Is Canada’s Arctic spending spree really rooted in foreign policy?

This is a reproduction of an article that first appeared on 66° North. If you would like to read more posts by Lukas Wahden, you can sign up for his blog on Substack here.

Arctic relations with the U.S. have influenced recent Canadian debates over how to restructure the country’s security posture in the region. On March 12, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a historic security and infrastructure package for the Canadian Arctic.

The planned expenditures are organised around three broad themes: sovereignty assertion, development and nation-building, and strategic autonomy vis-à-vis the United States.

In the announcement, Carney bemoaned that previous administrations were unsuccessful in their attempts to strengthen Canada’s sovereignty in remote Arctic territories, a traditionally anxiety-laden aspect of Canadian statecraft. To remedy this, the governing Liberal Party plans to “move forward with a comprehensive plan backed by over $40 billion, including more than $35 billion in federal investments to defend, build, and transform Canada’s Northern and Arctic region.”

Of this sum, around $32 billion are earmarked for various forward operating locations of the Canadian Armed Forces in Yellowknife, Inuvik, Iqaluit, and at Goose Bay. The objective is to give the Canadian military — whose standing personnel across the northern parts of the country currently still amounts to only around three hundred individuals — the ability to deploy more rapidly, and year-round, across the entire region. Carney also promised that the investments would put the Canadian Armed Forces in a position to defend the country’s Arctic “without the help of Allies”.

Many observers in Canada agree that such investments are long overdue. The Canadian Armed Forces and Coast Guard are structurally incapable of monitoring and protecting certain parts of their Arctic regions, as well as adjacent waters. The deteriorating security environment of the wider Arctic region, combined with intense diplomatic pressure by the Trump administration on Canada to boost its defence spending, make an expansion of the country’s military presence in the north essentially unavoidable.

Carney’s package nonetheless follows a characteristically Canadian pattern, essentially prioritising domestic concerns over the wider regional backdrop. For Canada, Arctic sovereignty remains, primarily, an issue of nation building, population control and infrastructural development. Apart from in times of acute security crises, the Canadian Arctic has rarely been framed in foreign policy terms. But when it was, such as in the early decades of the Cold War, military planners quickly came up against difficult realities on the ground, including insufficient infrastructure, and a dependency on Indigenous communities for everything from knowledge of the terrain to basic assertion of year-round presence.

This domestic-first approach also characterises the spending spree announced by Carney. Although they were framed as a defence and security package in response to international upheavals, a notable number of the measures announced by the government are designed to benefit the military as well as civilian communities.

For instance, it is hoped that the planned upgrades to the Rankin Inlet and Inuvik airports will facilitate lower-cost air travel for both the military and civilians. A new highway extension is meant to connect both settlements and bases around Yellowknife and Inuvik. The government also wants to build the country’s first overland connection to a deepwater port on the Arctic Ocean, to link “strategic mineral deposits” in the north to the national road network. And a new hydro expansion project is supposed to “double the Northwest Territories’ hydro capacity and serve 70% of residents.”

In spite of these projects, media critiques of Carney’s announcement have zeroed in on continuing discrepancies between military and social spending in the Canadian Arctic. The general lack of high-quality healthcare and transport services in northern communities remains a problem, income and wealth levels are below the national average, and funding for everyday infrastructure is often insufficient. The historical memory of forced relocations of Inuit familiesduring previous militarisation episodes of the Cold War has also clearly coloured discussions.

While Canada’s spending package is thus clearly presented as a response to the new security situation in the wider region, Canada’s actual priority remains Arctic sovereignty assertion. Without stable, well-developed, economically prosperous local communities, Canada feels like it lacks the solid bedrock it needs for a role in the Arctic that would correspond with the size of the country’s territory.

For Canada, as with other Arctic countries, regional development and international security cannot be usefully disentangled. Like his predecessors, Mark Carney will be forced to walk this tightrope. Whether he is able to deliver the improved security posture promised to the U.S. will ultimately depend on whether he also addresses Indigenous concerns, regional development objectives, and demographic pressures. For Canada, Arctic security will thus continue to be a matter of butter first, guns second.

Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arctic Today.

Lukas Wahden is a PhD candidate in International Relations at SciencesPo Paris and Associate Fellow with the Russia Program at George Washington University. He mostly writes about Russia, the poles, oceans and space.