The last ranger on the rope line falls backward down the icy hillside he is climbing, pulling those ahead of him down, too.
“Axes out,” yells Sgt. Jim Welsh of the Whitehorse Canadian Ranger Patrol. “Pick-side in.”
The group of four, in T-shirts on a June day with almost 24-hour sun, follows his commands, stopping their fall on a ski slope still covered with patches of snow outside the capital of the Yukon in Canada’s far northwest.
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With climate change thawing the Arctic, Canada is turning its attention to northern security – but not by just dropping tanks in the tundra. Rather, it is spending on both military and northern communities to bolster regional safety and awareness.
The group is training for a monthlong mission this July to the Canadian High Arctic. They’re learning what to do if a team member falls into a crevasse along the ice field they will be traversing.
Exploring some of the world’s most inhospitable landscapes is a typical mission for the rangers, who are volunteer Canadian army reservists whose mandate has long been to serve as “eyes and ears” of the North. But the stakes of their patrols have gotten much higher.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Russia, which boasts the most Arctic territory of any country, has broken the postwar order with its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. China, in a power struggle for global dominance, has declared itself a “near Arctic state.” Global warming has opened up the Northwest Passages to vessels that were once iced out. And the United States is no longer a partner that Western allies trust.
In response, Canada is pouring money into defense spending, and forces like the rangers stand to directly benefit. But they are among those advocating for a big-tent vision of what Arctic security means. And the Yukon, one of three Canadian Arctic territories, is modeling how.
In March the territorial government opened the Canadian Institute for Arctic Security, which works closely with rangers and other military branches as well as the federal government, Indigenous governments, and international partners to redefine what it means to keep the North “safe.” It’s part of a larger global rethink of defense spending, not as a zero-sum game pitting military against social spending, but as a win for both countries and communities.
“We aren’t going to secure the Arctic by arming it,” says Sergeant Welsh.“But if our communities are strong and our people are trained and our people are on the land, then they’re going to see when there’s something weird happening: … an unregistered boat in the water [or] that mining operation on an Arctic island.”
Living safely “north of 60”
Forty percent of Canada’s landmass lies in the Arctic – trailing only Russia – but Canada’s Arctic security has generally gone unscrutinized outside of times of crisis, the last one being the Cold War.
But over the past decade as a warming climate has changed the landscape, and particularly since 2022 amid rapidly changing geopolitics, Arctic security has jumped back up the list of Canada’s priorities.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Canada said it would name a new Arctic ambassador and open Canadian Arctic consulates in Alaska and Greenland. In March, Canada’s defense ministry announced a massive expansion across the North with the creation of new hubs, including airstrips and equipment to support a more constant presence of Canadian armed forces.
In June, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a cash increase of over $9 billion (Canadian; U.S.$6.6 billion) in Canadian defense spending overall to meet NATO member targets of 2% of gross domestic product by March 2026, saying that “threats which felt far away and remote are now immediate and acute.”
A few weeks later at the annual NATO summit held at The Hague, Canada, along with most NATO allies, pledged to ratchet up that spending again, this time to 5% of GDP by 2032. But within that target, members can earmark 1.5% for “civilian infrastructure” like roads and better telecommunications that serve both the military and communities. That’s the philosophy underpinning the Yukon’s goals for a more secure Arctic.
The Yukon sits “north of 60,” the latitude that demarcates Canada’s three Arctic territories, but its land north of the Arctic Circle is largely unpopulated save for one “fly-in” community. Protected on its western flank by Alaska and buffered by hundreds of miles of Canadian wilderness from the north Atlantic, the Yukon receives less military attention than its neighbors.
That changed in early 2023 when a high-altitude balloon originating from China flew across Alaska, western Canada, and then the mainland U.S., before it was finally shot down by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of South Carolina.
Ranj Pillai had only been the premier of the Yukon for one month in February 2023 when another object was shot down over traditional Indigenous lands in the Yukon by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canada unit created during the Cold War.
Military officials and police swarmed into central Yukon to find it. Rangers helped them understand the terrain. But no one knew who to call, or how to share information, especially with Indigenous governments.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“We watched the Canadian armed forces mobilize, but we saw gaps in their ability to communicate” with people in Yukon, says Mr. Pillai, who stepped down as premier in June. He is still a member of the territorial legislature.
The object, which was never recovered, was deemed not to be a surveillance balloon from China, but it spurred the province to change. Mr. Pillai finalized the creation of the Yukon Arctic Security Advisory Council and the Canadian Institute of Arctic Security. The institute is currently government-run, but aims to be an independent think tank, says Andrew Smith, who runs it. The institute launched with its first major conference in March.
A month later, the Assembly of First Nations Yukon Region, which works with the 14 First Nations in the Yukon, held an Arctic security industries conference. The Arctic institute aims to help foster Arctic security development opportunities for First Nations in the territory. It also promotes dual-use infrastructure, the kind touted in NATO’s 1.5% defense spending category.
For example, the Dempster Highway is the only all-season public road in Canada that can be driven to the Arctic Ocean, but its 750 kilometers (466 miles) is unpaved with hardly any services. If it were made suitable for military use, that modernization would also benefit remote communities.
“The security spectrum we’re looking at is extremely broad,” says Mr. Smith. “It is from missile defense and space tech to … food supply chains and health care.” That ensures communities remain vibrant and viable, he says, which “is a demonstration of sovereignty and therefore deterrence.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Mr. Pillai accomplished one of his main goals on June 23. The Monitor joined two temporary navy reservists on their first day of work in Whitehorse. They are there to assess the viability of a more permanent navy reserve, after they ascertain what the community needs and wants.
It’s all part of what Mr. Pillai calls a “sustainable Arctic defense establishment.”
“That is the baseline for sovereignty,” he says, “when people are thriving in their lives across the North of Canada.”
Patrolling the High North
The frenzied global conversation around Arctic security belies what Michael Byers, the author of “Who Owns the Arctic?” sees as the counternarrative: “Canadian Arctic sovereignty is more secure than people think,” he says.
Despite turbulent relations with the U.S., Canada and America are still steadfast military allies. The rangers, numbering 5,000, are a formidable force officially established in 1947 in the Yukon, first in Dawson City and then in Whitehorse. A quarter are Indigenous. And while it’s not a full-time job, they are paid for their services and their equipment, which allows them to explore the harsh environment of the Arctic.
Cooperation in the Arctic is not only the norm, it’s necessary given its vast size, and Canada has led the way chairing the first Arctic Council in 1996. It has invested in first-class ice-cutters and Earth-imaging satellites that provide data on Arctic ice. And climate change has altered landscapes but most of the threats that pose are constabulary, like drug and human smuggling or search and rescue.
“The challenges are real,” Dr. Byers says. “In fact, they’re truly massive, but they don’t involve any invasion by another state.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Many First Nations leaders say they are happy to be formally included in emerging discussions about Arctic security. “First Nations need to be involved in Arctic security because of the openness of the oceans up there,” says Dawna Hope, chief of the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun First Nation, in whose traditional land the object was shot down.
But Darren Taylor, chief of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation in Dawson City, who shares overlapping traditional territory where the object landed, says he worries about Canada opening itself to war by defending itself from war. “I think we need to show our presence up North and be able to defend any threat that’s potentially coming. But we can’t increase the possibility of that threat also by way of our actions as a country,” says Chief Taylor.
That is a concern that Mr. Smith hears and understands. But he says it is hard to measure prevention versus deterrence. “And the world that many of us grew up in or matured in is fading away, either by political change, changes in societies, or climate change,” he says. His institute, he says, wasn’t created out of fear. He wishes it began without the backdrop of current geopolitical tensions.
But as it is, the Arctic is once again on the agenda, and policy is created in Ottawa. Canada is as wide as it is long, yet most Canadians live within 60 miles of the U.S.-Canada border. Heather Exner-Pirot, senior fellow and director of energy, natural resources, and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says the Arctic is “exotic” to most Canadians, and that doesn’t inform good policy.
Ken Coates, who chaired the Yukon Arctic Security Advisory Council, sees the Yukon trying to change that. “The Yukon is really trying to be constructive. So it’s not whining. It’s not sort of sitting there and saying, ‘Hey, give us four soldiers and a tank.’ They’re saying, if you look at this, we can give back as much as we take.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Many Yukoners want to give back, at least judging from Sergeant Welsh’s telephone line.
The longtime ranger, who spent a month in the High Arctic this winter supporting NATO military operations in the extreme cold, says he’s getting near-daily phone calls about how to join the volunteer service. Last year, the phone would ring about once a month.
“And there are all kinds of patrols happening all over the Arctic this summer. We’re going to more remote locations than we’ve ever been to, and we are doing bigger, harder things,” he says. “We are giving back something meaningful to Northern communities; and there’s an appetite to show that we’re a meaningful, contributing part of the Canadian military.”
In other words, a win-win.
Earlier this week we reported a story from The Hague, where European nations pledged more NATO funding by broadening their definition of defense.
