A member of the Canadian delegation looks at her country's flag flying above the new Canadian consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, in February before its opening.FLORENT VERGNES/AFP/Getty Images
John Wright is the chief executive of Canada Pulse Insights and a former honorary colonel to Canada’s chief of defence staff.
Speed is now the true measure of sovereignty in Canada’s North.
Ottawa can publish strategies and announce billions in investments, but if we can’t move people, ships and aircraft into our own Arctic quickly, and keep them there, our claims are only as strong as our press releases.
For years, we’ve tried to close the gap between our ambitions and our capabilities with words. On paper, it looks serious. Last Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced $35-billion in Arctic defence and infrastructure spending. The problem is the Arctic doesn’t live on paper, but in days and hours.
Anyone who chooses to test our resolve operates on political time: an aggressive freedom‑of‑navigation stunt, or a single presidential flex launched on a whim, can carry consequences planners once considered unimaginable. Those choices play out over a news cycle, far from procurement horizons and project implementation plans that still move at a bureaucrat’s pace.
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Our allies have started to understand that speed is sovereignty. Denmark and Greenland have been forced to treat their own North differently in the face of renewed American interest in basing and “security partnerships.” Canada’s decision to open a consulate in Nuuk in record time was part of that same logic: plant an allied flag before others redraw the map in practice.
We now need the same urgency on our side of the Arctic, and not just from Canadian forces alone. The fastest way to turn our North from a backdrop into a lived security space is to use it more, with more friends, more often.
That starts with treating NATO as an amplifier of our presence, not a substitute for it. Our northern allies already field some of the world’s most capable Arctic and near‑Arctic forces. Yet they usually come to Canada only for big, choreographed exercises that take a year or more to plan.
We need something different, especially with the European Parliament having just adopted a report calling for a “deeper Euro‑Canadian alliance” and coming on the heels of Mr. Carney’s successful trip to Norway: semi‑permanent military gaming on Canadian terrain.
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Canada should invite northern NATO allies to use defined Arctic and sub‑Arctic areas as regular training terrain on a recurring basis, not just during named joint exercises. They can run their own air, sea and land drills on Canadian soil and in Canadian waters, under agreed rules, without waiting for Ottawa to script every move. We attend, observe and co-ordinate where needed while they build durable presence.
We should also develop and host a network of “co‑operative nodes” with specific airfields, ports and logistics points deliberately designed to host allied units quickly. Think of them as plug‑and‑play Arctic hubs: places where allied aircraft can land and turn around quickly, and where Norwegian or Finnish troops can refuel, stage and operate in harsh conditions, even when Canada doesn’t have a large formation beside them.
And we should designate “terrain cut‑outs” that are corridors and sectors where allies know they are welcome to train and experiment. The more often NATO aircraft, ships and units operate in those Canadian lanes, the more our map becomes real to them. For them, presence creates familiarity, while for us it creates tenants.
Some may worry that this dilutes sovereignty, that inviting foreign forces to train semi‑independently on our soil risks outsourcing our defence. The opposite is true. Sovereignty is not weakened when allies know our terrain – it is when potential adversaries do. The point is not to have NATO defending Canada in our absence but to ensure that, if deterrence fails, allied forces are not discovering our North for the first time in the middle of a crisis.
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None of this lets Ottawa off the hook on Canadian capabilities. We still need better infrastructure, more ice‑capable ships, modern sensors, improved logistics and properly supported Canadian Armed Forces. But we cannot wait until every procurement box is ticked before we make our North a place where allied boots, hulls and aircraft are a normal, constant presence.
Strategies and announcements matter. They signal intent, set priorities and unlock budgets. Yet what will ultimately determine whether Canada is taken seriously as an Arctic power is not the breadth of our policy documents, but the speed and density of our presence.
In the Arctic, speed is now the true measure of sovereignty. If we fail to close the gap between ideas and infrastructure, between words and response time, we invite others to fill it for us. The way to prevent that is not only to build more in the North, but to have more of our friends there, more often, moving at the tempo this new era demands.