Custos Borealis: The Military in the Canadian North, 1899-2010

For policy-makers grappling with the challenges of evolving sovereignty and security issues in the Canadian arctic, the last few years have been remarkable. Reporters across North America have published sensational articles forecasting potential changes resulting from global warming; scientists affirm that the ice cap was receding at a faster rate than anticipated. The federal government’s 2005 International Policy Statement repeatedly identified the arctic as a region of particular focus, and it pledged significant resources to bolster a Canadian military presence in the region – affirmed by political leaders in the last federal election campaign. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged to increase the Canadian Forces’ footprint in the region – with ships, more troops, and a high arctic base. Unfortunately, these are old proposals promoted as something new: most of these initiatives were promised in the past two decades and scuttled when crises passed and political interest in the region waned. The absence of any published, longitudinal study of Canada’s military commitments in the North make the historical memory elusive at best – for journalists, policy-makers, and scholars alike.

This research project aims to rectify this. The twentieth-century Arctic does not lack for histories; much is known, for instance, about the American presence in Northwest Canada during the Second World War and its impacts on Northern peoples and environments (Coates and Morrison 1992, 1994) as well as general concerns about sovereignty (Eyre 1987; Bankes 1987). Arctic history, however, has been dominated by the debate over the sovereignty-security equilibrium in immediate postwar Canada. Scholars such as Shelagh Grant (1988) have tracked popular media statements and those political activists who trumpeted concerns about sinister American intentions threatening Canadian sovereignty in the North. Others, like William Morrison, have painted a more benign portrait of bilateral cooperation: “on balance, it is difficult to fault the Americans, unless one assumes a priori that everything the United States does in its foreign policy is malevolent” (Morrison 1987). The literature charting actual military activities in the postwar period is surprisingly sparse. Colonel Bernd Horn (2002) has written an insightful overview chapter on arctic security from 1939-99, with particular strength on army activities to 1960, but given the saliency of the arctic in current political and military discourse this is clearly insufficient.

The most comprehensive study on the Canadian military and the North was conducted in the late 1970s by Dr. Kenneth Eyre as a serving member of the Canadian Forces and a Ph.D. student at the King’s College (University of London). In mid-2005, I approached Eyre, now a director at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, about the status of this research. He suggested that I take the lead on a co-authored project which would draw upon his doctoral research, expand it to include declassified sources and secondary literature published during the past quarter century, and extend the discussion forward from 1975 (where he left off) to the present.

The timing is critical. Recent commentators have called for bold, immediate action to assert Canadian sovereignty in the face of threats both to the delicate Arctic eco-system and also to continental security generally (Huebert 2003, 2002; Arctic Council, 2004). Others warn that “alarmist” reactions have often brought more harm than benefit to Northern peoples like the Inuit – the people most directly affected by Arctic activities – and caution that the underlying pretext for action often disappears faster than the sea ice (Griffiths 2004, 2003). Former Prime Minister Paul Martin declared on 20 September 2005 that Canadians “must, and…will, reaffirm our sovereignty as part of a broader Northern Strategy” (Martin 2005), and Stephen Harper has committed to investing significant new resources into the region. Developing and enacting a sustainable strategy in an era of environmental and geopolitical uncertainty is daunting to policymakers, who are well aware that today’s decisions will have long-term effects. Without a strong awareness of what has been proposed and implemented in the past – and what has worked and what has not – they may end up repeating the same mistakes ad infinitum.

People interested in this subject are welcome to contact me (Whitney Lackenbauer) at: pwlacken@uwaterloo.ca