In late August, the prime minister traveled to northern Canada for what has now become an annual tour. Stephen Harper delivered the main speech of the visit in Churchill, Manitoba where he declared that defending Canada’s Arctic sovereignty is now the government’s top foreign policy priority. First on the agenda is launching new negotiations with Denmark and the United States to resolve Arctic territorial disputes. Only if Canada is willing to assert its sovereignty in the high Arctic, Harper continued, can we truly consider ourselves the kind of “Arctic power” which the government believes that Canada ought to be.
While it would doubtlessly be good to put an end to the long-standing disputes, which are largely the result of imprecise description and poor surveying, this should hardly be the most pressing item on the government’s Arctic agenda. Indeed, even if we were to reach an agreement with the American and Danish governments and resolve the disputes, these ad hoc negotiations would do little to lay the groundwork for the strong multilateral relationships needed to navigate the uncertain future of the Arctic. Canada should work to revitalize the ineffectual Arctic Council as the main forum for Arctic diplomacy.
But diplomacy alone cannot deliver on Harper’s desire to make Canada into an Arctic power. For that, the prime minister needs to do something that he knows few Canadians want: new defence spending. After all, Canadians are worried that we could be headed into another long period of deficits, to be followed eventually by painful cuts to spending which dwarf those of Jean Chrétien’s first two governments. We are also relieved that Canadian troops are coming home from their long mission in Afghanistan and are not eager for military issues to once again dominate the national debate.
This is perfectly understandable. Talking about defence issues is risky for government and opposition alike because it is all too easy for one side to paint the other as defeatist or unpatriotic. Canada’s dysfunctional solution to this problem is to avoid talking about defence issues seriously and to focus instead on peripheral issues that happen to sound important. But this solution makes it all too easy to ignore Canada’s defence needs and it does so at our peril. Canada’s military needs to be able to operate in the Arctic. Admittedly, it is incredibly difficult and expensive to do so, but we cannot afford not to.
Our choice is strikingly clear: either we develop and maintain the capacity to defend and patrol a changing Arctic or we have the United States do it for us. To those who would say that expanding and improving our capacity in the Arctic is unnecessary, consider that in a few short decades, climate change will transform the Arctic from a desolate frontier into a potential resource and shipping bonanza. Companies and governments from every corner of the world will be interested and many will try to take advantage of the new opportunities. Some will challenge Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic.
Asserting sovereignty is not about simply having military forces in the Arctic, but about having ones which are properly equipped and trained to operate in the grueling conditions of northern Canada. Unfortunately, the Harper government’s military agenda for the Arctic is a half-hearted approach to assuring that the Canadian Forces have what they need to carry out their work. For instance, the proposed purchase of F-35 fighter jets, which are faster and stealthier than the CF-18s which Canada currently uses, will put Canada in good stead to patrol the high Arctic. However, since there are currently no permanent military airbases in the Arctic, the F-35s would still have to fly for hours from bases in northern Alberta and Labrador. Though the government has ordered new ice-hardened vessels for use in the Northwest Passage, these have no permanent military naval base from which to operate. Since ice-hardened vessels are not designed to break ice, these would still be incapacitated for several months of the year unless supported by new ice breakers such as those operated by the coast guard. This trend is repeated in nearly every planned equipment purchase or retrofit for the Canadian Forces’ Arctic operations.
It may be that there is even more spending necessary to bring the Canadian Forces up to a reasonable standard. It may be that Canadians would be comfortable with sharing the defence burden in the Arctic with the United States. This we cannot know until we can have a national debate about the future of northern Canada and the role which the Canadian military will play in defending it. If we cannot depend on the government to initiate such a debate, then we should look to the opposition.
