In the first decades after Confederation, the Dominion of Canada wrestled with the challenges of demonstrating sovereignty over the vast Canadian landmass. The first four provinces were small and, in 19th-century terms, densely settled. But in only thirteen years the nation expanded exponentially, making it difficult for a small government to assert control over the entire country.
We have forgotten how quickly Canada grew after 1867. It started small: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, with neither of the last two including their present northern regions. The massive Hudson’s Bay Company territories in Rupert’s Land, representing over one-third of all Canadian lands, were added in 1870. British Columbia joined the following year. Prince Edward Island came on board in 1873, adding another province but not much land. The last major acquisition came in 1880, when Britain transferred to Canada its somewhat tenuous claims to the Arctic Islands. Confederation was completed in 1949, when the Dominion of Newfoundland, with a significant population and stable administration, joined Canada.
Between 1867 and 1880, the Dominion of Canada added a land mass vastly larger than Great Britain, more than a quarter of it north of the tree line. Much of it was sparsely populated, mostly by First Nations, Metis, and Inuit, with a small agricultural population on the prairies, some developed areas in southern and coastal British Columbia, and some fur trading posts scattered around the rest of what was now called Canada. With a population of only 3.6 million in 1870 and the British troops that had been stationed in the country on their way home, the nation had no plan - and no capacity - to assume responsibility for defending its sovereignty over any of this.
Then as now, Canada’s approach to protecting its jurisdiction depended on the rest of the world not having much interest in the area and on responding with a short-term intervention if Canadian sovereignty was threatened. The Americans paid little attention to Red River (Manitoba) and British Columbia, and chose not to pursue what jingoists amongst them described, Donald Trump-like, as their Manifest Destiny to control all of North America.
However, when in the spring of 1873, a handful of American traders highlighted the absence of Canadian authority by attacking First Nations people in what is now southern Alberta, the federal government responded by creating a paramilitary force, the North-West Mounted Police. The red-serged police quickly became iconic, representing the assertion of Canadian sovereignty in western and later in northern Canada. The NWMP played a vital role in maintaining Canadian control over the world-famous Klondike gold field in the 1890s, even though American miners vastly outnumbered Canadians there. Most of the provinces had their own police forces, but the prairie west and later the huge northland was overseen by the Mounted Police.
It was however in the Canadian Arctic that the NWMP led one of the most remarkable extensions of sovereignty in history. Starting in the years immediately after the Gold Rush, the police began to establish posts and carry out a series of lengthy patrols, asserting Canadian control over large territories that were barely outlined on the maps and that previously had no government presence.
Beginning in 1903 with a post on Herschel Island just off the north coast of Yukon, and ending with Bache Peninsula in 1926, halfway up the east coast of Ellesmere Island, the police established markers of sovereignty over the entire area of the inhabited Canadian Arctic, and in the case of Bache Peninsula, a part of it that was entirely uninhabited. Each one had a post office, significant because these were an internationally recognized assertion of sovereignty.
The purpose of these police operations was simple: to show the flag across the vast expanse of the Canadian Arctic and to demonstrate, in widely recognized ways, that Canada was in control of its territories. The scale of these operations was, by modern standards, ludicrously small. An online history of the Mounted Police says “by 1919 the entire Arctic was under Canadian jurisdiction containing 25 detachments and over 70 men.” Seventy men for the modern Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut--an area of about 3.8 million square kilometers!
Canada held to this approach until the 1940s, beginning to change only when the United States decided to build a highway to Alaska and construct an oil pipeline and refinery complex to support the defence of Northwest North America. Canada played a similar background role in the Cold War build up in the Arctic, supporting rather than leading the addition of new defensive systems in the Far North.
Between 1942 and 1947, a unit of the Canadian Military Reserves known as the Canadian Rangers, now numbering about 5,000 northern residents, was set up to demonstrate sovereignty by carrying out patrols and acting as guides and scouts in the region. They provided a limited military presence in the north, and were much cheaper to operate than regular troops would have been.
For generations, Canada did not have to do much to defend the North, because outside interest was minimal, threats close to non-existent, and internal pressure inconsequential. Free to do almost nothing, Canada opted to maintain the thinnest possible presence in the Arctic, reacting occasionally when presented with a temporary challenge to its sovereignty, such as the 1969 voyage of the SS Manhattan, an American oil tanker, the first commercial ship to venture the Northwest Passage. Canada voiced its claims of sovereignty over the passage, but the Americans disputed it then and now, and nothing came of the issue.
Now, however, it is clear that showing the flag is no longer enough. For generations, Canada has done northern defence and security on the cheap, counting on the lack of outside threats, the American military, and Arctic geography to protect us. That safe and secure world no longer exists, as has recently been demonstrated by Donald Trump’s bloviating fantasies about absorbing our country, by the possibility of Russian aggression, and by geopolitical uncertainty focused on China. Long gone are the days when a post consisting of two Mounted Police officers and some Inuit helpers, with a post office that received mail once a year, could assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.
The contemporary Arctic requires a much more consequential and substantial Canadian military presence and, even more, a 21st-century defence strategy, co-developed with Indigenous organizations and territorial governments, that prepares Canada for a confusing and chaotic world. The appalling political events to the south of us have made it clear that we must at last take charge of and responsibility for the enormous and important area of our country that for so long and so shamefully we neglected.
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William R. Morrison is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia.