Back in 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper went north of 60 in a fighting mood, with clenched fists. Surrounded by soldiers in desert camouflage, he talked of defending Canada’s North against all comers, especially harpoon-wielding Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
Back in 2007, Harper had promised six Polar Class vessels to patrol the Arctic shoreline, a deep-water station at Nanisivik on Baffin Island near the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, a military training centre at Resolute Bay.
He promised, again, to re-arm and re-equip the Canadian Rangers, the band of happy warriors who stand on chilly guard for the rest of us.
As he said in 2007 of the true North, strong and free: “We use it, or lose it.”
His view of our Arctic has seemed to be the old Cold War version; the North has value only as a zone of defence for Canada South.
Yet most promises of the past have not been kept. And a lot has changed and is changing fast as the sea ice melts.
A cruise ship passed through the Northwest Passage in 2006, some months into Harper’s first year in office. A coal carrier used the passage to get from Vancouver to Hamburg in 2012. Today, a Chinese container ship is taking the passage to Rotterdam.
China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have applied for observer status on the eight-nation Arctic Council because, like the U.S. and everyone else except official Canada, they regard the Northwest Passage as an international waterway ripening for international trade and commerce.
It’s apparent that, despite Putin’s pugnaciousness, there are more pressing threats to our northern frontier — things like pollution from shipping, illegal migration, and trafficking in drugs, weapons and human beings.
So this time on his northern adventure, Harper kept his clenched fists in his parka pockets. He’s singing from the songbook prepared for Canada’s assuming chairmanship of the Arctic Council last May — a chair it will fill until 2015.
The new themes are “development for people of the North,” “responsible resource development,” “safe Arctic shipping” and “sustainable circumpolar communities.”
Not a mention of stealth snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles or submarine patrols.
This upsets retired generals and admirals and academics in imaginary tin hats. They think Harper is letting our guard down.
They lament that the gallant Rangers don’t know how to conduct surveillance from the air or on the water and can only wave their First World War rifles from shore at signs of trouble.
They say Canada is not asserting its due authority over the Northwest Passage the way Russia is over the Russian Northern Sea Route, where ships must register, pay a fee for passage and be escorted by Russian icebreakers.
Our prime minister, though, is pragmatic. His mind is unclouded by proscribed substances that might affect political adolescents. He surrenders to no flights of fancy.
He knows that Canada, on its own, can command little respect. He knows that the cost of asserting its will over others determined to use the passage as their own is prohibitive.
He knows that there is safety in numbers and that polar co-operation and diplomacy can do more for the environmental safety and geographical security of Canada’s North than confrontation and defiance.
Harper’s hope for Arctic Canadians is economic development and benefit from the extraction of natural resources, as it is for the rest of the country. He believes that social improvements are the fruits of enterprise.
Not all Canadians agree — not those who worry about polar bears, wapiti or delicate plants on melting permafrost, certainly not those who accuse Harper of being in too much of a hurry to get what can be got while the getting’s good.
In the case of our North, though, Harper’s right to be in a hurry. Nature, spurred on by the follies of humankind, is changing the features at the top of the globe at an alarming rate.
It’s no longer just a line of defence in a snowbound wilderness.
And Canadians should take comfort in knowing that their Arctic is part of Fortress America. If there’s trouble threatening the northern battlements, the Yanks will come.
