Canada’s Arctic White Paper#

In December 2024, Canada’s Department of National Defence published its latest white paper about its Arctic strategy, named Our North: Strong and Free. The white paper came as an update from the 2019 version, which is actually mostly focused on the relations with indigenous peoples, and marks Canada’s growing interest for the Arctic from a geostrategic point of view, with the ultimate aim of strengthening its hold of what has been mostly characterised as an underpopulated backwater.

The first interventions, from Canada’s Ministers of Defence and of Foreign Affairs, sound like a wake-up call. A main trope of their narrative is the end of the “end of history”: while Fukuyama’s world-famous essay is never mentioned, their interventions show a clear belief that the defeat of the communism at the Cold War—and the one of fascism around forty years earlier—would have led to the worldwide spread of liberal democracy and a perennial global dominance of the United States—and, by extension, the Anglo-Saxons. “When the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended”, as put by the Minister of Defence William Blair, “many democracies—including Canada— scaled back defence investments and shrunk their militaries”. At the same time, as Blair still mentions, “By 2013, defence spending had fallen to 1 per cent of our gross domestic product”. The main aims of the new strategy is to face the emergence of this “new world” and to increase the relative weight of military expenditure.

The strategy singles out Russia and China as Canada’s main adversaries, followed by Iran and North Korea. “Although these countries pursue different goals at different scales”, as stated by the white paper, “they share a broader disregard for the stable and predictable rules that have governed our international relations—sovereignty, non-intervention, basic principles of human security, and free and open trade”.

Russia is more directly mentioned as a threat, which “despite battlefield losses in Ukraine, remains highly capable of projecting air, naval and missile forces across Europe, as well as to and through the Arctic to threaten North America”, while China is seen more as an indirect threat, namely as “an increasingly capable and assertive actor looking to reshape the international system to advance its interests and values, which increasingly diverge from our own on matters of defence and security”. But both countries are considered as challengers to the international order “that has safeguarded Canada’s prosperity and security for decades”. The white paper does not overlook the fact that both countries are active in the Arctic: the former through direct access, while the latter, “despite not being an Arctic nation, seeks to become a “polar great power” by 2030 and is demonstrating an intent to play a larger role in the region”.

Canada’s answer to this perceived threat is to assume a more active international posture. Like the United States, Canada straddles across two oceans, and this gives a natural projection towards both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. On the European front, Canada plans—among the others—to increase its contingent in Latvia to 2200 units by 2026 and to continue to support Ukraine militarily, also by training its army. At the same time, as an Arctic country, Canada plans to increase investments into Arctic defence, with a particular reference to Arctic and Polar over-the-horizon radars.

In 2022, Canada announced 38.6 billion CAD (around 25 billion euro) of investments over 20 years into NORAD, the organisation providing joint air defence between the United States and Canada. As put by the strategy, “our Arctic waters, airspace, and territory cannot be vulnerable to intrusion or used as an avenue to harm Canada, our closest ally, the United States, or other NATO allies”. Canada’s commitment in the Indo-Pacific is vaguer, apart from some general mentions to the military rise of China and to the tensions across the Taiwan Strait and a reference to the fact that six of Canada’s largest trading partners are located in the Indo-Pacific region; and, given China’s importance as one of Canada’s main trade partners, it is doubtful how much the country is ready to follow up with the U.S.’s strategy to contain the Dragon, although it is still likely that Ottawa will somehow toe Washington’s line.

Beyond The White Paper: Canada’s Arctic Activism#

The white paper does not mention every aspect of Canada’s growing Arctic activism. One of the most important ones, not analysed by it but still very important to understand Canada’s actual outreach in the region, is the Icebreaker Cooperation Effort Pact. Better known as ICE Pact, with words carefully chosen to make one of those acronyms Americans are very fond of (remember the USA PATRIOT Act?), the agreement was signed by Canada, Finland and the United States in July 2024 and its main aim is to build an icebreaker fleet which could somehow counteract Russia’s, now the largest in the world.

For Ottawa, the ICE Pact implies in particular a greater cooperation with Finland, which used to be a main supplier of icebreakers to Russia until the launch of the Special Military Operation (Recruiting Friends for the Polar Icebreaker Express: Viewing the ICE Pact through Broader Defense Industrial Cooperation). The realisation of one of the two new icebreakers for the Canadian Coast Guard, which has been awarded to the Canadian Davie Shipbuilder on 8th March 2025, will take place in both Finland and Canada: the icebreaker, more specifically, will be first constructed in the Helsinki Shipyard and then assembled in the Davie Shipbuilding plants in Quebec. It should be noticed that the Helsinki Shipyards, which previously belonged to a Russian fund, have been bought by Davie Shipbuilding itself in November 2023 (Canada’s Davie completes purchase of Helsinki Shipyard from Russia’s Algador | Reuters).

Furthermore, Canada’s growing interest for the Arctic has been accompanied also by a diplomatic offensive. Ottawa has recently settled a dispute on Hans Island, an uninhabited island located between Greenland and the Canadian island of Ellesmere. The dispute, better known as “Whisky War”, was taking place since 1973 in a peaceful way (soldiers from both countries planted their flags and left a bottle of local liqueur every time they had the opportunity to stop on the island to signal that it was theirs), but it remained unresolved until 2022, when Canada and Denmark agreed to split the island in two parts (The whisky war: Danemark and Canada Hans Island dispute—MariTimes Crimes). The agreement came just after the launch of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, which both parties mentioned during the press conference; and, while the dispute had a rather limited impact on the bilateral relations between Canada and Denmark, given the low economic and strategic value of the island, keeping it open could be a source of embarrassment in the ongoing confrontation between Russia and a “Collective West” both countries are parties of.

More recently, the country is also establishing two consulate in Anchorage, Alaska, and Nuuk, Greenland (Why is Canada scrambling to counter Russia, China in the Arctic? | Politics News | Al Jazeera), with the clear aim of strengthening its diplomatic presence in an increasingly strategic region.

It should be noticed that, as seen for the new German Arctic strategy, climate change has been somehow downgraded among the main challenges affecting the region. Global warming is clearly still mentioned as one of them, but first and foremost as something that “will create new security challenges and magnify existing ones at home and around the world”. Just a few words are devoted to the ecological challenges for the Arctic, namely to the fact that it “is now warming at four times the global average”, and to the prediction that “by 2050, the Arctic Ocean could become the most efficient shipping route between Europe and East Asia”. This can be striking for a country whose government is known for having wholeheartedly supported the environmentalist ideology and whose former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—still in charge when the white paper was redacted—thanked Greta Thunberg “for inspiring our kids, for pushing us all to do more, and for building a movement to make it possible” after a meeting with the Swedish activist. But, for many Western governments, the 24th February 2022 has represented a somehow landmark turning point, making them (officially) change priorities. Interesting enough, many of the Western environmentalist movements themselves have adopted the same anti-Russian stances of their governments.

As a whole, Canada poses itself as a defender of the Old Order. In spite of the increased great power competition in the Arctic region, the idea that Russia or China may attack Canada through the Arctic is laughable, and the Canadian policymakers themselves are (probably) aware of this. Therefore, the rhetorics about the Russian and Chinese “threats” should be interpreted not in terms of a possible Russian or Chinese attack against Ottawa or Toronto, but as a challenge to a world order which sees Canada as a (passive) member of the dominant Anglo-Saxon core of the “Collective West”. The strategy itself mentions multiple times the preservation of what it calls “the rules-based world order”; and, if we put aside the rhetorical aspects of the white paper, we could easily understand that Canada clearly sees the preservation of the post-1991 unipolar order as something that “will enable Canada to engage the world from a position of strength”. The ongoing transition towards a multipolar world, in this contest, does not threaten Canada physically, but denies it the sense of security which comes from belonging to some kind of ruling core.

Moreover, as we mentioned above, there is the illusion of the “end of history” and the idea of an inevitable global spread of the Western model after its main alternatives have been defeated. The idea of an inevitable worldwide spread of liberal democracy, united with the concept of “democratic peace”, offered many Western politicians, like those of the Liberal Party which currently rules Canada, the hope that building some kind of Heaven on Earth was possible. This hope proved to be delusional in many occasions, it has been a direct cause of many Western-promoted military conflicts (see Iraqi War), and anyway the world is drifting away from the control and the delusions of Western neoliberals and neoconservatives; but there is little doubt that there are still many Western politicians and policymakers who sincerely believe on this. And the delusion of the “end of history” has definitely played a way greater role in the making of Canada’s current Arctic strategy than the unlikely threat of Russian or Chinese missiles reaching Toronto through the Canadian Arctic.

The Future Of Canada’s Strategy#

Is this new Arctic strategy the sign that Canada will soon start to make history and to give due relevance to a region which has mostly been seen as an underpopulated backwater? The two notions are way more interconnected than it may appear at a first glance. If Canada will start making history, the first place we will notice it is in its Arctic region, where there are still three ongoing territorial disputes affecting Canada:

• A region in the Beaufort Sea, claimed by both Canada and the United States (Alaska);
• The status of the Northwest Passage, which passes through the Canadian Archipelago. Canada considers it to be internal waters, while the United States push for freedom of navigation and their recognition as international waters;
• The Lomonosov Ridge in the Arctic Ice Sea, claimed by Russia, Denmark (through Greenland) and Alaska.

Although these disputes involve only sea regions, their resolution is way thornier than the one on Hans Island due to their much greater strategic and economic relevance. Enforcing these claims may imply a switch to a fully historical mindset, especially given Russia’s dominance in the Arctic region and the United States’ increasingly assertive posture under Trump; but joining history, and therefore refocusing on immaterial aspects such as a quest for strength and glory, implies a radical change in mentality which cannot take place overnight, and the Arctic strategy itself, in spite of its strong rhetorics, is a sign that this is not really happening. According to the white paper, for instance, Canada’s defence spending to GDP ratio should go up to 1.76 per cent by 2030; but, while this would still mark an increase from the 1.3 per cent in 2023, this would not be nearly enough to break Russia’s dominance in the Arctic region and it would be even below the 2 per cent NATO target. This compares with a country like Germany, which is also attempting a similar path and whose government claims to have successfully reached the aforementioned target.

This does not imply that Ottawa’s Arctic objectives are going to be missed. During the last years, for instance, Canada has definitely registered some leaps forward in the construction of icebreakers: one of the two aforementioned icebreakers, for instance, will be the first icebreaker built in Canada in more than 60 years, and both this and the one built in both Canada and Finland are expected to be Polar Class 2 ones, therefore capable of going through 3-meter thick ice fields. Still, everything should be put into perspective. The ICE Pact will definitely help Canada in terms of getting a more modern icebreaker fleet and acquiring industrial know-how; but, as put by the Italian analyst Tommaso Bontempi, Russia will find its status as the dominant Arctic power threatened only if the ambitious plan to build 90 icebreakers within a decade will ultimately succeed (A New Icebreaker Fleet: The U.S. Response to the Russian Readiness). Building icebreakers requires great investments in terms of both costs and times: the construction of each of the aforementioned vessels will cost around 2 billion euro (Canada Bolsters Arctic Capabilities Ordering Two Heavy Polar Icebreakers, Teams up with Finnish Yard), and the delivery is expected only in 2032. It is not unlikely that both costs and timings will further increase, as we saw for the new German research icebreaker Polarstern 2.

Nonetheless, we cannot exclude that Canada will ultimately join history and abandon the image of peaceful power it carefully built over the years. And the trigger, in this case, would not be a perceived threat by Russia and China, but the ongoing changes in the foreign policy of the country which leads the “Collective West”. Even more than his 2016 electoral victory, after all, Trump’s 2024 one may be reminded as a landmark moment of the ongoing switch from a “global” America to a “national” America, whose implications can hardly be underestimated. A “global” America does not need new land, and tends to justify its foreign involvement and its military presence abroad in the name of some ideology, which can also be used to create loyalists abroad. A “national” America, on the other hand, is more cynical, tends to act more openly out of self-interest (as put by Henry Kissinger, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, just interests”) and may be interested in acquiring new land. The claims to the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada—and perhaps, in the future, some parts of Mexico—do not come out of the blue, but are part of a long-standing strategy which has been just set aside during the Cold War and the subsequent globalist era.

In spite of Elon Musk’s disparaging comments about Trudeau being “the Governor of Canada”, as if Canada were a random U.S. State, and the self-evident power imbalance between Washington and Ottawa, an annexation of Canada or any part of Canada by the United States is quite unlikely for the foreseeable future, and Trump himself has excluded the option of taking over its northern neighbour manu militari. Nor does the perspective of Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state enjoy any relevant support in the country: according to a recent poll, for instance, just 6 per cent of Canadians would support it, with a further 24 per cent who would be open to it, and no Canadian province has a pro-American majority. The recent re-election of the Liberal Mark Carney, who managed to recover a gap with the Conservatives which was occasionally over 20 points in the beginning of the year, is a further sign that most Canadians oppose joining the U.S.: Carney has been a way more vocal critic of Trump than his Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre.

Will Canada reinvent itself as an anti-American power? If Canada chooses this path, it can do so by reviving the CANZUK project (a proposed alliance between the four main Commonwealth realms of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), by strengthening its ties with the European Union or by joining the non-Western world and getting close to the BRICS. None of them, nevertheless, is likely to become the main vector of Canada’s foreign policy in the future. CANZUK, at the moment, lacks the political support required to become a real organisation; the lack of the main requirement to join the EU (being a European country) limits the possibility that Canada could reorient itself towards Brussels; while the third option would imply Canada stops identifying as a Western power and renounces its Anglo-Saxon heritage—like Australia when it tried to redefine itself as an Asian power during the early 90’s. Therefore, it should be excluded for the time being. Another option, actually the most likely one, is that the relations with the U.S. will remain Canada’s main priority, but that Ottawa will counterbalance its relations with Washington with those with the UK, the other Commonwealth realms, the EU and Mexico. The equilibrium point of this counterbalancing will depend on the future of the relations between the two North American countries and of Canada’s capability of making use of it.

Whatever the path Canada is going to take, nevertheless, the Arctic will be crucial in defining Canada’s future status as a power and the future vectors of its foreign policy. As put by a former Canadian Prime Minister, “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty on the Arctic. We have to use it or lose it”. And, if there is a main potential source of tensions between Canada and the United States, this must not be searched among any boutades about Canada becoming the 51ststate, or even any possible revision of the U.S. borders to include Alberta or some other part of the country where pro-U.S. feelings are stronger (it should be remarked that no Canadian province has a pro-U.S. majority). Real tensions, on the other hand, could arise from any of the two disputes between the two countries in the Arctic region: the dispute on the Beaufort Sea and, in particular, the one on the status of the Northwest Passage. Given the increasing relevance of the Arctic region, the States are likely to increase their pressure to Canada to acquiesce to their demands, and the possible annexation of Greenland—which, unlike the one of Canada, should not be excluded altogether—will imply that the Canadian Arctic will be surrounded by the States on two sides. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that the Canadian Arctic will play a prominent role in determining the country’s future and, perhaps, its entrance to history.

AUTHOR

Giuseppe Cappelluti
Independent Expert