Forces wrap up on most northerly island in Nunavut

ALERT– The Canadian Forces wrapped up their most ambitious sovereignty exercise in the High Arctic Monday with a snowmobile parade along Alert’s frozen runway.

Operation Nunalivut was meant both to test and showcase Canada’s ability to move people and equipment from the most northern permanently inhabited place in the world.

“What it does is demonstrate to other countries how present we are, how capable we are, how important it is that other countries see that we’re operating here,” defence minister Peter MacKay told reporters in front of a huge sign welcoming visitors of Canadian Forces Station Alert.

Regular forces, reservists, Canadian Rangers and members of Greenland’s Sirius dogsled patrol team fanned out in seven patrols in the vast area around the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, travelling as far as 210 kilometres to Ward Hunt Island and Alert Point to the southwest.

They returned to Alert in a long column, with MacKay and Gen. Walter Natynczyk, the chief of defence staff, leading the parade on snowmobile. Search and rescue technicians, clad in orange jumpsuits then parachuted onto the runway from a Hercules aircraft flying at 10,000 feet.

Brig. Gen David Millar, the commander of Canadian Forces north of 60, said the Forces are learning to operate in what the military calls “austere” environments by deploying new communications equipment and travelling into remote areas beyond the military’s traditional range.

“Ice for us is a highway,” Millar said.

But he said patrols and satellite images both reveal long cracks, known as leads, forming in the ice off northern Ellesmere much earlier than normal.
“During our patrols, water was more apparent than ice,” he said.

Temperatures in Alert Monday hovered around ¬-20C, uncharacteristically mild for this time of year. That was true for the whole operation, which surprised Abraham Qammaniq, a Canadian Ranger from the small hamlet of Hall Beach, Nunavut.

“That was a surprise,” he said. “I was expecting -40. My cousins were this way last year. They were saying it gets to -40 at night so I came prepared with my caribou pants, really warm stuff. I’m surprised it was like back home.”

This year’s edition of Operation Nunalivut included for the first time members of the Sirius team, who patrol thousands of square kilometres of uninhabited northwestern Greenland by dog team and skis.

Rear Adm. Henrik Kudsk, from the Sirius team’s home base in the small hamlet of Kangilinnuit, Greenland, said both Canada and Denmark, which controls Greenland, need to be prepared for new levels of adventure tourism and resource extraction in the High Arctic.

Oil drilling is to being near the remote Disko Island this summer, he added, bringing and oil rig, supply ships and hundreds of workers to a remote part of Greenland.

“That is a level of activity we’ve never seen before,” Kudsk said. “We [Canada and Denmark] need to be able to pick up the phone and call each other.”

Canada is stepping up cooperation with Demark and the United States, two countries with whom it has Arctic boundary disputes.

The Americans will send a destroyer this summer to the waters off Pond Inlet, on northern Baffin Island for Operation Nanook, the Canadian Forces annual summer exercise in the Arctic.

Premier Eva Aariak pledged her support for military operations inside Nunavut, but also took a shot at the federal government, calling for improved infrastructure and an agreement to devolve natural resource revenues from Ottawa to Iqaluit.

The Government of Nunavut cannot currently earn revenues from mining or oil and gas projects.

“This [devolution] above all, would be Canada’s most poignant demonstration of sovereignty,” she said as Mackay looked on.

Later, answering an unrelated question, Mackay said Ottawa would increase its military capability in a way that would benefit Nunavummiut.

“We’ll work with our territorial partners, work with the premier, to ensure that we’re able to continue this type of activity and to put down an even stronger footprint when it comes to the necessary infrastructure to help people who are living here and who want to come here for further commerce and economic activity,” he said.

MacKay also acknowledged that Canada’s control over its Arctic islands is not contested by any nation.

“There are no claims that we’re particularly worried about. There are some disputes over borders, we’re working those through the appropriate international channels,” he said.

Whitney Lackenbauer, a professor of history at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, said operations like Nunalivut don’t strengthen Canada’s legal control of its Arctic territory, but instead serves two separate political purposes.

“The main audience for this is domestic,” with the Conservative government attempting to cultivate a sense of national purpose in the North.

“[But] in political terms it does send a signal to the world that Canada cares about the Arctic.”

Lackenbauer added the inclusion of Denmark in Operation Nunalivut “acknowledges the Arctic isn’t just ours.”