The Justin Trudeau government has re-discovered the North.
Last week, on December 6, Global Affairs minister Melanie Joly unveiled Canada’s new Arctic Foreign Policy.
Perhaps surprisingly, the new policy’s focus is not on the Arctic’s climate-change-challenged environment. Nor is it about the people who have lived in the North for millennia.
No, this policy is rather almost exclusively about what it calls the “strategic importance” of the Arctic for “the defence of North America”.
The Global Affairs document identifies Russia and China as the main threats. And the Arctic Policy says the Canadian response to Russian and Chinese military and economic ambitions in the Canadian North will be to engage in “deeper collaboration” with our “greatest ally” – you guessed it – the United States.
Meanwhile, far from Canada’s North, in tropical Mar-a-Lago, Florida, the soon-to-be president of that greatest ally continues to threaten Canada with 25 per cent tariffs on everything we export to his country.
When Canadian leaders point out the unjustified, crippling economic harm his tariffs would inflict on a friendly neighbour, the president-elect has a glib response. He says Canada could save itself from economic grief by becoming a fully-fledged possession of the U.S., the 51st state.
At first, it was a joke. But in subsequent iterations that 51st state suggestion has taken on a more and more ominous and insistent tone.
We have to wonder if, deep down, Trump might be hankering for a big legacy project to cap his unlikely political career. Annexing Canada – with all of our oil, lumber, diamonds, gold and other minerals, and, never forget, fresh water – might just fill the bill.
Such a suggestion remains, for now, wild speculation. And even when it comes to the more mundane matter of tariffs, we can’t be sure what Trump will actually do once he has to make real world choices, and not just social media posts.
He might be chary to act too hastily to create trade barriers, given the negative impact punitive tariffs on Canadian goods would have on his own country’s economy.
The environmentally fragile North Slope
But Trump will, without a shred of a doubt, happily poke Canada’s eye with a sharp stick in one area of looming cross-border conflict: the North Slope that straddles the northern parts of Alaska and the Yukon and the extreme western Northwest Territories (NWT).
Trump has promised many times to “drill-baby-drill” starting on day one of his presidency. He has even said he would assume the powers of a dictator to make that happen.
When Joe Biden became president in 2021, he promised there would be “no more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry” and “no more drilling on federal lands or offshore.”
He did not keep that promise to its fullest extent. On a number of occasions, Biden bowed to political pressure to allow the expansion of (already widespread) drilling offshore, especially in the environmentally vulnerable Gulf of Mexico.
But Trump and most Republicans object to even the most modest and reasonable restrictions on fossil fuel exploitation.
That’s where the North Slope in the Western Arctic comes into the picture.
This is a vast, and rich – but fragile – region, where scores of rivers flow into the Beaufort Sea, creating an irreplaceable habitat for hundreds of bird, fish and land species.
Most notable among the latter are the Porcupine Caribou herd. While it fluctuates in size, as recently as 2018 the Porcupine herd numbered in excess of 230,000 animals.
The Porcupine herd’s range is enormous. These caribou – a wild version of the familiar reindeer – can migrate over 2,400 kilometres from their calving grounds in Alaska to feeding territories in the Yukon and NWT.
The Gwich’in people also straddle the Alaska-Canada border. They live in communities such as Tetlit Zheh, NWT (formerly Fort McPherson) and Old Crow, Yukon, and Arctic Village, Circle and Fort Yukon in Alaska.
The Gwich’in have developed a sustainable relationship with the caribou and other wild species of this North Slope region over multiple centuries, a relationship which persists to this day.
Decades ago, in recognition of the unique environmental importance of the North Slope, both Canada and the United States decided to set it aside and protect it from any sort of industrial development.
In the U.S., the protected area is known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In Canada, that area is covered by two national parks and one special conservation area.
ANWR covers over 78,000 square kilometres The three protected areas in Canada cover over 23,000 square kilometres.
On both sides of the Canada-Alaska border, these protective regimes have meant no oil and gas exploration, and no pipelines crossing any part of the territory.
Trump allowed drilling in his first term; Biden cancelled the leases
In recent times, in the U.S., however, politicians and industry lobbyists have been trying to weaken these longstanding Arctic environmental protections.
They say their country simply cannot do without the vast reserves of oil and gas that lie beneath the lands where Gwich’in hunters still harvest caribou and, under the Beaufort Sea, where other hunters still harvest seals and whales.
Indigenous communities, environmental groups, and friendly politicians in the U.S. Congress, and some environmentally aware elements of the U.S. business community, have succeeded, in significant measure, in stymying these efforts.
During his first term, Donald Trump was bound and determined to hand out leases for oil and gas drilling on the North Slope, and he almost succeeded.
The resistance of some parts of the U.S. federal bureaucracy, and of some surprising allies in the financial sector on Wall Street, slowed down Trump’s efforts. But just before he left office, in January 2021, his officials did give a handful of companies drilling leases in ANWR.
Joe Biden cancelled those leases not long after taking office – although, later in his term, Biden caved into political pressure to allow petroleum industry activity in a region with a less protected status just west of ANWR, the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
Biden defended that decision by pledging ANWR’s protections would remain sacrosanct as long as he had any say in the matter.
Now, we can all be sure the minute he is back in the oval office, Donald Trump will be proceeding to revive drilling and exploration in the fragile Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, just over the border with Canada.
Environmentalists and a small and politically weak handful of Indigenous communities will object. They will not succeed.
Canada might even raise its voice, though few in Canada will see the threat to a caribou herd and other wild species, and to the still-enduring way of life of a few thousand Indigenous people in a remote part of the country, to be anywhere near as urgent as the threat of 25 per cent tariffs on everything we sell to the U.S.
Neither the Canadian government nor Canadian public opinion in general will take much notice of the fact that the U.S. will be messing with the environment of a region that is artificially divided by a straight-line border on the map.
Hundreds of thousands of caribou who cross that line each year have no way of knowing it’s there.
The North Slope is an environmental zone we share with our Americans neighours. Now, they seem to be ready to permanently despoil it in the interests of one highly polluting industry.
Sadly, that fact is not likely to carry much weight in the halls of power in Ottawa or the provinces.
For Trump, it will be an easy win, with virtually no downside.
But the oil drilling on the North Slope will just be the beginning. We will all have to worry about what comes next.
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