Arctic security is critical. Is Canada ready to stand on guard?

You're listening to a frequency podcast network production, in association with City News. It's not the border that most Canadians worry about, at least not until they're reminded. Just how open it is. They just shot it. Only days after a US fighter jet downed a suspected Chinese spy balloon, the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ordered the takedown of an unidentified object flying over Northern Canada. The discovery of Chinese buoys by Canadian forces in the Arctic should be a wake-up call. The Department of Defense says it's taking all appropriate measures to safeguard our sovereignty over the past month. We've been reminded, it's fair to say, just how important security at our Northern border can be. When geopolitical tensions rise. So how well protected is that border? How do we monitor it? And how could we do that better? How does a changing climate make Arctic security even more critical? And what keeps the people who don't need to be reminded to focus on this? Appetite. I'm Jordan Heathrawlings. This is The Big Story. Dr. Whitney Lachembauer is the Canada Research Chair in the study of the Canadian North, a professor at the School for the Study of Canada at Trent University, the author of more than 30 books and countless papers on Arctic security. Hello, Dr. Lachembauer. Hi, Jordan, great to be on the show. Well, thank you so much for joining us. The question is, before the events of last month, how often do you think Canadians pay attention to the security of their Arctic? It pops up periodically, but it's not something that we think about. I think on a day-to-day basis, now I spend a lot of my time up in Canada's Northern Territories. So there, it's certainly a more ongoing preoccupation. But when we think about the Arctic as really an inherent part of Canada and part of North America from the standpoint of defense, we often think about it as a there, as opposed to a here. And I think what we've seen in the last month is a real internalization and remembering that the Arctic approaches to the rest of North America are very, very important when we're thinking about continental defense when we're thinking about the defense of our country. Let's talk about what that looks like right now. How do we currently monitor our Northern border? What is up there keeping tabs on everything? So when it comes to aerospace threats, bombers flying through the atmosphere or even cruise missiles, we look at these detection systems that take the form of radar stations with their big geodesic dolums, like these giant golf balls that are all sprinkled across Canada's Arctic roughly along the 70th parallel. We also have modest capabilities to detect things going on within parts of our waters. So there have been technology demonstration projects that have shown that we can do to monitor those waters. And during the summertime, during the open season, when there's the most volume of traffic, we'll often have Coast Guard vessels and even Navy vessels from time to time, patrolling those waters. I think on a day-to-day basis though, we can sometimes forget that we're really fortunate as Canadians have the Canadian Rangers, who are Canadian citizens living in communities all through our Arctic, who are serving as our eyes, ears, and the voice of their communities if something strange is detected. So long-standing stories historically about rangers seeing submarines or strange individuals showing up in their communities and sending along that information and those people being apprehended. Overall, however, I think it's still fair to say that with some of the emerging threats to North America, that really it's time to revisit what our capabilities are in the Arctic to be able to detect challenges to North America across all domains. How has the system we use to monitor our Northern border changed over the past couple decades if it's changed at all? Yeah, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. I mean, really, we're still looking at those terrestrial, so ground-based radar systems like the North Warning System, which is using legacy technologies really designed in the 1970s, implemented in the late 80s and early 90s, to do a lot of that detection. Now, they're still really useful. A lot of that data that's being generated is still really important to us, but it begs the question, if we're facing new threats like hypercanetic weapons or next-generation cruise missiles that can fly a lot faster, then those systems are able to detect, and they're flying so fast that we really only have seconds or minutes to be able to make decisions on what we're going to do about it if we want to actually be defeating those weapons systems coming in. We need to revisit what some of those capabilities are. Now, when we think about Arctic security or defensive Canada, we also need to think about outer space, and we have invested quite a bit in satellite constellations, both civilian and military applications of those, like radar sat and radar sat constellation, which do give us a picture from outer space of what's going on in the Arctic, and we've also seen the first couple of our new Arctic and offshore patrol ships, the HMCF's Harry DeWolf and HMCF's Margaret Brook come online in the last couple of years. Some of the listeners will remember that there were some difficulties with the engines on the DeWolf, so it wasn't actually able to do what it had hoped to do last summer. So there's still some technology issues to sort out, but as those continue to come online, we will have more capability in terms of patrolling the waters in the Arctic. What about geopolitically, how has, and I guess I'm referring here mostly to the past few years, or even just the last year, how has the landscape up there changed making this a little bit more critical? Fixer, and it's a key question. I think we held out hope beginning in the early 90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Arctic, and when I'm talking Arctic here, talking about the circumpolar north, that ocean surrounding the North Pole, including eight different circumpolar countries of which Canada is the second largest right after Russia, that this would be a region of the world where we could come together and with common interests surrounding environment and northern peoples, that all of the different Arctic states could cooperate. And some people even talked about Arctic exceptionalism, somehow the Arctic was different than any other region on the planet in terms of offering possibilities for cooperation, and for bridge building between what had been the Soviet Union and the West. I think what's happened over the last year is we've seen that imagined circumpolar cooperative space run into the harsh reality that the Arctic is not insulated from dynamics in the rest of the world. So when we look at Russia's brutal further invasion of Ukraine starting last February, a lot of the cooperative forums that had been set up to allow for positive dialogue and cooperation between Arctic states, including Russia, have either been put on pause or have been pushed to the side because we can't see the Arctic become a space that allows Russia to pretend like it can carry out a brutal obnoxious act like it's done in Ukraine and still think that the world is going to play with it in a positive way. That's how the landscape has changed, theoretically. I want to ask specifically about the actual practical landscape as we keep seeing articles and reports about rising Arctic temperatures, melting polar ice, all of that stuff. How has the actual terrain changed and what are the implications of that? So certainly we've seen a decline in sea ice. We can't imagine that this means that the Arctic all of a sudden, you know, one day of the year becomes evenly blue, especially in Canada's Arctic waters, they can still be very unpredictable and quite treacherous as the ice breaks up and continues to clog those waters. But certainly the science is clear and the indigenous knowledge is clear that the cryosphere, so the ice-covered parts of the Arctic have changed dramatically, both in terms of the volume of ice, but also when that ice breaks up, which is much earlier in the spring than before, and also freezing up later in the fall. Also when we think about terrestrial systems, so when we think about the ground itself, rising temperatures mean a lot more instability in terms of permafrost. When you go and visit the North, you'll find that most buildings in the Arctic are built on piles, so they're basically up on like building stilts, because you have to get down to a permanently frozen part of the ground in order to have your structures actually remain stable. So as that permafrost is becoming more volatile, this is affecting not only buildings in communities, but also a lot of the routes, transportation routes to and from communities, things like airfields and so on, and this affects certainly our ability to access the region, or others ability to access the region, in the case of less ice, perhaps more easily, but also meaning that some of our long-standing ways of accessing the region are now becoming more precarious, that becoming more uncertain, and certainly unpredictability is not a good thing if you're an inook, living in one of our northern communities who depends upon the land to go go out and catch carrot, wear catch seals at different times of the year to feed your family or to go very picking to compliment your your family food intake. I want to turn now to events of the past month, which of kind of, as you mentioned, driven home the need to pay more attention to it. Yes. When you initially saw the reports of what was first identified as a UFO, shot down in the North last month, what was your immediate gut reaction thought? Obviously, this was coming in the slipstream, if you will, of the previous balloon that had been identified by North American aerospace defense command. So this is the Canada U.S. joint command where we work with our American sisters and brothers, seamlessly in defense of North America. My first thought was, oh my gosh, is another one of these coming into Canadian airspace? And what does that tell us about, about what a competitor is doing in what is Canadian sovereign jurisdiction, sovereign airspace? So that was my very first thought is, oh my gosh, are these things kind of flying everywhere? And what did we hear when it, when it developed? Well, as it developed, I think we heard different snippets of information coming to us, particularly in Southern Canada. So the idea that this was not the same as that massive giant eight-story balloon that was shot down off the Atlantic coast and recovered that this was something different, that this was actually detected because, remember, we were talking about the North warning system and the different surveillance systems that exist within the Canadian and U.S. military partnership? Well, after that first balloon was detected, I think people turned up those sensors to be even more sensitive to things that might be coming into North American airspace. So we just understood that that was partly why this might have been detected in the U.C. And then again, information suggested it was a smaller air vehicle and that it was not obviously tied to either China or Russia or some other competitor out there, that it really was unclear where it came from. We, and again, I used we to refer to those of us who don't pay much attention to what's going on up there, began learning of monitoring boys that were found up there last year. I mean, my first question is, what are those and what do we know about them and what are the implications of that? So really interesting because we have seen over the last 15 years a dramatic increase in Chinese interest in the Arctic, and one of the forms of that interest is the people's Republic of China, increasing investments in icebreakers, they have this way long or the snow drag in one and two who conduct polar research both in Antarctic and in the Arctic, and also Chinese interest in potential maritime routes, particularly North of Russia, but to a lesser extent in North America through what these Canadians have referred to as the Northwest Passage, right, or potentially sailing right over the North Pole. So China has been pretty active in marine scientific research, and this buoy is a system that the Chinese deployed to do a bunch of experimentation or to gather scientific data on an ongoing basis within Arctic waters. So this would be gathering information about salinity, so how salty the water is. It's potentially information about what is going on in the water column beneath it. So what's actually passing through those waters and other ocean related data? Are there security concerns around that? So again, depending on where that buoy was deployed and what it was designed to gather, certainly there would be concerns about that. I mean, if this is primarily being gathered in anticipation of say submarine activity in the region, that would be, I think, caused for quite a few alarm bells. But if this was a buoy, that then went from international waters and floated into Canadian waters, really we have to be careful not to accuse them of doing something illegal if it's actually, you know, adhering to what the rules are that we adhere to in other parts of the world. So it's one of those pieces where I'm still waiting to learn more information about the exact nature of this buoy, but do definitely say it's a wake up call for Canadians to realize that there are other countries in the world who do have an interest in our Arctic. And while some of these interests may be benign, while they might not be hostile and might actually help to share science that will benefit us, they also can have other purposes and other uses that could potentially be worrisome for Canadians. And we talk about that buoy, how would we determine that? Do we have the capability to determine where this thing started out or are we kind of flying blind and is the government moving on that? I would presume they are. I also think that it probably makes sense for our government not to be proactively giving us too much information up front until it's had time to go and actually do its calculations, do its assessment and figure out, you know, what exactly was going on with it. Right. There's diplomatic activity going on through the Chinese embassy asking questions and hopefully securing more information. Time will tell how transparent the Chinese embassy folks actually are and the Chinese foreign ministry is with giving us information that we should be able to access from them. I think in terms of capabilities to detect things like small monitoring buoys or even small things floating through the atmosphere and in the case of these airships, right? We slow, pretty cool. And when I say cool, I mean like if they're gas-filled or air-filled, right, they're harder to detect than something that's really hot or we have satellites that can actually detect heat signatures of things. We do have capabilities, but I think what this has done in the last month when we've listened to the Minister of National Defense Anita Nand and the Chief of Defense Staff General Air and other speak is that this reinforces the importance of Canadians alongside the Americans and other allies, making investments in North American defense modernization. Make sure that we have the whole array, the whole suite of sensor systems that we need to be able to detect incursions, those things that are coming into Canadian airspace or into Canadian waters in a timely manner and that we have the capabilities to be able to respond to them. So there's been some talk as well that it was actually an American jet that shot down the unidentified object in the Yukon, not a Canadian jet because unfortunately weather conditions were pretty bad in Cold Lake where our CF-18 Squadron is stationed and the Americans just happened to get there first. That was not a bad thing. It didn't affect Canadian sovereignty. That's why we have NORAD. That's why we have this really close partnership with the US for Condental Defense. But to me, it does speak to the importance of us investing in getting those F-35s and getting new military equipment that gives us a full range of options to be able to respond, especially if these kind of incursions into Canadian space are threatening because the Arctic is a really important access point if you're going to target North America. That's one of the last things I wanted to ask about, which is the North American partnership. As you mentioned, it was a US jet that shot down that UFO. Obviously, NORAD plays a huge role in Arctic defense. How much do we need to focus on developing our own capabilities? I say this with all love to Americans, but we've seen on Fox News recently, the hard-or-right turn of America, including talking about Canada becoming a socialist state and et cetera. How much can we afford to rely on the US when it comes to protecting our own Arctic sovereignty? So in that sense, yes, we get the Tucker Carlson's on Fox News, depending on who's in the White House, we can have some pretty walkie ideas from time to time and maybe we're looking to a future in a few years where we could find that walkie-ness returning, dare I say. So Canadians, we want to make sure that we have the capabilities to be able to look after ourselves as required. And that's in the Arctic, as elsewhere. But I say that with the sense that there's no closer defense partnership on this planet than exists between Canada and the United States. And I don't think that makes Canadians naive or makes us exceptionally vulnerable, but that said, when it comes to Arctic defense and Arctic security, I think Canada does have special knowledge. We have a very strong vested interest in wanting to contribute, to not only our relationship with the United States, but also with our European allies in NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to bring our expertise to the table. So in essence, we want to make sure that we are capable of having domain awareness, so understanding what's going on within Canadian space and not having to rely entirely upon others to share that information with us. So as we're going forward in the next, I think, 10 to 20 years, and as Canada is making what are pretty costly commitments to modernizing NORAD and modernizing North American defense, I think we're going to see very important investments made into the Arctic. I think most of our decisions will be made with our American friends and closest allies and premier partners through NORAD, and that's something that doesn't keep me up at night. I actually see that relationship as a real strength for Canada. When you look at those 10 to 20 years coming up, what does keep you up at night? And what keeps me up at night is the effects. of climate change and environmental change on communities and on peoples living in the Arctic. That's something that is real right now and will only become more significant out to 10-20 years. I think we also need to be mindful of what our adversaries, what competitors are doing in challenging our democratic institutions. We've seen this played out with the revelations over the last couple of weeks in terms of recent elections. I think Canadians can also look to what went on with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, what's going on in the United States with election interference, and start to think about what are other ways that even within our Arctic, our competitors might be undermining Canadians' democratic right to decide on our futures. And for Northerners, that's often captured in the phrase nothing about us without us. How do we ensure that Northerners retain the position of being the primary drivers of what that Arctic agenda is going to look like in a world that's becoming more hostile and in a world where Canadian rights are not as obviously respected as I think they were in previous decades. I think we just have to be vigilant to this point. We have to be monitoring what other countries are developing in terms of capabilities and really thinking about what are the threats that are likely to pass through the Arctic to target the heartland of North America? What are the threats to the Arctic itself and then one of the threats in the region and make sure that we're attentive to all of those different dynamics without losing focus on our commitments all across Canada and indeed around the world? Dr. Lawcombauer, thank you so much for this. It's fascinating. My pleasure, thanks Jordan. Dr. Whitney Lawcombauer, Canada Research Chair in the study of the Canadian North. That was the big story for more. You can head to the bigstorypodcast.ca. You can always find us on Twitter at the bigstoryfpn and you can always email us. Hello at the bigstorypodcast.ca. If you want this podcast, on any podcast player just hit subscribe, you'll get every episode. If you want it on your smart speaker just ask for it by saying play the big story podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Jordan E. Thrawlings. We'll talk tomorrow. [BLANK_AUDIO]