Security threats to the Canadian Arctic emanate from outside the region but target or affect the region itself. Climate change is the primary existential threat to the Arctic – as NATO’s 2030 agenda suggests, it is “the defining interest of our time.”1 While Northerners are adapting to the effects of climate change, the mitigation of climate change cannot be accomplished in the Arctic itself. It requires global action. While NATO has stated that it intends to be the leading international organization in understanding and adapting to the impacts of climate change on security, Canada and other countries will pursue most of the action on climate change mitigation through other multilateral channels. There is no desire or benefit to “securitizing” climate change as a threat to the territories by assigning DND/CAF or other security agencies the lead responsibility for addressing its root causes (at least beyond reducing military greenhouse gas emissions). Instead, Canada and its subnational partners will continue to pursue diplomatic action in international forums with much broader mandates than national defence.2
Within the defence and security realm, Arctic threat assessments should clearly explain at what part of North America or the Arctic these systems or capabilities are most likely to be directed. For example, geographic proximity means that immediate threats that Russia’s military buildup poses to the Norwegian Arctic do not necessarily threaten the Canadian Arctic.3 Accordingly, generalizing about threats to Canada posed by Russia’s “Arctic capabilities” (particularly land and naval forces) can be problematic, and might distort the appraisal of where and when Canada might be called upon to be a “provider” (rather than a “consumer”) of collective security.
While the regional and global threat environments have changed since Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most threat assessments do not suggest that Russia is more likely to attack the Canadian North using kinetic military forces. Given that any Russian invasion of sovereign Canadian territory would constitute an act of war, and thus lead to the mobilization of our NATO allies (and the American nuclear deterrent), there is little to no likelihood that Russia would risk a general war with the West to try to acquire Canadian Arctic territory or resources. Geography and geostrategic considerations mean there is no simple analogy to what has transpired in Ukraine.4
Over the last two decades, Russia has devoted considerable resources to modernizing its fleet of nuclear attack and ballistic missile submarines - despite the serious financial constraints that country faces. This spending affirms the priority that the Russian government places on this arm of its military, one which has a history of operating in the Arctic Ocean and perhaps even in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.5 In spite of these growing capabilities, the challenge lies in inferring Russian intent and deciding what gains Russia perceives that it could secure through military action in the region.
Does Russia pose a maritime threat to or in Canada’s Arctic waters? In a polemical March 2016 Wall Street Journal article, Scott Borgerson and Michael Byers suggested the threat of “naval vessels from Russia and other unfriendly nations passing through the Northwest Passage, or terrorists and smugglers seeking to enter North America from there…. The sea-ice is melting, foreign ships are coming, and there is little to stop an increasingly assertive Russia from sending a warship through.”6 This assertion misses the mark on several grounds. First, studies of northern shipping routes and sea-ice dynamics consistently suggest that Canada’s Arctic waters are not a safe or reliable sea route for transit shipping. They are less attractive than the Northern Sea Route (which runs north of Russia’s coastline) and even a possible transpolar route through the Central Arctic Ocean into the future. Russia is unlikely to risk damaging a billion-dollar warship to sail through Canada’s Arctic waters for unclear strategic objectives, and Moscow has no desire to demonstrate the feasibility of a Northwest Passage when it is competing to attract activity in its Northern Sea Route.
Furthermore, the scenario a Russian “freedom of navigation” voyage through the Northwest Passage overlooks how, for more nearly a century of straightforward self-interest, Russia has passively supported the idea that Canada enjoys control over a “sector” of the Arctic and/or that the Northwest Passage constitutes internal waters. Russia claims sovereignty over the Northern Sea Route, and to challenge Canadian sovereignty by treating the Northwest Passage as an international strait would undermine its own legal position in the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation. Although transiting the Northwest Passage (by air or sea) in violation of Canada’s internal waters position might afford closer launch sites for ballistic or cruise missiles in a wartime scenario, in a peacetime context this would likely invite an American reciprocal “freedom of navigation” voyage through Arctic waters that Russia claims as internal (and the U.S. consider an international strait). Presumably this would offset any benefits that Russia might gain from challenging Canada’s legal position.7
Instead, Russian activities against the Canadian North are likely to take the form of “grey zone” or hybrid threats, below the threshold of armed conflict, which seek to disrupt systems, undermine democratic institutions, and sow or exacerbate divisions amongst Canadians.8 The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats defines these threats as:
Such actions are coordinated and synchronized and deliberately target democratic states’ and institutions’ vulnerabilities. Activities can take place, for example, in the political, economic, military, civil or information domains. They are conducted using a wide range of means and designed to remain below the threshold of detection and attribution.”9
By combining conventional and unconventional means (such as disinformation and interference in political debates or elections, disrupting or attacking critical infrastructure, cyber operations, and asymmetric military means), hybrid actors use ambiguity and intermediaries (or proxy actors) to make it difficult to attribute responsibility and respond. As a recent report notes, “resilience and defence against hybrid threats in Canada require greater integration of military and non-military discussions on Arctic vulnerabilities to better understand how they interact and expose Canadians to harm caused by adversarial states that seek opportunities to advance their interests in the Arctic to Canada’s detriment.”10
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Dr. P. Whitney Lackenbauer is Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in the Study of the Canadian North and Professor in the School for the Study of Canada at Trent University. He was Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel of 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories from 2014-2020 and was reappointed to this position from 2022-2025. He is also a Fellow with the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary History at the University of Toronto; the Arctic Institute of North America; the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary; and an adjunct professor with the Brian Mulroney Institute for Government at St. Francis Xavier University and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience, School of Management, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Whitney specializes in Arctic security, sovereignty and governance issues, modern Canadian military and diplomatic history, and Indigenous-state relations. Whitney has (co-) written or (co-) edited more than sixty books and more than one hundred academic articles and chapters.
1 - NATO factsheet, “NATO 2030” (June 2021), https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2021/6/pdf/2106-factsheet-nato2030-en.pdf.
2 - P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “NATO, Climate Change, and Security,” NATO Resilience Working Group meeting, Warsaw, Poland, 10 June 2022. For a recent expression of concern about militarizing the climate crisis, see Daniela Philipson Garcia, Feminist Interventions: Resisting the Militarization of the Climate Crisis (We Do and the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, June 2023), https://wedo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/WEDO_CFFP_MilitarismClimateBrief_June2023.pdf.
3 - Andreas Østhagen, Gregory Levi Sharp, and Paal Sigurd Hilde, “At Opposite Poles: Canada’s and Norway’s Approaches to Security in the Arctic,” Polar Journal 8, no. 1 (2018): 163-181.
4 - On the continuing relevance of geography, see Ryan Dean and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “Geostrategy and Canadian Defence: From CP Stacey to a Twenty-First Century Arctic Threat Assessment,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 20, no. 1 (2019): 34-96, https://jmss.org/article/download/69488/53633.
5 - Michel Byers, “Russian Maps Suggest Soviet Subs Cruised Canadian Arctic,” Globe and Mail, 6 December 2011.
6 - Scott Borgerson and Michael Byers, “The Arctic Front in the Battle to Contain Russia,” Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2016.
7 - On the similarities between Canadian and Russian positions on Arctic waters, see Aldo Chircop, Ivan Bunik, Moira McConnell and Kristoffer Svendsen, “Course Convergence? Comparative Perspectives on the Governance of Navigation and Shipping in Canadian and Russian Arctic Waters,” in Ocean Yearbook 28, ed. Aldo Chircop, Scott Coffen-Smout, and Moira McConnell (Brill, 2014): 291-327.
8 - See, for example, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Troy Bouffard, and Adam Lajeunesse, “Russia’s Information Operations: The Kremlin’s Competitive Narratives and Arctic Influence Objectives,” Journal of Peace and War Studies 4 (2022): 161-186, https://www.norwich.edu/pdfs/pawc/journal/PAWC_Journal_2022_P.%20Whitney%20Lackenbauer,%20Troy%20Bouffard,%20and%20Adam%20Lajeunesse.pdf.
9 - European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, “Hybrid threats as a concept,” https://www.hybridcoe.fi/hybrid-threats-as-a-phenomenon/.
10 - Gaelle Rivard Piché and Bradley Sylvestre, “Vulnerabilities and hybrid threats in the Canadian Arctic: Resilience as defence” (European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, May 2023), https://www.hybridcoe.fi/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/20230529-Hybrid-CoE-Working-Paper-24-Canadian-Arctic-WEB.pdf.