As southern Ontario’s hot, sticky summer starts to wind down, the last thing on most people’s minds is the vast, frozen tundra of Canada’s Far North. But on Sept. 18, a group gathered in downtown Toronto to hear a broad range of experts discuss Arctic sovereignty and security.
Granted, the Far North has always been a very niche area of interest in Canada, which is curious for a country that prides itself on being a northern nation. But perhaps that’s to be expected when 90 per cent of our population lives within 160 kilometres of the U.S. border, many in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto that have relatively temperate climates.
The fact remains, however, that the North constitutes 40 per cent of Canada’s landmass. And as temperatures warm and economic opportunities open up in the Arctic, it is a region that has attracted the attention of the world’s leading powers, Arctic states and even developing countries like India. Indeed, it often seems as though everyone wants a piece of the frozen pie, except Canada — a country that claims sovereignty over a quarter of the Arctic.
Yet as those who attended the Canadian Arctic Conference heard, Canada’s claim over the North is tenuous. Much of our claim to sovereignty rests with the approximately 200,000 Canadians who live in the Arctic. Unfortunately, governments of all stripes, and the current Liberals in particular, have treated the North as somewhat of an afterthought, which has left them without proper infrastructure and limited their economic opportunities.
The cost of “infrastructure development is about 145 … per cent higher in the North than in the south,” said naval warfare officer and Arctic policy expert Katherine Todd. “So these are really big, expensive projects.” And the situation has only got worse due to the high taxes imposed by the Trudeau Liberals, specifically the carbon tax.
The transportation of goods has “become significantly more costly since we put the carbon tax in,” said Mark Mather, owner of the Dawson City General Store in the Yukon. “Two years ago, our fuel surcharge went up as high as 92.4 per cent, which … has made the cost of living just absolutely crazy here.”
He noted that in Dawson City, four litres of milk sells for $6.49, which is fairly comparable to the rest of the country, though the margins for grocers are much tighter due to the higher cost of shipping. Yet in Inuvik, N.W.T., he said that same milk can run as high as $21, owing largely to a lack of transportation infrastructure.
The prohibitively high cost of living in many northern communities causes both poverty and serious health problems due to a lack of fresh foods in many diets, leading to increased health-care costs. The dearth of all-weather roads, airports, railroads and ports throughout the region also limits our ability to protect it from external threats and hampers economic activity.
“The infrastructure gap in the North is obviously a big challenge to economic development,” said Photinie Koutsavlis, vice-president of the Mining Association of Canada. Mining in the Arctic is two to 2.5 times more expensive than elsewhere in the country.
This is not a problem faced by our primary competitors in the Arctic, Russia and China, which have been prioritizing northern infrastructure development for years. Russia, in particular, has heavily militarized the Arctic.
It is the owner of the world’s largest and most capable fleet of icebreakers. It has spent the past two decades building and upgrading Arctic deep-water ports and airfields capable of accommodating nuclear bombers, along with its northern air-defence and surveillance systems. Canada, on the other hand, has spent the better part of two decades constructing a single deep-water port, and it won’t be able to land large planes or operate year-round.
“The fact that both China and Russia are challenging our territorial claims to vast portions of the Arctic … should be concerning to all of us,” said retired Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, who lamented how Canada, especially under the Trudeau Liberals, has neglected its Armed Forces and let down its allies by failing to contribute its fair share to international peace and security.
“I’m not suggesting that Russia or China or others will launch an attack into Canada over the North Pole. But we can expect to see an increasing probability of Russian and Chinese exploration vessels looking for minerals of value, or for drilling in our pristine Arctic, or for laying claim to lands, which they’ve already disputed in court.”
Alison LeClaire — who previously served as ambassador to Russia and director general of Arctic, Eurasian and European affairs at Global Affairs Canada — contends that, “Russia’s approach to the Arctic is largely economic,” with the region accounting for 12 to 20 per cent of the country’s GDP, compared to less than one per cent in Canada. “They look at their Arctic as their economic future,” she said.
And the Russians have invested heavily in ensuring that future, with, for example, a fleet of icebreakers that can escort commercial ships through Arctic waters. This is a capability Canada does not have, and it represents a huge missed opportunity as shippers increasingly look to the Arctic as a means of reducing transport times between Europe and Asia. Canada is quite literally sitting on what could become our own version of the Panama Canal, without any means of controlling or monetizing it.
Although Russia has always constituted the greatest military challenge to the Canadian North — a threat that has not diminished since the fall of the Soviet Union — many of the Arctic Conference panellists believe that China poses the greatest risk to Canadian sovereignty.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of geography will of course observe that China does not border the Arctic. Nevertheless, in 2018, it declared itself a “near-Arctic state,” and has been building out its Arctic naval fleet and looking to project military and economic power in the North ever since.
According to LeClaire, in the past, Russia worked to prevent China from making significant inroads in the Arctic, but the war in Ukraine forced it to forge an alliance with Beijing, which has increased China’s leverage and changed the calculus. This has given the Chinese Communist Party far more leeway to pursue its “Polar Silk Road” project, an extension of its Belt and Road Initiative in the Far North.
For more than a decade, China has invested heavily in Canadian mining projects, looking to increase its monopoly over the production of rare earth metals and other critical minerals needed for the energy transition. Only recently has it started to receive pushback from the federal government on national security grounds.
The risk, according to journalist and commentator Jeff Nyquist, is that if the Chinese are allowed to build infrastructure in the Arctic, if they’re the ones constructing ports and running icebreakers in areas that Canada had failed to develop in over 150 years, then eventually they could turn around and claim the territory as their own.
If we hope to prevent our adversaries from encroaching on our northern territories, Canadians, and their government, will have to start taking the region far more seriously. The need for increased defence capabilities, in the North and elsewhere, is clear and pressing, and governments have only been able to ignore it because voters have not demanded a military that is capable of defending our borders.
The same is true of northern transportation infrastructure: it doesn’t get built because the region’s sparse population ensures it’s not a priority for government. But there is a significant opportunity for the business community and investors to begin exploiting the significant opportunities that await us in the Far North, including natural resources, shipping and tourism.
What’s needed is a national strategy to facilitate negotiations with northern Indigenous communities, reduce regulations and red tape to make it easier to get mining and infrastructure projects approved and to find ways to spur investment in private infrastructure projects, such as railways, airports, toll roads, tourist amenities and electrical generation projects. A little capitalism and Canadian ingenuity would go a long way toward helping us fully realize the Arctic’s vast potential.
National Post
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