Overdue fresh resolve for federal investment in Canada’s North

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2025 (248 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This past week, Minister of National Defence Bill Blair announced a $2.67 billion, 20-year commitment to build Canadian Armed Forces operational support hubs in Iqaluit, Inuvik and Yellowknife. Meanwhile, $34 million was committed for a research and training centre in Nunavut.

This sort of commitment to development in Canada’s Arctic is not a common occurrence and the timing was perhaps a performative gesture to let various third parties know the nation was prepared to make its presence known in the North.

However, at a recent Canada West Foundation event in Winnipeg called Thin Ice: Navigating Canadian Arctic Sovereignty, foundation president and CEO Gary Mar said he’s heard more about Canada’s Arctic over the past 10 weeks than the past 10 years combined.

In Manitoba, many of us have appreciated the potential that exists in the North through the modest infrastructure we’re lucky to have: a railway to Hudson Bay and a small deep-water port.

It’s also well-appreciated significant capital is required to maintain it, let alone enhance it. We’ve also come to understand the “business plan” is effectively still a work in progress after many decades of pitfalls.

In the last few years, provincial and federal governments have invested tens of millions in the railway and Port of Churchill. It has taken an awful long time to get to this early-stage point in the development of what many believe could become a strategic international logistic hub.

In Canada, the North does not really carry any political capital, with so much of the country spread out across the U.S. border. The country has also demonstrated an unwillingness to exert its sovereignty over the massive expanse at least partly because it’s super complicated.

Mar made another keen observation in that regard, saying: “The Arctic is largely ignored … but you can’t love that which you know nothing about.”

Jessica Shadian, president and CEO of Arctic360 think tank (founded only eight years ago), is a transplanted American who also spent five years working in the Norwegian Arctic.

She made the point at the Thin Ice event Norwegians don’t think of the Arctic as some far off, unknowable place. It’s also a tiny country whose geopolitical realities — located very close to Russia — has compelled it and the other Nordic countries to be vigilant both from a national security and sovereignty point of view in ways Canada has not been.

She suggested Norway is something akin to a “wartime economy,” something Canada could learn a thing or two from in terms of committing dollars to things that may not necessarily win the party in power any votes.

Retired major general Colin Keiver, former deputy commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who spoke at the event along with Shadian and Erin O’Toole, former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, noted it’s been 20 years since Canada has produced a national security strategy.

He believes Canada’s expression of sovereignty in the North must be more than just be a military one.

Keiver and O’Toole spoke about the utilization of dual-use infrastructure, like low-earth orbit satellites that could spot forest fires — and missile attacks — as well as providing broadband connectivity or sub-sea cables that could also carry intelligence sensing devices.

While there is an acknowledgement much capital investment will be required to build infrastructure in the North, its source was not something this group of speakers were able to articulate.

Canada’s has a poor reputation as a laggard in meeting its NATO commitments of spending two per cent of GDP on defence and it’s been arguably just as lax in investing in the North.

Embracing the reality of being an Arctic nation requires a commitment to bi-partisan action. Political expediency inevitably leaves the North out in the cold, but as O’Toole said: “We owe it to our fellow citizens in the North. Everything we do there has to have dual or triple use.”

Action will require the kind of resolve the country has not demonstrated in the past, but as O’Toole said: “’We the North’ should be more than just a (Toronto) Raptors playoff slogan.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca