. Or, this could be just another brief episode of southern concern, to be followed by a rapid falling off in interest and a retreat of the North into national irrelevance.

How, then, should the North react? It’s fairly safe to assume that the issue will pass in time, if only because the changes are likely to be slow and Canadian concern about the North very difficult to sustain. (Of course, global warming could proceed very rapidly, and the arrival of foreign tankers and ships could force Canada’s hand much sooner.) The Conservative government, unlike its Liberal predecessors, has the unusual habit, for a Canadian government, of listening to the military. And if the military presents a reasonable strategy for defending the North, the Harper administration will likely put money into the region. There are potential benefits for the North in this. As Alaska discovered many decades ago, military spending makes a surprisingly robust foundation for regional economic development, if the social and cultural dislocations can be managed properly. So, if the North knows what it wants out of the federal government and can combine these needs with military or comparable expenditures, it has the chance to capture a much larger share of national spending and stabilize the regional economy in the process.

The past offers clear lessons about Canadian concerns over sovereignty in the North. We do not, as a nation, care very much about the Arctic until someone else wants it – as demonstrated when Canada left Herschel Island to American whalers in the 1890s and again at Hans Island in 2005. Canada has never made the investments necessary to demonstrate a lasting commitment to the region. Australia, for one, has a far more impressive military presence in its vast outback regions than Canada does in the Far North, and the Scandinavian nations are careful to defend their northern districts. The current interest will fade, until the Americans, the Japanese or the Chinese sail a ship through the increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage. Canada will then fly into a near-panic, editorialists will decry the absence of an Arctic defense and surveillance capacity, opposition politicians will demand immediate action, and little will be done. Until the next time.

Canadians have a curious lack of interest in the North. The Arctic regions figure so prominently in national mythology and self-image that one would reasonably expect the country to be anxious to protect and integrate the region into the nation. But this has not happened in the past and, if anything, is even less likely to happen in the future. Canadians simply do not care very much about sub-Arctic and Arctic regions. The country’s population, after all, is strung out along the Canada-USA boundary and is increasingly concentrated in a handful of major cities. The Arctic is a long way – geographically and conceptually – from the Canadian mainstream. The country did not get exercised over the American presence in the Yukon during the Gold Rush or the U.S. friendly invasion during World War II.

If history offers a lesson about the current debate, it is simple. The potential and increasingly likely entry of foreign shipping and interests into the Canadian Arctic in the coming years will generate a great deal of editorial noise, little substantial Canadian interest, and minor Canadian action. The North is geographically part of Canada, but it’s not yet a fully integrated into the nation. Canadians have not yet demonstrated that they truly care about the present or future of the North. The current furor over questions of national sovereignty will like remain just that – mere chatter.

Ken Coates is Professor of History and Dean of Arts at the University of Waterloo.