Canada needs to rethink missile defence, increase security in the Arctic: report

The radar bulbs of Cambridge Bay’s North Warning System facility, built in the 1950s as a part Distance Early Warning network, remain landmarks in this western Nunavut town. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Ballistic missile defence and beefed-up international military co-operation are back on the radar for the Arctic — or should be, according to a new report released this week by the International Security and Defence Policy Working Group international affairs think tank.

The new report points to growing threats to Canada and the rest of North America from the Arctic.

“The growing international interest in Canada’s Arctic, both commercial and military, is a consequence of global warming, an expansive China and a more nationalist and aggressive Russia,” says the report, whose authors include intelligence, military and security experts.

“The latter factors point to the need to re-engage with the United States on the question of a North American security framework, including whether Canada should opt to participate with the U.S. in continental ballistic missile defence.”

By using a network of satellites and land-based stations, a ballistic missile system located in the Arctic, would detect nuclear missiles or other airborne threats aimed at North America and dispatch interceptor projectiles to knock them down.

The U.S. and Canada already plan to replace the radar along the North Warning sites across the Canadian Arctic, Admiral William Gortney, head of the Canada-U.S. National Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and of the joint Canada-U.S, Northern Command said earlier this year.

The ballistic missile defence plan has been around since the early 2000s, when Inuit in Canada and Greenland reacted to the U.S. plan for anti-ballistic missile radar and communication systems in several places across the Arctic, including the U.S. Air Force base in Thule, Greenland.

The idea was to defend the U.S. against nuclear missile attacks from so-called “rogue” states such as North Korea and Iraq by missiles launched from ships or land, as well as lasers fired from modified aircraft.

But to make the proposed system work, the U.S. had to put radar and missile sites circling the Arctic.

In 2002, a defence watchdog told Nunatsiaq News that an upgraded Thule air base couldn’t do the job of defending U.S. airspace without assistance from additional sites in Canada.

Then, in 2004, high-level officials from Greenland, Denmark and the U.S. met in the Greenlandic sheep-farming village of Igaliku to sign three deals, which would also allow the U.S. to move ahead with its missile defence program.

Since then radar sites in Alaska and Thule have been upgraded.

But the former Liberal government of Paul Martin decided in 2005 that Canada would not join up with the missile defence plan, although last year then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper said “obviously there are changes occurring in the world and we will continue to examine whether that does or does not serve Canadian interests and we will make whatever decision is in the best security and safety interest of Canadians.”

Canada is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intergovernmental military alliance — and the new report mentions that NATO allies, which include Denmark, Iceland and the U.S., “are already committed to come to our assistance in the case of an armed attack on our territory.”

But the new report would like to see them collaborate on more action plans.

“As some countries increase their military presence in the Arctic, including Russia, we should discuss with our Arctic NATO allies how to improve deterrence in the Arctic.”

This should include contingency planning “in anticipation of any foreign military action directly affecting those NATO allies bordering the Arctic Ocean.”

“Of course, Canada would have to provide its permission for any allied operations in the region,” the report notes.

Climate change is behind many of the threats suggested in the report, which says climate change presents “significant implications for security,” because of the changes to food production, weather patterns, and the availability of water.

“These developments, impossible to control and difficult to manage at the national and international levels, have significant implications for security. The potential for new trading routes through the Arctic and for an accompanying increased military presence there will raise issues of sovereignty and is bound to increase tension,” says the report.

And there’s a growing need to devote more resources and effort to new security challenges in the Arctic through more international cooperation on tracking shipping and people, search and rescue efforts and through the Arctic Council.

“If the Arctic Council lives up to its potential, Arctic states will have fewer security and defence concerns than they would have in an unregulated competition for sovereignty and control over resources,” the report says. “However, the hope that Russia would not engage in greater militarization of the Arctic is fading, and this is a shared concern on the part of Canada’s NATO Arctic allies.”

Earlier this year, during Operation Nunalivut, then-associate minister of National Defence, Julian Fantino, said Canada had seen “an upsurge in activity” in the Canadian Arctic from Russian military aircraft and that “we’re looking to continue standing up against any threat to our sovereignty and stand ready at any moment to defend our people, land and interests.”

It’s too early to say yet how the new Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will respond to Arctic security issues.