After spending almost a decade well behind the curve as Russia and China ramped up their Arctic capabilities, by the end of 2024 Canada was slowly mobilizing to buy modern equipment and build new military infrastructure in the North.
Then came 2025 and an even bigger challenge: the United States.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, covered Canada’s recent Operation Nanook training exercise in Inuvik with the U.S. and other allies. In addition to the usual stories about aging Canadian army helicopters breaking down and waiting three days for parts from Ottawa, the article quotes Canadian officers describing relations with the American military as “business as usual.”
“We don’t let politics get in the way of our professionalism,” said one Canadian commander.
That, of course, is what a senior officer in an allied force has to say. Even when everyone watching the Arctic knows that the Trump Administration has become the elephant in the igloo.
War is the continuation of politics by other means, as Prussian general and military theorist Clausewitz famously put it. The best military officers are constantly thinking about politics, either geopolitics or the political relations between them and their allies.
A few more quotes were hammered into me as a young Foreign Service Officer. One was British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who said countries don’t have friends, just their national interests. Another is that wise leaders worry more about other countries’ capabilities than their intentions.
The Yukon and Canada have been in the happy position for more than a century that we could ignore these age-old geopolitical rules with regard to the United States. The number of Canadian leaders who have described the Americans as our closest friends and allies is too long for a Google search to get to the bottom of.
Ever since the U.S. Navy surpassed the British Navy, Canada has been indefensible versus the U.S. But it didn’t matter. In 1942, the number of American troops in the Yukon building the Alaska Highway was probably double the total population of the entire territory. The Canadian army was in Europe fighting the Nazis. Yet the Americans just gave back the highway and politely left, after a very nice handover ceremony I recall from my grandparents’ photo album.
But now we have to recall it wasn’t always that way. Just after the Klondike Gold Rush, the Alaska Boundary Dispute pitted the Americans on one side and the British Empire and its new Canadian dominion on the other.
President Teddy Roosevelt let the British and Canadians know he was prepared to use unilateral force if necessary, and ordered the U.S. Army to build Fort Seward in Haines.
Your ability to buy cheap American beer in Skagway is a reminder of how that one turned out. The Canadian diplomats who were negotiating with the Biden Administration over the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea between the Yukon and Alaska are undoubtedly well aware of this history as they now contemplate what the Trump Administration will do.
Which gets us to today. Canadians want to avoid becoming the 51st state, and Yukoners want to avoid becoming the new Guam.
The challenges go far beyond tariffs. The New York Times and New York Magazine have tallied up all the topics where the new U.S. leadership was reportedly considering action against Canada. The lists can only be described as alarming. Using what President Trump referred to as “economic force” to compel Canada to become the 51st state. Privileged access to Canadian critical minerals. Redrawing the border in place since a 1908 treaty. Revising the Great Lakes treaties dividing the water and management rights. Getting access to B.C. water. Kicking Canada out of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance which dates back to the Second World War. Ending military collaboration, including the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
And this may not be everything. The New York Times spoke to anonymous insiders who said U.S. officials told their Canadian counterparts that the president “had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.”
While intentions can change with a whim, now that we look at the U.S. capabilities to change things with Canada — if they really wanted to — we realize what a problem this could be for us.
In the North, Canada has spent so long spending so little on military equipment and infrastructure that the gap with the U.S. is very wide. As just one example, remember the plane crash near Faro in January? From Alaska, the U.S. kindly sent a rescue helicopter. But not just a rescue helicopter. As the Yukon News reported, it was a modern Pave Hawk helicopter that can do day and night rescues. And it can fit inside a Globemaster transport plane so it can be flown quickly to the airport nearest the accident.
And Alaska doesn’t have just one Pave Hawk rescue helicopter. It has the entire 210th Rescue Squadron which can even refuel helicopters in the air for long-range missions.
Meanwhile, Fairbanks is closer to Faro than Canadian air force bases at Cold Lake or Comox. And Canada doesn’t have anywhere near this kind of equipment.
Consider another example. What could Canada actually do if a Russian icebreaker decided to sail through the Northwest Passage and the Americans didn’t help? Or the Americans sent one of their own. Or the Chinese sent one, and the Americans sent their own naval and air forces to track it through Canadian waters.
Our new heavy icebreaker won’t be ready until 2032. And even then it will have less power and shorter range than Russian and Chinese icebreakers.
It took a long time to get into this situation in the Arctic. It will take a lot of time and money to get out of it. Especially more money if we can’t rely on the Americans to help.
The new U.S. stance also makes military equipment procurement even more complicated. Canada needs to remember that buying U.S. equipment often means being dependent on the Pentagon for ongoing access to mission-critical software and data. As was recently pointed out by Michael Byers, an Arctic sovereignty expert at UBC, this includes the F35 jet fighters Canada is purchasing. We would not want to end up like the Ukrainians, with key U.S. weapon systems suddenly being unusable in a crisis.
Hopefully all this ends up just being talk from Washington. But we would be unwise to rely on that. The budget analysts at the Department of Finance in Ottawa are going to have to add some big numbers to their plans for northern infrastructure and defence. And Canadians are going to need to vote for candidates who are willing to spend it.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
