COLUMN ONE : On Guard, but Who Is the Enemy? : No invasion force is poised on Canada’s Arctic doorstep, but sometimes the nation acts as if one were. A thin, thin line--including Eskimos armed with World War I rifles--defends the frozen north.

The Cold War is over, as anyone with the price of a newspaper knows. The Soviet bogey of the East-West power pageant is stuffed and denatured, nearly a museum piece. Canada, a nation that novelist Mordecai Richler regards as “one of history’s couch potatoes,” is wise to all this. It is calling home its troops from Europe.

Certainly no one in this kinder, gentler age is about to attack an international good guy like Canada.

So what is Johnny Pokiak doing, standing guard here by the frozen waters of the Beaufort Sea in the Northwest Territories, armed with a World War I-vintage Lee Enfield rifle, 200 rounds of ammunition and orders to make tracks for the nearest phone and ring up army headquarters, collect, should he spy something funny--say, the conning tower of a nuclear submarine poking up through the ice?

“Protecting the Canadian sovereignty,” says Pokiak, an Eskimo newly recruited into this enormous, three-ocean country’s northernmost reserve force, resplendent in his regulation red sweat shirt and olive-drab fatigue trousers.

No invasion force may be poised on Canada’s doorstep, but Canada sometimes acts as if one were. While Americans loll about in their traditional geographical complacency to the south, Canadians remain tetchy when talk turns to the integrity of their national borders. Fear lies just below the surface of the national psyche that someone--maybe even the Americans--will one day swallow up the Great White North.

“There is a reflexive Canadian approach to (sovereignty),” says Franklyn Griffiths, a political scientist at the University of Toronto and an authority on the subject. “The flag goes up. People get very excited. It’s a behind-the-barricades attitude.”

The flag is never run up the pole so fast, Griffiths says, as when the Arctic is at stake. True, most Canadians huddle in tidy, attractive cities close to the U.S. border; surprisingly few of them ever bother to face north and visit the snow-shrouded Arctic.

But just the same, Canadians put great stock in their forbidding northern frontier, much as they do in the presence among them of a large, French-speaking population: The Arctic, like the French-speakers, is an important element of the national identity, something to set Canadians apart from the culturally dominant Americans.

And so it is that many unusual things go on here in the name of Arctic sovereignty.

Take the Canadian Rangers. Pokiak is one of nearly 1,000 Inuit--as the Eskimos prefer to be called--recruited by the Ministry of National Defense to defend the vast, sparsely populated, so-called Barren Lands of the Arctic.

Rangers are issued bolt-action Lee Enfields and ammunition, which they are free to use on seals and caribou if they don’t happen upon any trespassing submarines first. During training patrols, carefully timed so as not to conflict with the musk ox hunting season, they learn some parade-ground razzmatazz, memorize submarine silhouettes, and go out on the land to hunt, fish and teach their tenderfoot southern officers how to build igloos and otherwise survive in the famously inhospitable North.

“It’s like a glorified Boy Scouts,” says an approving recruit named Bruce Noksana. “We have fun.”

Few Rangers have actually ever spotted subs, much less pulled one over to the side of an ice floe for a warning, but a group of Rangers did once fax Yellowknife that “the Russians are here.”

It turned out to be a dozen visiting Soviet exchange students.

More promisingly, Rangers helped find the radioactive wreckage of a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite that fell to the Canadian earth in 1978. Other Rangers have sighted UFOs, and once they turned in some Canadian Forces regulars who were building an illicit radio tower without clearance from the brass.

The Rangers are “one of the most cost-effective elements of the Canadian Forces,” says Capt. Paul Chura of the army’s northern headquarters, in Yellowknife. Cold War or no, Canada is recruiting the Inuit reservists at an ever-increasing clip.

Yet Canada’s reliance on the Inuit to protect its far North hasn’t always been so benign. Back in the 1950s, some sovereignty-sensitive Canadian officials got it in their heads that they could best defend the High Arctic if they planted Inuit, like so many human flagpoles, on some of the region’s uninhabited, undefended islands.

Starting in 1953, 17 Inuit families were transported from their homes in northern Quebec to the High Arctic, where they were to start up the new communities of Resolute and Grise Fiord. “Sovereignty is now a cinch,” one official confidently cabled Ottawa as the volunteers boarded their ships.

Alas for Ottawa, soon after the human flagpoles were planted, they concluded they’d been had. They complained that they had been dumped on rocky beaches where there was nothing to build new houses with but flimsy packing crates. There was little to hunt besides seals. And worst of all, since Resolute and Grise Fiord sit well above the Arctic Circle, the sun never rose on the newcomers for three depressing months in the wintertime.

“There was a lot of crying,” recalled participant Edith Patsauq. “Even the dogs were crying.”

Today, those human flagpoles who remain in the High Arctic are pressing for an official apology, about $8 million in compensation, and formal recognition of their role in Ottawa’s plucky assertion of sovereignty. The government is having none of this, though it has offered to uproot the unhappy Arctic defenders and move them back to their old hunting grounds.

Elsewhere, over the years, the Inuit have also been used to build and maintain the old “DEW Line,” a Cold War-era string of radar listening posts stretching along the Arctic coast. Their ancestral homeland, after all, was doing duty back then as a strategic buffer between North America and what used to be the Soviet Union. Had the Soviets ever mounted a missile attack, the long-range projectiles traveling the polar flyways would have come whizzing right over the Inuit on their way to America.

Russia’s political will to launch a first strike has all but disappeared, but what remains of the DEW Line has now been undergoing a $6-billion modernization. Washington is footing most of the bill but operational control will go to Ottawa.

And to much puzzlement and guffawing from opposition parties in Parliament, the Canadian government has also committed the country to buy a $3.5-billion fleet of new helicopters, fitted out to detect and drive off Soviet--make that Russian--submarines.

Canada has likewise set up Arctic scientific outposts, weather stations and air-traffic-control sites; bolted plaques engraved with stern assertions to rocks on empty islands, and even dedicated the world’s most northerly national park, on remote Ellesmere Island. This frigidarium has drawn fewer than 500 visitors per year since it opened.

Ottawa has spent great sums to develop such far-flung model towns as Nanisivik, a bleak but successful zinc-mining village on the moon-like reaches of northernmost Baffin Island, as a means of establishing Canadian industry in the Arctic and showing the Maple Leaf.

And Canada maintains an ultra-secret military listening post at Alert, just across the Arctic Sea from Siberia, complete with an all-weather landing strip, a forest of antennae, comfortable dormitories, indoor patios decorated with Cinzano umbrellas and frequent airlifts of such morale-boosting treats as fresh Ontario blueberries for homesick eavesdroppers.

All this is costly, but the station isn’t cutting back in light of the Soviet decline, says Alert’s commanding officer, Maj. Pierre Langevin.

“If something happens, then everybody starts screaming, ‘Why couldn’t you tell us?’ ” he says. So, like the old DEW Line sites, Alert has been undergoing improvements for the long haul: It has just received a new power plant and fuel depot.

Canadian officials have, in recent years, proposed laying the keels for a fleet of attack submarines to patrol Arctic waters, fixing listening devices to the Arctic Ocean floor, and, in the case of one Canadian government-policy study group, lacing the deep-water Arctic channels with mines.

Why all the watchfulness, even in this day, when scholars of international politics and diplomacy argue that the very concept of sovereignty is obsolete?

Besides, who has it in for Canada in the first place? Who would want to pick a fight with a mostly empty, mostly frozen nation?

Well, maybe the United States, says Capt. Chura.

“There’s a lot to be had here,” he reminds a visitor to Tuktoyaktuk. “Alaska is right over there. It would be easy for one of the American oil companies to just plop down and not tell anybody. We haven’t got the people to populate the land we have.”

Indeed, down through the recorded history of this continent, Canada has been fending off poacher after would-be foreign poacher. American whalers skulking around remote reaches, main-chancing Danish explorers checking out the islands for diverse commercial advantages, uninvited Inuit hunters crossing the ice from Greenland, even the American North Pole expeditionists Adolphus Greely and Robert Peary--all have raised Canadian hackles at one time or another.

One explorer, Otto Sverdrup, went so far as to claim three Canadian islands for his native Norway. And in 1919, Danish map-readers in some ministry or other in faraway Copenhagen worked up the nerve to argue that Ellesmere Island, a large and scientifically interesting tract at the outermost limits of Canadian territory, wasn’t part of Canada at all, but a no-man’s-land.

Canada was able to buy off Sverdrup for about $54,000 at today’s exchange rate. But proving Denmark wrong was more of a chore, since international law considers “administration” of a territory to be a necessary element of sovereignty and there is nothing much on Ellesmere Island to administer.

Ottawa solved the problem by dispatching some Mounties to Ellesmere’s barren and unpeopled slopes, where they made themselves useful by opening up a post office and shipping mail in and out once a year. (Operation of a post office is also considered an outward and visible earnest of sovereignty.)

Canada next felt its Arctic threatened in 1946, when the U.S. Air Force was found to be kicking around a proposal to claim a Canadian island for Washington and plant a weather station on it.

But these days, says Griffiths, the only real Arctic-sovereignty issue left is the unresolved question of who owns the Northwest Passage.

Northwest Passage? Americans may be forgiven if they don’t understand: U.S. schoolchildren are taught that early explorers spent years paddling the lakes and streams of North America in search of a chimerical northwest route to the Far East, and never found anything.

Canadians are taught, by contrast, that there is a Northwest Passage, running in and out among the Arctic islands from the northern Atlantic to the Beaufort Sea. The only problem with it is that it is dominated by ice 10 months out of the year and so is virtually useless as a commercial shipping lane.

But if oil tankers and banana boats have little use for the fabled Northwest Passage, the United States and the Soviet Union are believed to have made good use of it throughout the Cold War for their nuclear cat-and-mouse games, a la Tom Clancy. (Nuclear-powered submarines are, of course, able to run under the ice.)

Canada deems the Northwest Passage an internal waterway, like the Mississippi. The United States considers the channel international waters, and never asks Canada permission before sending a vessel through. (However reluctant Washington may be to antagonize its friendly northern trading partner, it fears setting a precedent that other countries might follow: Indonesia might claim the much-traveled Strait of Malacca as national waters, for instance.)

Washington pressed the point in 1985, sending a Coast Guard icebreaker through the Northwest Passage without permission. Ottawa retaliated by granting permission, even though Washington hadn’t sought it.

And that wasn’t enough to placate Canadian nationalists, some of whom rushed to the Arctic, flew over the passage in a helicopter and dropped the national flag in the icebreaker’s path. Ottawa later moved formally to enclose the channel as domestic waters, and ordered construction of its own glitzy, $400-million icebreaker, to patrol the Arctic archipelago. That costly project has since been scrapped, however.

And perhaps it’s just as well. If, after all, Canada discovered American subs stalking Russian craft on vestigial missions in its Northwest Passage, it would have to do something about them. And what could Canada do? Open fire? Mount a counter-intrusion off Murmansk or Galveston?

“I think there’s an institutional need not to know,” says Griffiths, the University of Toronto expert on sovereignty.

Yet he worries about this unresolved bit of cartography. Very few countries, after all, have ever ceded territory or coastal waters to others, no matter how homely or useless those lands or waters might be.

And who’s to say that Canada’s Arctic sea lanes will be useless forever? Climatologists say global warming may push up Arctic temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Celsius by the middle of the next century. Icebergs might melt. Commercial shipping might then become an attractive proposition. Ugly Americans might start buying up beachfront property for summer cottages.

“You can have title to the store, and yet have sold the store out,” says Griffiths. “I would say, in a sense, this is the history of Canada.”

Arctic Defense

No invasion force is poised on Canada’s doorstep, but in villages such as Tuktoyaktuk, the army is recruiting soldiers at an ever-faster clip.