Who Controls Canada’s Arctic?

On this sun-dappled day the picturesque hamlet of Pangnirtung shimmers in the Arctic light—its raw beauty undisturbed except for the occasional whir of motorboats as Inuit fishermen check their weirs for pink-fleshed Arctic char or prowl the freezing aquamarine waters of Cumberland Sound for beluga whales. The village of 1,500 just south of the Arctic Circle appears as remote and impenetrable as it did centuries ago when intrepid explorers first tackled towering ice ridges and treacherous straits in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, and the wealth they believed lay beyond it.

Buffeted by blistering winds and bound in ice and mist for much of the year, outsiders are rarely seen in Pangnirtung. So word quickly spread when a hardy-looking kayaker suddenly appeared in the village wearing only a pair of shorts, despite the sub-zero weather. The military believes the mysterious stranger was actually a spy sent to do reconnaissance prior to the arrival of French President Jacques Chirac, who visited Pangnirtung as a guest of then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in September 1999.

The alleged agent was followed by a number of other strange sightings. rcmp officers reported seeing a large, V-shaped wake, while Inuit hunters described a conning tower matching a submarine class used by only two countries: France and the US. And an Inuit woman travelling on a fishing boat recounted how she suddenly came eye-to-eye with a frogman in scuba gear floating near the shore.

Long-range Aurora patrol aircraft were dispatched to hunt for the sub, but could not confirm there were any intruders. All this left many in the village uneasy about going out on the water. “We feel invaded,” says Peter Kilabuk, wearing the trademark red ball cap and sweatshirt of the Canadian Rangers, a primarily native militia, as he prepared to head out on patrol in August. “Either the government is not telling us what threats there are in our own waters, or no one has the means of protecting our waters.”

The suspicious events in Cumberland Sound added to the growing belief at National Defence headquarters in Ottawa that even in the post-Cold War era, the Arctic continues to be the scene of international intrigue. Now, instead of Soviet and US missile-equipped nuclear subs shadowing one another under the polar ice cap, the looming threat comes from foreign governments, including the US and European Union, who do not recognize Canada’s fragile claim to the Northwest Passage, snaking through the resource-rich Arctic Archipelago.

Some of the foreign intrusions into the archipelago have been conducted like military exercises. In the summer of 2002 and again in 2003, the Danish government sent a frigate, its hull reinforced to withstand heavy ice, to Hans Island, a lonely piece of rock in Kennedy Channel running between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. On both occasions, marines were put ashore where they erected Danish flags and left plaques declaring ownership of the outcrop—a desolate site, but one that is located in the centre of a rich fishing ground, under which may lie part of the region’s vast energy resources, estimated to contain more than 4.7-billion barrels of oil and forty trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The military has begun responding to the growing challenges on Canada’s northern frontier. In August, six hundred soldiers, sailors, and airmen travelled to Pangnirtung to take part in Exercise Narwhal, the first time all three branches came together for a joint initiative that anyone in the area can recall. To increase surveillance, unmanned drones and new satellite technology were tested. The army also plans to continue its Arctic initiative with a similar but larger exercise in 2006. With growing foreign interest in the resource-rich North, the Liberal government promised in October’s Throne Speech to develop a comprehensive strategy to protect Canadian sovereignty and boost development in the region. “If Canada is not in a position to offer protection, then somebody else will be doing it,” says Defence Minister Bill Graham. “It’s our country, it’s our responsibility, and we will fulfill our responsibility.”

But there’s one more threat to Canadian sovereignty in the region that no amount of defence action can avoid: global warming. Over the past three decades ice ridges have thinned by up to 40 percent, while the ice cap’s surface cover has been receding by 3 percent a decade. The once-impenetrable Northwest Passage could be ice-free and open to shipping in the summer months by the middle of the century. If, as expected, shipping does increase, some analysts believe Canada’s claim to the Arctic is so weak that it will have no choice but to allow passage. Each vessel moving through, will, in effect, carry away a piece of the nation’s claim to the Arctic. “My worry is, when global warming takes effect, the Northwest Passage is going to be freed up,” says Conservative defence critic Gordon O’Connor. “A number of countries are going to say it’s an international passage and we could start losing our sovereignty over pieces of the Arctic.”

The Arctic has long been embedded in Canada’s national mythology, its brutal beauty tightly bound to the country’s identity as the “true north, strong and free.” It began in 1670 when King Charles II granted a Royal Order to the Hudson’s Bay Company, giving it title to Rupert’s Land, essentially Hudson’s Bay and its watershed. In 1821, title was expanded to include what is now the Northwest Territories and Nunavut south of the Arctic Islands. The Hudson’s Bay Company signed over sovereignty of its lands to Canada in 1869. Then, in 1880, after numerous entreaties from Britain, Canada, a thirteen-year-old nation of four million people, finally agreed to take stewardship over the still unexplored Arctic Archipelago.

Until then, the quest to unlock the secrets of the far north had largely been a British imperative. The names of bold explorers such as Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher, and William Baffin—men determined to find a northern sea route linking Europe and Asia—grace the rough-hewn islands and frozen channels.