Bases and hubs: Experts weigh in on campaign promises for Arctic sovereignty

Arctic security and sovereignty are shaping up to be key issues for the April 28 federal election. This article is part of a series examining northern security, and the plans that Canada’s main political parties are promising.

Leaders of all three major federal parties are pitching themselves ahead of the election as the best defenders of Arctic sovereignty.

“Canadians want a government who will fight for them, and our government will always do that,” Prime Minster Mark Carney said March 18 in Iqaluit.

He was the last of the three major party leaders to reaffirm his commitment to Arctic security during visits to Iqaluit, after NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh on March 16 and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre on Feb. 10.

All three parties agree that northern sovereignty should be a priority. The Arctic is becoming increasingly accessible with glacial melt opening the Northwest Passage, making control over its mineral riches and trade routes a goal for countries such as Russia, China, and the United States under an increasingly aggressive President Donald Trump.

With these threats growing, Nunatsiaq News asked Arctic security experts to weigh in on the different approaches party leaders are suggesting.

A military base in two years? Not ‘unless they are in tents’

The most ambitious of the recent Arctic military infrastructure promises is for a permanent Canadian Armed Forces military base in Iqaluit.

It was part of Poilievre’s “take control of our North” plan that he announced in Iqaluit on Feb. 10.

Singh also supported the idea of establishing a base during his visit to Nunavut’s capital on March 16.

The base would be big enough to host a Royal Canadian Air Force command unit and to launch and land new F-35 fighter jets and Poseidon P-8 surveillance aircraft, according to Poilievre’s plan.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre announces his Arctic sovereignty strategy at the Iqaluit airport on Feb. 10. (File photo by Arty Sarkisian)

He pledged that the base would be operational within two years if he became prime minister.

Retired Col. Pierre Leblanc said it’s unrealistic to think the military will have a permanent home in Iqaluit within that time frame.

“Unless they are in tents,” he said.

Leblanc was a commander of the Canadian Forces Northern Area from 1995 to 2000.

Even if the Conservatives win the April 28 election and form the next government, construction season in the North is too short for such a project to be completed in just two years, he said.

Even missing a sealift could set the project back by at least a year, he said, adding that the design and approval stages will also take several months if not years.

“The procurement process will be very long and convoluted.”

When asked, Poilievre didn’t say how much exactly the project would cost. Leblanc estimated the price tag would be more than a billion dollars.

‘A bit of an unknown’: Operational support hubs

Operational support hubs are a key pillar of the Liberal government’s $81.1-billion defence policy that was introduced in April 2024.

National Defence Minister Bill Blair announces the locations of three northern operational support hubs on March 6 in Iqaluit. (File photo by Arty Sarkisian)

Defence Minister Bill Blair announced on March 6 those hubs will be built in Iqaluit, Inuvik and Yellowknife with a total cost of $2.67 billion over 20 years.

The money will go toward airstrips, logistics facilities and equipment to help the Canadian Armed Forces better “assert Canadian sovereignty,” said a Department of National Defence news release issued with the announcement.

“I still don’t know exactly what that means. Is it going to be food? Fuel? Ammunitions? Boats? It’s still a bit of an unknown,” Leblanc said.

Currently, the Canadian Armed Forces has four operational support hubs, all of them overseas — in Germany, Kuwait, Jamaica and Senegal.

Support hubs would likely have a much smaller staff, said Ken Coates, a senior policy fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a policy think tank based in Ottawa.

A hub would provide a space, or “front line,” for southern forces to quickly move in the Arctic, Coates said.

Bases versus hubs

With slightly different functions, a base and three hubs would have different impacts on the North.

From a military perspective, building the hubs would make more sense instead of one base in Iqaluit, Coates said.

“It gives us maximum flexibility. Imagine if you had soldiers sitting in Iqaluit and somebody attacked Herschel Island,” he said, referring to the island five kilometres off the coast of Yukon, about 3,000 kilometres away from Iqaluit.

Thinking about it that way, it wouldn’t make much of a difference if Canada used forces located on southern bases or on the potential northern one to protect its Arctic coastline, he said.

However, a military base could be more beneficial to Iqaluit as a community.

“Traditional military bases have been seen by countries around the world as a foundation for economic and social development,” Coates said.

The Gagetown base in Oromocto, N.B., for instance, annually contributes more than $200 million to the local economy and more than $700 million to the provincial economy, according to the Department of National Defence website.

Roughly 75 per cent of Oromocto’s 10,000 residents are base employees and their families.

An Iqaluit base would have approximately 250 personnel attached to it at the very most, Coates estimated.

But, he said, neither the hub plans nor the base plans would be able to fill Canada’s security gaps in the Arctic and neither would have the capacity to deflect an attack from the North.

“It’s the showing of the flag, it’s the symbolism,” Coates said.