Arctic Vulnerable to Lawlessness

The commander of Canada’s forces in the Arctic retired from the military Tuesday with a blunt warning that the country needs to devote more resources to monitoring the vast, resource-rich region.

“The end of the Cold War has made the Arctic more open, more available for a lot more activity. These activities right now are not monitored as well as they should be,” Col. Pierre Leblanc said in Yellowknife.

“The risk is simply that if we don’t watch what’s going on in the Arctic and control it, various parties may go up there and do as they please,” said Leblanc, speaking just hours before officially handing over his command and retiring from the military.

During the Cold War, the Arctic was a no-man’s land crammed full of Western radar equipment monitoring the activities of the Soviet armed forces.

Since then there has been a boom in tourism as well as gold and diamond mining, leaving Canada virtually incapable of monitoring activity inside its own boundaries at a time when police are fretting about signs of increased organized crime in the Arctic.

Canada has just 200 military personnel and 400 police to monitor an Arctic expanse the size of continental Europe. It does not have a single icebreaker or submarine capable of operating year-round in the Arctic.

Some 1,400 Inuit Rangers carry out sovereignty patrols 10 days a year and Aurora long-range maritime patrol aircraft perform Arctic surveillance missions just four times a year. There is no radar system in place to monitor sea or air movements in the High Arctic.

“There is the need to improve monitoring of activities throughout the Arctic, more specifically, in and around the Northwest Passage,” said Leblanc, referring to the potentially valuable ice-clogged shipping channel linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Some analysts forecast that global warming will eventually melt enough ice to make the passage open to shipping for five months rather than the current three months.

“Last year a cruise ship off Alaska was fined $10 million for dumping oily bilge water in an area that is under a significant amount of surveillance,” said Leblanc.

“So if people are tempted to [dump] in a place like that what is the temptation of doing it up in the High Arctic if you know there is practically no surveillance at all? The temptation would obviously be very high.”

Leblanc has spent much of the last two years trying to make Ottawa more aware of what he sees as the growing dangers to Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic. His call for more resources has irritated some in the defense ministry, already struggling to cope with slashed budgets and worn-out equipment.

Nevertheless, Leblanc said, defense officials are studying at a number of ways to increase monitoring “with a view to putting these systems in place relatively soon to make sure that we’re not caught with our pants down”.