The Canadian Arctic is a sieve. And this is a problem, because climate change is making this territory more and more accessible at the very time when our closest northern neighbor, Russia, is multiplying military bases there.
On our side of the pole, part-time Inuit volunteers, the Rangers, provide our only permanent military presence.
“We are the eyes, the ears and the voice of the Canadian army”, explains Jimmy Evalik, the chief Rangers of Cambridge Bay, one of our northernmost communities of the country, in Nunavut.
Our 1,600 Rangers like Mr. Evalik, spread across the Arctic along our 162,000 kilometers of northern coastline, are increasingly alone in the face of an increasingly hostile world.
Northern Nunavut is closer to Russia than to Ottawa, and our Russian neighbor has been renovating its Cold War-era Arctic military bases, as well as building new ones. Sergeant Evalik and his teammates are only supported by 340 soldiers.
We met the Chief Rangers of Cambridge Bay in July 2022, for the documentary The Arctic War, available from February 14 on the VRAI platform. This project was born from the Russian invasion in Ukraine, when we realized our geographical proximity to the aggressor.
During our stay, Sergeant Evalik was waiting for the start of Operation NANOOK, the Canadian military’s annual summer exercise in the Arctic.
The 200 participants arrived from over 3000 km south, in Trenton, Ontario, where we joined them on the tarmac of the military base.
“It’s important that everyone knows that we have a presence in our Far North. There is always a possibility of foreign invasion. It’s 100% possible”, indicated Sergeant Joseph Colonel before boarding.
NATO worries
For the first time, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined our soldiers during the exercise to send a clear message: shadows hang over Arctic security.
“The shortest route to North America for Russian missiles and bombers would be over the North Pole,” Stoltenberg said.
He explained that Russia uses its Arctic military infrastructure to test its new weapons, and that it operates there hand in hand with China. He warned that the Sino-Russian partnership threatens “our values and our interests”.
The NATO secretary general had clearly come to check on what Canada is doing to protect NATO’s northwest front, according to Robert Huebert, an Arctic military strategist at the University of Calgary.
Not ready
But “the federal organizations responsible for the safety and security of the Arctic region […] are not ready to respond to increased monitoring requirements,” wrote the Auditor General of Canada, Karen Hogan, in November.
Shortly after, in December, Mr. Stoltenberg added a layer of it, underlining with the antenna of CNN that Russia continued to develop its Arctic military installations, in spite of its difficulties on the Ukrainian face.