Colleague Jeff has supplied a convincing overview of Canada’s difficult role in the Arctic. Canada likes to mythologize its great open spaces in the wild north, creating emblems ranging from lines in the national anthem – “the true north strong and free” – to films like “Nanook of the North” to art like the sandstone sculptures and Baker Lake prints that southerners pay plenty of loonies to own to Stan Roger’s great song “The Northwest Passage” to the Edmonton Eskimos football team. Norm Kwong, one of their legendary players and perhaps the only major (ethnically) Chinese football player in history, recalls once hearing an Edmonton matron in the audience for one of his interviews tell her neighbour, “See I told you they were real Eskimos”.
But what Canada, the world’s second largest country, hasn’t done is provide military support for its mythology, making it vulnerable to the aggressiveness of the first and third largest countries, which face it in the Arctic. Instead it has slugged it out with tiny Denmark (controlling gigantic Greenland) in a farcical struggle over miniscule Hans Island. The excuse for lack of muscle in the Arctic has been strictly economic in the past, but this may be changing because the tide of Canadian public opinion has swung for the Arctic, and that has the politicians’ ears. Almost twenty years ago Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney cancelled Liberal plans for ice breakers for the navy, something which both Norway and Denmark manage to finance, and the US and Russia have both ice breakers and nuclear submarines out on Arctic patrol. In its lead editorial today, the conservative Vancouver Province advised the government to lease ice breakers if they are too cheap to build them, but to get them before it is too late to the newly announced far north military base with deep water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island, and to the beefed-up existing bases. Canadians will soon see whether their government is serious when it says it will provide protection for Canadian values from sea to sea to sea.