But with no way of upholding its claim to the Arctic, Canada was soon challenged by Scandinavian explorers, including Norway’s legendary Roald Amundsen. In 1906, he completed the first successful transit of the Northwest Passage, having entered Lancaster Sound in the Eastern Arctic in a refitted, steam-powered herring boat, the Gjoa, and emerging one thousand days, and more than three thousand kilometres later, battered but alive, in Alaska. He was followed in 1909 by American Robert E. Peary, believed to be the first person to reach the North Pole.
As Amundsen moved through the passage and Peary raced to the Pole, Canada was desperately trying to claim sovereignty, sending Captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier on numerous trips to the North between 1906 and 1911 in his ship The Arctic. Accompanied by scientists and prospectors, Bernier collected licence fees and duties from whalers. His lasting legacy: a bronze plaque that he hammered into the frozen tundra on Melville Island on July 1, 1909, officially claiming the Archipelago for Canada.
The rcmp also carried the flag into the north, policing and visiting remote communities. In 1942, Henry Larsen, a Norwegian-born rcmp officer, became only the second person to conquer the passage. It took him almost two years, but he finally made it through on the St. Roch, a schooner with a hull made of thick Douglas fir.
Canada’s claim was challenged again after the Second World War when the American military moved into the Arctic to build bases and the Distance Early Warning Line, a string of radar stations designed to detect incoming Soviet bombers and ballistic missiles. The American presence expanded so rapidly that, according to cabinet notes from 1953, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was worried about a “de facto exercise of US Sovereignty” in the region.
In that same year, several Inuit families were moved by ship from northern Quebec to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, about 1,500 kilometres south of the North Pole. The government claimed they were being moved because they faced starvation, but many of those making the journey believed they were used as human flagpoles. “I’m convinced the main reason was sovereignty,” says John Amagoalik, a tall, wiry Inuk who was five when his family was left on a gravel beach in Resolute Bay. “Many of us felt the government couldn’t assert sovereignty, and it had to depend on a small group of Inuit. We’ve made a contribution to this country.”
If the Inuit were indeed being used strategically during the Cold War, then Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is perhaps the most enduring legacy of that American presence. The windswept town of six thousand is the site of a former US military base, which operated on-and-off between 1942 and 1963. Remnants of the base, including old hangars, are still used, and the former barracks now serves as a residence for Nunavut Arctic College.
Throughout this period, Ottawa largely neglected the region’s sparse aboriginal population, which suffered from rampant tuberculosis, lack of housing, and even starvation. The dire situation facing the Inuit forced St. Laurent to admit at the time that Ottawa had “administered these vast territories of the north in an almost continuing state of absence of mind.”
For many, John Diefenbaker was the first, and last, prime minister to offer a strategic plan for the Arctic. In a speech he gave in Winnipeg in 1958, Diefenbaker outlined his northern vision, which included highways, the development of natural resources, and scientific research. “I see a new Canada—a Canada of the North,” he declared. He succeeded to a degree, beginning construction of the seven hundred kilometre Dempster Highway, running from Dawson City to Inuvik, and launching what became known as a golden age in Arctic science and research during the 1960s and 1970s.
Since the early 1980s, however, Canada’s underfunded programs in Arctic research have lagged behind most other northern nations, says David Hik, a University of Alberta biologist and leading expert on northern ecology. In fact, just as international interest in the Arctic is growing as a result of climate change, Canada’s aging scientific infrastructure is crumbling, and a number of research stations have been mothballed.
Even such unlikely countries as China and South Korea have Arctic research programs. Canada, in contrast, is the only major polar country without a dedicated Arctic research institute. “We are one of the most significant northern nations, yet we don’t have a plan, or any obvious interest, and we haven’t made strategic investments,” says Hik. “This is our security, and this is our future over the next century. A country can’t live one hundred miles from the border. If we think that’s the extent of our land base, then I don’t think that’s much of a future.”
