How Canada is defending the place with no dawn

By Liam Denning

Standing on a thick layer of sea ice, with vague misgivings about the numbness spreading through my feet, I venture a churlish question to the Canadian infantry officer on whose snowmobile I hitched a ride to this remote spot in the High Arctic: “Why are you wearing green?”

We’re waiting for the rest of his patrol in the middle of something like a frosted crater; the windchill is around negative 50F. It is a bright morning in early March in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, barely a thousand miles from the North Pole. Chief Warrant Officer Pierre Ouellet’s camouflage looks more suited to the tree line, the Arctic boundary several hundred miles south. White would be more discreet, surely?

He answers: “We want to be seen.”

That could be Canada’s unofficial Arctic motto. A year before, I was up a mountainside in Alaska with US Army troops training hurriedly for winter warfare. But the US is a continental superpower with an Arctic fringe. Canada, in contrast, is a middling power fringing an Arctic continent: an expanse of mainland and archipelago that makes up 40% of the country’s territory and 75% of its coastline but hosts less than 1% of the population. Ottawa has long fretted about foreign powers stealing in like squatters to some cavernous, virtually empty penthouse.

That penthouse includes most of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Arctic territory and acts as the de facto northern frontier of the US. Long a potential pathway for bombers and missiles in the skies, it also offers a potentially game-changing shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans — the fabled Northwest Passage. Beneath the permafrost and ever-less-icy waters lies a potential trove of mineral resources, including the building blocks of the energy transition.

As climate change and a fracturing international order draw the world’s attention northward, I’ve come to Resolute Bay to watch the Canadian military grapple with the seemingly banal, but hugely complex and expensive, challenge of occupying its own territory and preparing for an emerging great game at the top of the world.

Remote and isolated as it is, Resolute sits in the heart of Canada’s Arctic, making it a key logistical hub: the site of the Canadian Armed Forces Arctic Training Center, which includes the only runway this far north long enough to accommodate giant CC-177 cargo planes. It’s also home to the Polar Continental Shelf Program, supporting scientists in the field, including those involved with mapping out Canada’s entitlements on the Arctic seabed — a latter-day extension of the exploratory mission that gave the bay its name, derived from a British Royal Navy vessel sent in vain to find the doomed Franklin expedition to the Northwest Passage two centuries ago.

Yet there is another reason Resolute Bay figures prominently in Canada’s effort to assert its sovereignty over its Arctic territory. The isolated hamlet on the bay, Resolute, dates from the 1950s and a dark chapter in the history of Canada’s treatment of the Arctic’s original masters, its Indigenous people. In that feverish early Cold War period, Ottawa coerced, or lured under false pretenses, more than 90 Inuit men, women and children to relocate from elsewhere to Resolute, on Cornwallis Island, and Grise Fiord, a settlement on nearby Ellesmere Island. This was done in part to — you guessed it — reinforce Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.

Ottawa issued a formal apology for the High Arctic relocation in 2010. A little way out of town near Resolute, a stone monument depicts a man looking toward Grise Fiord, where, about 240 miles northeast, stand a stone woman and child with a husky looking back, mute testament to the separation of families that took place. In that context, Resolute’s name in the Indigenous tongue of Inuktitut feels even more apt: Qausuittuq, the place with no dawn.

Yet embedded in that sad beginning also lies a prospective answer to the conundrum of how Canada can exert sovereignty over this harsh and seemingly limitless vista. In Resolute, I saw how Ottawa relies on a largely Indigenous contingent of Canadian Rangers to bolster its Arctic capabilities. Likewise, Ottawa’s commitment to the northern communities from which the Rangers hail, enhancing their resiliency in the face of climate change and other novel challenges, is critical to preserving their presence and the generational knowledge that it underpins. In that respect, Canada’s defense of its sovereignty in the Arctic ultimately rests as much on building a robust and inclusive national identity as it does on fielding a military fit for purpose. Its success in doing so can provide a model from which other Arctic countries, the US included, can learn.

A desert made of water

Resolute Bay lies in a polar desert. Stepping off the plane near the training center, a collection of low buildings resembling a moon base, I’m surprised to find myself coughing; the air catches in the throat like an icy dust. I flew in with members of the Royal 22e Régiment, the Canadian Army’s storied Francophone infantry regiment known as the Vandoos (vingt-deux, see?). Some recognize photojournalist Louie Palu, traveling with me, from when he was embedded with them in Afghanistan. For many, this is their first time so far north.

There are a few short roads around Resolute Bay. Lined with poles and wires covered in a rime of frost like old sailing masts, one runs a mile or so north to a huddle of huts and tents named, with real estate mojo, Crystal City. Three miles south, the road heads into tiny Resolute itself, which has fewer than 200 residents.

And that’s it. Cornwallis Island is a small patch of wilderness in Nunavut, the Canadian territory that stretches from Manitoba to the waters off northern Greenland. Averaging 0.05 people per square mile, it is a demographic near-vacuum. In my initial briefing, an officer warns: “If you’re lost in Nunavut and you yell, no one will hear you.” The grim echo of Ridley Scott’s Alien evokes a sense of having landed on a different planet altogether.

Maybe that’s why the changing rooms, where you suit up for the outside, feel like an airlock. Besides the cold — the wind chill dips below negative 80F at one point during my visit — dehydration creeps up on you. As Captain Phil Simon, a surgeon and medical officer, tells me, “With every breath, you’re losing water.” Along with biology, medics stationed in Resolute Bay need a doctorate in flight schedules: Even a perfect medevac from here takes about 12 hours. A senior officer in the regional command says it was easier moving casualties from Afghanistan to Germany and then on to Canada than it is getting them out of here.

Not to forget: Nanook. No short walk around the complex is complete without doing the occasional 360 to spy any polar bears. Nine are being tracked in the area when I arrive, and the safety tips on posters around the base tend to stoke, rather than allay, anxiety. A homemade effort I found pinned up in a broom closet resonated more: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger … except for bears … bears will kill you.”

General Wayne Eyre, who has just retired after serving as Canada’s Chief of the Defense Staff, fully acknowledges that no foreign army is coming over the ice today; if they did, he tells me, “the first capability we would send up is search and rescue.” He is instead looking a decade or two ahead, when more ice has melted and the postwar certainties of sacrosanct borders and free trade, coming apart already, potentially break down completely.

In the face of such scenarios, Canada’s military suffers from what one might call diseconomies of scale. The army’s roughly 44,000 regular soldiers, spread across a country a little bigger than the US, would fit inside just one major US Army base, Fort Liberty in North Carolina. Joint Task Force North, responsible for Arctic operations, has around 1,600 personnel today. There is a lot of ground to cover, much of it extraordinarily rugged and lacking basic infrastructure.

All-out war on the ice may be hard to imagine. But as Omond Solandt, the former head of the Canadian Defense Research Board, observed in 1948, not long before Resolute’s founding, “Everybody knows it’s impossible to fight a war in the Arctic, but we have to prepare for the man who doesn’t know it’s impossible.” So armies must imagine stuff anyway. Incursions by small, specialized forces, or drones — or “weather” balloons — are all too easy to imagine in such open space. As sea ice melts, shipping activity picks up. More than 140 vessels are expected to traverse the Northwest Passage this year. Besides offering another avenue for intrusion, each ship represents a potential search and rescue mission.

The seemingly obvious draw is what lies beneath. Gold has been mined in Canada’s Arctic since the Yukon rush of the late 19th century. World-class deposits of uranium, diamonds, iron ore and copper have also been mined, and there are hopes to develop lithium and rare earth metals, too. Meanwhile, the US Geological Survey estimates that perhaps 20 billion barrels-equivalent or more of oil and gas lie beneath the Canadian Arctic.

Beyond all this, in several senses, is the tantalizing prospect of one day sucking up rare earths and other minerals from the Arctic seabed. At a military conference in London recently, I heard a senior UK Royal Air Force officer almost casually refer to the seabeds and the poles as “the Klondikes of the 21st century.”

Exploiting them is another matter. Besides extreme conditions, sheer remoteness and short working seasons make Arctic mining and drilling time-consuming and expensive. The giant Mary River iron ore mine on Baffin Island, for example, took roughly half a century from initial discovery to first production. For all their potential, Canada’s three Arctic territories lag significantly when it comes to investment in new projects.

Climate change is touted as a catalyst for more. But sinking permafrost, less predictable sea ice and erratic weather patterns are less like the neat click of a long-sealed vault unlocking and more like the wayward swing of a wrecking ball.

And yet, even if one knows all this, what if the other side thinks it knows otherwise? Most Klondike gold prospectors found nothing and nonetheless joined the rush. When it comes to imagined futures, the Arctic is not just a blank canvas but a shared one, too.

In stretching to protect this region, Canada’s military is hampered not merely by the vast distances but also by its less-than-vast budget. An updated defense strategy — “Our North, Strong and Free” — promises more money, including funds for new Arctic installations and equipment. Announcing Eyre’s replacement General Jennie Carignan as the new Chief of the Defense Staff — the first woman to hold that position — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted that her appointment came amid “complicated geopolitics and increased threats, particularly to our Arctic.”

Even the new budget remains below NATO’s current target of 2% of gross domestic product, however. Meanwhile, Defense Minister Bill Blair has spoken of the difficulty of convincing Canadians to raise spending further. As P. Whitney Lackenbauer, a professor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and a leading military historian, puts it: “Many Canadians still see the Arctic as a ‘there’ rather than a ‘here.’”

One morning, somewhere in among the low hills near Resolute Bay, I watch reservists — wearing white this time — stage a mock attack on an encampment. They are, for all intents and purposes, capturing a patch of nothingness, blank white ground indistinguishable from the wider horizon. Tactical exercises here, as opposed to survival training, are relatively new for this regiment, reflecting the shifting geopolitical winds. For all the spent casings in the snow, and tactical camouflage, a strong element of psyops is at play. These soldiers are demonstrating to anyone watching, foreign or Canadian, that they can fulfill basic roles in a place that, given half a chance, will kill you without any human intervention.

Yet they couldn’t do that were it not for a unique part of the Canadian military, one that ties it in a more profound way to this unforgiving land.

Ranger time

The secret to building an igloo is a spiral. You lay down blocks of hard-packed snow — “like sawing Styrofoam,” a sweating soldier tells me — in a ring and then cut a deep, slanted notch in one of them. That is the sloping start of the wall building up, round and round, higher and higher, to the apex. I am watching Master Corporal Steve Aulaqiaq, clad in a red parka, frost clinging to his mustache, as he slowly disappears, walling himself up inside a white dome. He is a Canadian Ranger.

The Rangers, founded in 1947, are a part-time force numbering around 5,000, with about 1,500 of those in the Arctic, most of them Indigenous. They’re not combatants; they are the military’s eyes and ears in the emptier spaces of northern Canada, tasked with seeing something and saying something rather than shooting someone.

Yet they are far more than that. They’re teachers, pathfinders, weather experts and, in this setting, even protection from bears.

That morning when I discussed camo with Ouellet, several Rangers were teaching a squad of Vandoos how to hunt seal and fish through the ice. Most of the Rangers hail from Arctic or sub-Arctic communities to the south. They aren’t superhuman; I see signs of frostnip, especially around the eyes, evidence of wind cutting against exposed skin on long snowmobile patrols. But the Rangers’ acclimatization sets them apart. While I fret about my feet getting frostbite despite triple-layered boots, one Ranger kneels on the ice, pulls off his gloves and reties a sled with bare hands.

That sled, called a komatik, is itself a form of Indigenous technology. Wooden runners and cross-pieces are lashed together rather than nailed — an elegantly simple design that makes them sturdy yet with enough give to handle rough Arctic terrain. As a metaphor of the pragmatism and adaptability this place demands, they are hard to beat.

The Rangers have a quiet presence. For all the incongruity of the Vandoos’ green camo, it’s the Rangers’ outfits that I’ll remember: seal-fur gloves, a bristling coat fashioned from nearly 10 beaver pelts, a striking green cap made from the skin of a harp seal. All stuff that is suited to, and of, this place.

It is a tangible facet of the Rangers’ role as living links to the land, waters, animals and people of Canada’s Arctic. They carry generational knowledge of how to survive and thrive here. Master Corporal Kadin Cockney from Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, whose mother is a Ranger, describes a life that’s been defined by seasons of migratory hunting and fishing. Sergeant Noah Mosesee, who has been a Ranger on and off for 21 years, hails from Pangnirtung, or Pang, on Baffin Island and tells me proudly about teaching his youngest son to hunt caribou when he was just 3.

Highly trained as they are, the regular military would be lost out in this wilderness without the Rangers’ guidance. “Our Rangers are teaching the army experts. So who’s really the expert: the person who lives here or the person who came up for a visit?” says Sergeant Shawn Spencer, one of the Ranger Instructors who act as a critical link between the Rangers and the regular army.

He characterizes the Rangers as “more organic” than the conventional military — a difference in culture but also a reflection of komatik-like adaptability. Like plans colliding with first contact, rigid army schedules don’t fare well where sudden blizzards chew up days and methodically preparing for the field, with its myriad challenges, takes precedence over a 9 a.m. deadline. “We call it ‘Ranger time,’” says Spencer.

To be sure, no meaningful military presence would be possible up here without aircraft, snowmobiles and other modern intrusions. But technology invites hubris. Night-vision goggles fail as batteries succumb to the cold. Condensation hampers automatic weapons (the Rangers use bolt-action rifles). Crashed aircraft are sprinkled across the Canadian Arctic like whale carcasses, melancholic monuments to nature’s final word.

The skills embodied and taught by the Rangers are vital adjuncts, and backup, to all that. Given that regular soldiers only rotate through the High North periodically (a challenge for the US Arctic effort, too), the Rangers also provide a thread of continuity. Lackenbauer, the historian, calls them a “unique Canadian solution to how to have a meaningful military presence in such a vast area with such a minimal conventional military.” In other words, non-combatants though they are, they punch well above their weight.

There is an elegiac moment as Aulaqiaq, who joined the Rangers 50 years ago, begins igloo instruction. Blade in hand, he stands facing a semicircle of Vandoos. Beyond him is an Ozymandian snowscape dotted with the sunken shapes of collapsed old igloos that soldiers scavenge for ice blocks like stones from classical ruins.

“This is how we used to live,” Aulaqiaq tells them. “But not anymore. It’s just a story.” As he works, he explains that, when he was a young man, if you couldn’t build an igloo, then you couldn’t get married. You had to be a literal homemaker. When he finally cuts his way out of the completed igloo and pulls himself up from the snow, he thrusts his arms up and shouts “Now I get married!” Everybody laughs. But as he said, the story has moved on.

The hut at the end of the Earth

One reason climate change can seem abstract is that it is often portrayed in numbers: temperature variances, ice thicknesses and so forth. When I speak with David Burgess, a research scientist with the Geographic Survey of Canada, he begins by talking instead about a hut.

When scientists first began visiting uninhabited Meighen Island in the 1960s to measure its ice cap, flying in by ski-plane from Resolute Bay, they built a hut for shelter and storage. By 1975, the hut was covered by accumulated snow. So they built another one on top. By 2004, that one was covered, and a third was needed. It was the last. By 2008, the year oil prices hit their all-time peak, heavy thawing had begun. “The whole thing just melted right out and blew over in 2013,” Burgess says.

We’ve entered the era of falling huts. Melting ice in the Arctic stokes adventurism and an oft-touted “scramble” for position. The verb is wrong — try scrambling when you have to get on five layers just to walk outside for five minutes — but the impulse is real enough. As the sea ice has thinned and retreated, the decades-long legal, scientific and, ultimately, diplomatic process whereby Arctic nations divide up economic rights on swaths of the polar seabed has heated up.

Canada has proposed its own boundaries, under United Nations auspices, which overlap with Russia’s and Denmark’s (via Greenland), as well as a little with those of the US. The scale can be hard to grasp. Canada’s offshore exclusive economic zone and proposed extended continental shelf add up to about 3.4 million square miles, almost as big as the country’s land area. Add renewing Canada’s aging navy to its list of priorities competing for dollars.

Besides hard choices on spending, addressing Canada’s Arctic conundrum requires more lateral thinking about its objectives and strengths. “We often associate sovereignty with lines on a map, but it’s best understood as everything that goes on within those lines,” says Lackenbauer. In the Canadian context, much of that internal dynamic revolves around the Indigenous peoples who live there and their relationship with Ottawa.

This, too, is threatened by climate change. Glaciers are sources of water here, oases in the polar desert; their disappearance risks drought for those relying on them. Thinner, less predictable ice presents a hazard for snowmobiles. Burgess mentions a program called SmartICE, whereby sensors pulled by hunting parties track conditions and find the safest paths, like Waze for ice — ingenious if unfortunate in its necessity. Retreating sea ice also leaves coastlines more prone to erosion and violent storms.

With the relationship to the land and sea so central to Indigenous ways of life, the changes now being wrought on the environment undermine the very foundations of these Arctic communities. Survival techniques based on centuries of hunting seasons and weather patterns face possible obsolescence.

They are also at risk from sheer neglect. Elon Musk’s Starlink network has transformed internet access around Resolute Bay. I even see a telltale oblong antenna tucked behind a hut at Crystal City. While I am old enough to remember life long before instant messaging and streaming, the youngest recruits to the Canadian Army in 2024 will have been born in 2007, the year the iPhone debuted. They are wired differently.

Several Rangers speak in subdued tones of the increasing difficulty in passing on traditional knowledge to younger generations distracted by devices or the lure of lives elsewhere brought to life on handheld screens. I heard similar concerns expressed last year by elders in the remote fishing villages of western Alaska. When I spoke with General Eyre just before his retirement, he envisaged the Rangers’ role in Arctic operations expanding but nonetheless also raised the need to “reevaluate our training model.” Whereas Ranger recruits are expected to arrive downloaded with the skills necessary to survive and thrive, that assumption may also be a casualty of change.

A phrase I hear several times around Resolute Bay is that “we are guests here,” referring to the non-Indigenous personnel. It seems an odd thing to say when the whole point of this exercise is to demonstrate that Cornwallis is as Canadian as Toronto or Vancouver.

It also reflects an essential truth: Canada’s Arctic sovereignty is best understood not as a flag planted in the ice but as a more nuanced construct of overlapping circles or layers.

Resolute bridges a history of blunt-force, colonial sovereignty and a more useful, modern relationship between Ottawa and the hinterland. The Rangers personify this on a military level. Meanwhile, the government of Nunavut, carved out as a separate territory 25 years ago, just gained authority over resource development there from the federal government. Even the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which guards the skies and waters around Canada, Alaska and the Lower 48 states, is an exercise in pooled sovereignty, and a remarkable one at that.

In terms of new military spending, an obvious priority is bolstering and replicating logistical and training centers like the one at Resolute Bay. Sovereignty demands, at a minimum, presence, or at least the capability to manifest it when needed. And up here, that in turn demands the refuge and connectivity such hubs provide.

Beyond the military budget, however, spending on public services and civilian infrastructure is what makes sovereignty — in the sense of people actually living in a place — possible at all. Federal transfers to Nunavut of C$50,000 or so per person are higher than the per capita GDP of most countries. Even so, the region scores poorly relative to other Arctic regions in terms of life expectancy and, shockingly so, infant mortality. This represents more of a gap in defenses than a paucity of icebreakers.

As much as today’s Arctic narratives revolve around climate change opening things up, it is best understood more tangibly as a force bearing down. The cost of maintaining communities on the polar edge will keep rising. Canada’s balancing act of shared sovereignty here is vital and must enlist a unified cast: military personnel like the Vandoos and Rangers, but also climate scientists, health-care providers, engineers and, wherever possible, industries to provide employment and revenue. The concept of total war is a familiar one, but preserving the Arctic requires something like total defense. For the place with no dawn to be defendable, it must first remain viable.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.