Hunting the Northern Character

Photo: Hunting the Northern Character by Tony Penikett

Canadian politicians, like many of their circumpolar counterparts, brag about their country’s “Arctic identity” or “northern character,” but what do they mean, exactly? Stereotypes abound, from Dudley Do-Right to Northern Exposure, but these southern perspectives fail to capture northern realities. In his passionate, deeply personal account of modern developments in the Canadian North, entitled Hunting the Northern Character, Tony Penikett corrects confused and outdated notions of a region he became fascinated with as a child and for many years called home.

During decades of service as a legislator, mediator, and negotiator, Tony Penikett bore witness to the advent of a new northern consciousness. Out of sight of New Yorkers, and far from the minds of Copenhagen’s citizens, Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders came together to forge new Arctic realities as they dealt with the challenges of the Cold War, climate change, land rights struggles, and the boom and bust of resource megaprojects.

Following is an excerpt from Hunting the Northern Character and its Chapter 8: Arctic Security: Control or Cooperation?

Arctic Security: Control or Cooperation?

In June 2006, at Old Crow – the northernmost First Nation community in Yukon – I chatted with a Canadian senator, who seemed astonished at the prosperity of this little Arctic village. Busy construction crews were building houses, four-wheel ATVs trundled about, and people were offloading freight from a regional airline they partly owned. The senator was clearly taken aback at a scene, which was so sharply different from the clichéd image of Indian reserves: abandoned car bodies, “INAC shacks,” sedentary youngsters, and so on.

In 1992 the Vuntut Gwichi’in (People of the lakes) First Nation of Old Crow reached land claims and self-government agreements with the federal and Yukon governments. The First Nation took collective ownership of approximately 7,744 square kilometres of land and received $148.4 million in a cash transfer, much of which it placed in trust for future generations. Fourteen years on, the community was reaping the benefits. North of Old Crow, muskrat flats and tundra stretch all the way to the Arctic Ocean. A few miles west, in Alaska, the United States has based more than 20,000 armed forces personnel to protect its security and Arctic sovereignty. During my time as leader of the Yukon government, our territory had a permanent military establishment of two soldiers: a major and a corporal.

Gesturing towards the new houses, the senator asked me, “But how does Canada justify such expenditures?”

“Investments,” I countered.

“How does the government justify investment on this scale?” Since he’d read his briefing notes, the senator meant this as a serious question, despite the evident results of Northern land claims and self-government agreements.

“My guess is that somebody in the Canadian government decided that viable Arctic communities best express our sovereignty,” I said, without much forethought.

Nowhere had I seen public policy articulated in exactly that way, but I realized as I spoke that it was largely true. Validation of this came in an 2010 EKOS Survey that found that an overwhelming majority of northern (81 percent) and southern (71 percent) Canadians believed that the “best way to protect Canada’s interest in the Arctic is to have Canadians living there.” The greatest threat to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, the survey’s respondents agreed, came not from foreign warships or bombers but from the social, climatic, and economic challenges that keep those who live in the North from enjoying anything like the usual Canadian standards of education, employment, and health.

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Arctic mariners know that the ocean obeys only the laws of nature. All the admirals in all the Arctic navies cannot stop the sea ice from melting or the permafrost from thawing or the Arctic shoreline from changing shape. Hunters do not control the weather, nor where animals decide to roam or where fish choose to feed; a co-management board can do much for conservation, but it cannot prevent climate change from driving new species northward. Regardless, conventional thinkers still align, and even equate, security and sovereignty with control. This assumption continues to be reflected in both American and Canadian Arctic policy statements, with the great power privileging security and the middle power emphasizing sovereignty.

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Events over the past five decades demonstrate Canada’s anxiety about both its sovereignty and its lack of control. In response to the unauthorized transit of the American oil tanker Manhattan through the Northwest Passage in 1969, Pierre Trudeau’s government asserted Canadian sovereignty with the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act of 1970. After the US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea sailed the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Alaska in the summer of 1985 without requesting Canadian consent, Brian Mulroney’s cabinet promised to build new Polar 8 class icebreakers to defend Canada’s Arctic waters. The following year, 1986, Canada redefined its Arctic boundaries by drawing straight baselines around the Arctic Archipelago. Despite these initiatives, American and Soviet submarines continued to cruise beneath the Northwest Passage, just as they had done throughout the Cold War. Even today, Michael Byers asserts, Soviet-era charts “show more depth soundings in the Northwest Passage than Canada’s most recent charts do.” Franklyn Griffiths describes this reality: “No Arctic sovereign is omnipotent in its own space and its immediate surroundings.”

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True Arctic security will demand sizable investments over time in Arctic communities, both small and large. Being neither a military strategist nor an academic expert, I propose a very different framework for Arctic security, one that is suited for sparsely populated northern landscapes whose inhabitants struggle to fund the civilian (never mind military) infrastructure needed to guarantee Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. My framework has four key dimensions: cooperation, coordination, community, and investment.

This framework starts with a deep conception of Arctic security, one that encompasses state or military security, human security (food, housing, and income), community security, broader environmental security, and economic security. This broader conception of security depends on broad cooperation among villages, cities, regions, nations, and states. Achieving security on this scale will depend also on effective longitudinal coordination between chiefs or governments of communities, legislators of sub-national entities, federal governments or nation-states, and international bodies like the Arctic Council, the International Maritime Organization, and UNCLOS. Such coordination can be achieved only through two-way communication, not top-down, south-to-north diktats from national capitals. It will also require functioning relationships at every level, including with the private and not-for-profit sectors.

Since many Arctic communities are isolated besides being challenged by economic and environmental concerns, as well as education, health, food, housing, and other insecurities, this objective of a secure Arctic community can only be achieved over time, through firm political commitments by chiefs, legislators, and feds, who will have to build a consensus concerning long-term infrastructure investments.

Securing the world’s emerging Arctic community might sound like an idealist’s dream, but survey research suggests that building towards such a goal would appeal not only to Canadians but to other Arctic residents as well. By itself, the Canadian military could not defeat the army of any major power. Taking a multidimensional approach to securing the Canadian Arctic and the wider Arctic community is more realistic than making empty promises of military expansion, which offers only the illusion of command and control.

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A long-term “North First” investment in Arctic infrastructure will require a multi-party, multi-level commitment to spending on both defense equipment and infrastructure. All levels of government and industry will need to support that plan. Canada spends plenty of money in the Arctic, but it lacks a capital infrastructure plan. A Canadian government serious about Arctic security will consult widely, construct such a plan, and stick to it. This approach will require a prime minister or defense minister who is open-minded enough to involve counterparts from opposition parties in talks, as well as to consult with Indigenous and territorial governments. Table proposals, I suggest, talk them up, be open about the costs, and give every interested stakeholder a say. In the national interest, create in Parliament an all-party plan, then carry it through.

From individual hamlets to the larger community of Arctic states, building security in the circumpolar North will mean making strategic investments in a diverse range of social goods – safe housing; access to education and healthy, affordable food; energy development that benefits northerners while also protecting the northern environment; and transportation systems that connect villages, towns, regions, and nations – as well as carrying out diplomacy and good governance so as to link everything from international authorities to parliaments to regional capitals to local mayors. Timely investments of energy and imagination have created the northern land claims settlements, the idea of sustainable development, and the Arctic Council. Essentially, this was the vision of Gorbachev, Koivisto, Mulroney, and Brundtland, but also of Thomas Berger and Mary Simon. It was echoed by the three territorial premiers in 2007, and it seemed completely possible to me during that Old Crow conversation with my Canadian senator friend in the summer of 2006. States, including Canada, need to stop thinking about the Great White North as an empty space or a potential battleground and start viewing it as an emerging “community of communities,” to use Joe Clark’s description of Canada. The “North First” approach of the Defence Science Advisory Board makes a lot of sense, especially if, together, the federal parties in Parliament, after consulting with Indigenous communities and territorial governments, could be persuaded to adopt a long-term plan to build multi-purpose infrastructure, ports, and runways and to base icebreakers and rescue aircraft in the North. On the cornerstone of community, Canada could build Arctic security using the tools of cooperation, coordination, and long-term investment.

Tony Penikett spent 25 years in public life, including two years at the House of Commons as Chief of Staff to federal New Democratic Party Leader Ed Broadbent, five terms in the Yukon Legislative Assembly, and two terms as Premier of Canada’s Yukon Territory. His government negotiated settlements of Yukon First Nation land claims and passed pioneering education, health, and language legislation, as well as organizing Yukon 2000, a unique bottom-up economic planning process. Hunting the Northern Character was published by UBC Press in Autumn 2017.