OTTAWA — Just when Canada thought it was getting its military house in order by finally meeting NATO spending targets, U.S. President Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland have exposed the vulnerability of the vast, underpopulated and undergunned Canadian Arctic.
Trump’s Greenland threats have turned the Arctic from a distant, long-term concern into an urgent strategic test for Canada, exposing how a region long treated as remote is now entangled in disputes over shipping routes, sovereignty and alliance politics.
Successive Canadian governments have long understood that melting polar ice has left the Arctic more accessible — and more vulnerable to Russian and Chinese interest — but have done little to counter threats traditionally seen as unlikely.
Now, with Trump openly questioning Greenland’s security and threatening acquisition, some Canadians are asking whether Canada could be next.
“Out of the corner of your eye, you’re looking out there and saying, ‘Well, this broad landscape we have here in the Arctic is not actually protected,’” said Harry Flaherty, an Inuit business leader and president of the Qikiqtaaluk Corporation.
Flaherty has been lobbying Ottawa for more than a decade to help build a deep-water port on Baffin Island, several hundred miles from Greenland — one of many competing projects pitched as Canada scrambles to protect its economy from Trump’s threats.
The president’s threats to acquire Greenland are forcing Canada to confront how exposed its Arctic really is — a massive and underdeveloped strategic region long treated as a distant concern thanks largely to its shared continental defense partnership with the U.S.
Trump’s ambitions also imperil Canada’s long-contested claim of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has been rejected by successive U.S. administrations on both sides of the political aisle.
Trump cast a spotlight on the stakes in Davos when he said his proposed Golden Dome missile shield was “by its very nature going to be defending Canada.”
He told the World Economic Forum: “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way, they should be grateful. Canada lives because of the United States.”
Build, baby, build
Prime Minister Mark Carney is hustling to meet the moment with an ambitious “nation-building” plan. His government wants to turbocharge the development of dual-use military and civilian infrastructure in Canada’s Arctic, a region that covers an area the size of 40 percent of the entire U.S. — but with a population of about 150,000.
The project blitz includes potentially finding a way to build Canada’s first deep-water port, something in abundance across Russia’s far north.
“If you look at Siberia, they have at least 16 deep-water ports. And you look at Canada, we got nothing,” Flaherty told POLITICO.
Flaherty represents a business group proposing a port in the community of Qikiqtaaluk (population 600) on Baffin Island in the northern territory of Nunavut.
It would be the only military installation near the eastern gateway to the Northwest Passage, a sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that has for centuries fascinated European and Asian traders in search of shorter distances from port to port.
European explorers, including the doomed Franklin expedition, tried and routinely failed to find a route through the web of channels between Arctic islands. For most of that time, thick layers of sea ice made navigation nearly impossible.
In recent years, melting ice has opened the strategic sea route to increased commercial ship travel that could become permanently ice-free by the middle of the century.
Still, the Qikiqtaaluk project didn’t crack Carney’s list of priority projects, a massive to-build plan that includes other potential northern ports and related infrastructure. Carney even created what he’s called a Major Projects Office to expedite approvals for about a dozen energy and security-related proposals.
The global appeal of a new shipping route would render Canada’s contested claim of sovereignty to the Northwest Passage all the more precarious: The United States and European allies do not recognize Canada’s claims.
Canada and the U.S. signed a treaty in 1988 that pledges cooperation between the two “Arctic neighbours and friends” — something Trump’s foreign policy ambitions seem set to shatter.
‘Tent pegs and baselines’
Ottawa’s claims rest on long-developed legal positions that bolster Canada’s sovereignty claim to the Northwest Passage.
Alan Kessel, the former assistant deputy minister for legal affairs at Global Affairs Canada with extensive experience in the Arctic, frames Canada’s hold on Arctic sovereignty as ironclad. He points to a series of “tent pegs,” including that Canada-U.S. agreement, struck following a controversial U.S. Coast Guard transit of Northwest Passage waters in 1985.
American vessels now alert Canadian officials ahead of any planned crossing.
Ottawa also drew “straight baselines” around its sprawling archipelago — a legal move treating the waters between its islands as internal waters. The government layered on domestic regulation governing pollution and navigation.
Americans and Europeans have so far complied with Canada’s rules, Kessel said, adding that Washington would be risking American national security by actively violating Canada’s sovereignty claim to the Northwest Passage.
If those waters were treated as international straits, adversarial nations’ vessels could move in.
“It’s not in the U.S. political or geostrategic interest to suddenly have Russians and Chinese saying, ‘Oh, well, screw Canada. The U.S. has done it,’” he said.
Kessel advised the U.S. not to rock the boat: “Don’t mess around with this gently balanced, legally nuanced, floating-on-ice thing that we’ve developed.”
Ready or not
Nunavut’s former Premier P.J. Akeeagok says Trump’s Greenland saber-rattling should serve as a “a massive wake-up call for Canada.”
He’s pitching a Nunavut project that did make Carney’s shortlist: the Grays Bay Road and Port — a development in the works for almost a decade — that would be the first link between Canada’s national highway system and the Northwest Passage.
“With President Trump now aggressively framing Greenland’s lack of infrastructure and security as a threat to the Western Hemisphere, we are seeing what happens when a region’s strategic value is left vulnerable by a lack of investment,” Akeeagok wrote in a recent social media post.
Trump’s National Security Strategy, released last month, doesn’t mention the Arctic, but some former senior policy makers are warning it signals an inevitable play for the Northwest Passage.
“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity — a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” the State Department said in the 29-page strategy.
‘A legacy project’
Some diplomats attribute Trump’s fixation on Greenland to a simple visual distortion: the Mercator projection, which dramatically exaggerates the size of Arctic land masses. On those maps, Greenland appears to rival Africa in size — a perception Bob Rae, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, says may be feeding Trump’s Arctic ambitions.
“I think it’s a very critical point,” he told POLITICO. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that he sees it as a legacy project, where he can take credit for the fact that the United States will now be a larger country than it was before.”
But Rae says Trump’s interest in the Arctic is likely more than just a land grab — and the American national security strategy offers a big hint why.
“There is no conversation with the Americans that doesn’t turn on issues around investment and money and access to resources and minerals, which goes well beyond the issues of the Northwest Passage,” Rae said. “It’s clear that Mr. Trump feels that our sovereignty is a barrier to his having unlimited access to our resources, including water and critical minerals and everything else. That is what is staring us in the face.”
In the meantime, there is widespread disagreement over where Canada’s first major Arctic military installation ought to be.
Akeeagok criticized Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew for pushing the Port of Churchill — also on Carney’s shortlist — in the northern tip of his province on Hudson’s Bay as the “only hope” for safeguarding Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. “Churchill is a gateway in Manitoba, but it is not the Arctic,” wrote Akeeagok.
However, Flaherty continues his advocacy for a different Nunavut port in Qikiqtaaluk.
As recently as last month, he was in Ottawa arguing for a C$150 million investment from Ottawa’s newly created C$1 billion Arctic Infrastructure Fund for a build that he says could result in a functioning port by 2028.
“It’s just adjacent to Nuuk, Greenland. We’re talking about a major Arctic corridor, about Grays Bay and others, but this is the only one that is shovel-ready and is adjacent to our neighbors across the Davis Strait to Greenland,” Flaherty said.
“But Grays Bay is about five to 10 years away,” he added. “It would send a major message down to our partners in the states that Canada is actually doing something.”
‘Cold, dark and miserable’
The commander of Canada’s navy says a first-ever Arctic port is not a ready-made solution because all proposed locations will be iced in for at least part of the year.
Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee says the Canadian Arctic looks nothing like Europe’s northern reaches. “All you need to do is go north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, Finland or Norway, and it looks like the west coast of British Columbia,” he told POLITICO.
Canada’s Arctic is “still going to be cold, dark and miserable in winter up there,” Topshee said.
“So could we build more ports in the north? Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that those ports are not going to be effective for a large chunk of the year when it’s winter,” he said. “What are you going to do for the five, six, seven months of the year where you can’t get to any of those places — even with an icebreaker?”
Topshee said a vessel that could serve as a “mobile Arctic base” makes more sense because “there’s no amount of money that’s going to make Iqaluit ice-free, year round.”
Canada’s navy is getting the ships it needs to better serve the Arctic, he said, including new Coast Guard icebreakers, a new fleet of offshore patrol ships and a new class of destroyers.
The Greenland controversy is forcing Canada and its European allies to get their acts together in the Arctic, and reduce their overreliance on the U.S., he added.
“It’s easy to underestimate the convening power of the U.S. Navy, because when you get together as a group, they provide all of the cryptographic background, the information management background that we can all plug into,” Topshee said.
“It forces us to be more resilient, more effective and more robust.”
As a lifelong resident of the Arctic, Flaherty has understood the potential consequences of a fully melted Northwest Passage on Canadian sovereignty.
Flaherty’s parents were among the Inuit forcibly relocated from Quebec to what is now Nunavut in the 1950s in the name of populating a barren place. A generation later, having overcome the harshness of their environment to establish a new home, Flaherty says it is time for Canada to wake up.
“I always consider myself a flagpole of sovereignty when I talk about the critical importance of having the security and sovereignty of the north,” he said.
“We feel, as Canadians here in the Arctic, that this is our homeland, and we are part of Canada, and Canada will be there to support us in any way they can — if anything ever happens.”
