DND’s message to the North: ‘There’s going to be money flowing’

Science and tech researchers at the Department of National Defence say they’re heading north and bringing money with them. Do communities believe the promises?

At a Calgary conference largely dominated by Arctic climate change science, a different session popped up on Tuesday: “From science to mobilizing Indigenous business for Arctic defence and security,” sponsored by DND.

In that session, DND told northerners it’s ready to spend large sums of money not just on Arctic sovereignty, but on a wide range of other projects, and it wants to spend that cash with Indigenous businesses.

Northerners in the audience by no means greeted that message coldly, but they’re also no strangers to governments making that kind of promise. There was skepticism.

Defence Research and Development Canada – otherwise known as DRDC, the sci-tech wing of DND – told attendees it had been given $4.23 billion in Norad funding alone to “assess emerging threats and co-develop technological solutions.” DRDC added that right now, Canada’s “whole policy is about the Arctic” when it comes to defence.

The response from one Inuvialuit audience member?

“$4.2 billion seems like a big number,” said Tuktoyaktuk deputy mayor Tyrone Raddi, “but the US spends that on one jet. So it sounds good, but hopefully we see more.”

That atmosphere persisted throughout Tuesday’s session: the North is listening, but it’ll wait to see the rubber hit the road.

Charles Klengenberg, another Tuktoyaktuk resident who was invited by DRDC to open the session, used an example to explain why Inuvialuit might not hold their breath.

“I wanted to bring up procurement with DND,” said Klengenberg, who is the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation’s director of lands.

He described a resident noticing debris from an old Dew Line radar site. The community reported that to DND, which investigated.

“Us Inuvialuit, we thought: this is an opportunity for us to clean it up,” he said. “Even before we got to negotiating, they went and hired a southern company.”

While DND then tried to offer “little contracts,” Klengenberg said, that experience “felt like a slap in the face.”

“If DND wants to come back, they really need to address that situation with procurement and how it’s managed,” he said, “especially if they want to work up here in the Arctic.”

Country meat, coastal erosion

What DND says, what it does, and how that message is received appear more important than ever, because Ottawa has made clear it intends to spend and build aggressively in the Arctic.

Threats from the likes of Russia and China are the stated concern. At the back of some minds, the newfound unreliability of the United States is a factor.

Inuvik and Yellowknife have been told they will become northern operational support hubs, in effect one rung below a military base. Each community believes that will drive much-needed economic investment. Local politicians hope DND ultimately upgrades those plans even further.

Inuvik also has runway upgrade work costing hundreds of millions of dollars in progress thanks to DND cash. More broadly, when DND’s Arctic objectives are discussed, the conversation usually revolves around that kind of big-ticket infrastructure.

The NWT government and others are now trying to sell Ottawa multiple all-season highways on the premise that the North needs them for Arctic sovereignty.

Backers of one highway, the Slave Geological Province Corridor, renamed it the Arctic Economic and Security Corridor to make sure Mark Carney got the message. Last month, one of the project’s leaders openly suggested it should be built to prepare for a ground war in Europe.

But DND’s science and tech staff came to this week’s ArcticNet conference with a more nuanced version of what it means when the military spends money in your backyard.

They talked about projects like helping people in Nunavut’s Kivalliq region test whether fish are safe to eat, or designing a “field-deployable” miniature laboratory to check for E coli bacteria in country meat.

They pointed to work that protects Arctic coastal communities from erosion, and described an entire section of DRDC devoted to “community resilience and natural hazards” – in other words, how the military reduces risk from climate change.

“We really want to do things right,” said Brad Wallace, a program manager at DRDC who tried to demonstrate self-awareness on the agency’s part.

“We’re the government. We’re going to make mistakes, we know that,” Wallace said.

“But we’re trying to avoid those. We’re trying to work with the local people, we’re trying to benefit the local communities.”

DRDC set out a menu of issues it cares about and plans to spend money exploring. They include:

• the military implications of climate change;
• improving Arctic research infrastructure;
• provided energy to the military in the Arctic, which DRDC said had “wide overlap into the civilian world”;
• Arctic mobility, in terms of boats and submarines but also air and land; and
• “human performance” and polar medicine.

“There’s going to be more money flowing into the Arctic,” Wallace concluded. “There’s lots of opportunities here.”

No northern research centre

One question is whether the opportunities envisaged by DRDC line up with the opportunities Indigenous communities hope to see.

At times in Tuesday’s session, a friction was evident between what audience members could imagine and where DRDC had already drawn an internal line.

Take, for example, one of those five bullet points above: improving Arctic research infrastructure.

DRDC took time in the session to describe how it has seven research centres nationwide – but they’re all in the south. Only one of them is within 2,000 km of the NWT.

“Is there a movement afoot to build a research centre in a more permanent and robust way in the North?” asked one audience member.

“Yes,” DRDC’s Albert Chan responded, only for it to become apparent that he meant yes to “more robust” research centres and not northern ones.

“It depends how you define a research centre,” said Chan.

“I think Albert is trying to be very careful about what he’s saying,” said Wallace, coming to his colleague’s aid, “but I don’t care about being careful, so I’m just going to say no. To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans afoot [for a northern research centre].”

Michael McPhee, who works for the Sambaa K’e First Nation, noted that most of Tuesday’s session talked about coastal communities and how DND could help there. What about inland communities?

That drew a detailed response from Chan, who hinted at internal stressors as the federal government wheels its military complex around to face the North.

“Up until recently, when the government announced an increase in spending, we had a certain amount to support science and technology. All of a sudden, this climate change, defence of North America and so on? There’s a lot of work to be done. But our number of people has not increased from x to 10x, while the problem has gone from y to 100y,” Chan said, deploying algebra to help.

“All of a sudden, what we had to do went from this much to that much, while the people are still this many. So it’s not that we don’t care about inland. It’s like, OK, what is the priority? If this is a priority you’ve got to cut somewhere, given the number of people we have.”

Despite those moments of push and pull, the interest in the room was apparent.

Klengenberg, for example, made a point of taking photos when DRDC’s presentations reached the “contact info” slide. A young Inuvialuit audience member urged a bigger military presence in the North “because what I fear is getting invaded from North Korea or Russia.” DRDC said it was working hard to exceed the five-percent Indigenous spend target set by DND, and an audience member immediately told the agency to make it 10 percent.

Klengenberg, at the start of the session, said he saw progress even allowing for his own skepticism about issues like procurement.

“They came forward and they really want to work with us,” he said of DRDC.

“They want to know who we are, what we’re doing, what our communities are doing, and how we are addressing climate change impacts.”

When a climate disaster hits an NWT community, Klengenberg said, it’s the military who receive the call for help. Members of the armed forces, for example, helped evacuate communities in the face of the territory’s 2023 wildfires.

“I’m hoping we’re more proactive in the way we can address climate change together,” he said, “because we’re already doing it. The changes are happening at our back door.”