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Opinion: Northern bases need outside-the-box housing

If Ottawa wants Arctic military posts, it must deal with permafrost and short building seasons. Modular housing is an answer

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Canada’s Arcticstrategy calls for a near-permanent military presence across the North. Our $38.6-billion NORAD modernization over 20 years includes forward operating locations in Inuvik, Iqaluit and Yellowknife, as well as facilities at Alert, Resolute Bay and Nanisivik. The $1-billion Arctic Infrastructure Fund announced in Budget 2025 is building dual-use airports, seaports and all-weather roads across the region.

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What no one is building, at least not with any urgency or imagination, is housing for the people who will operate all of this. But you cannot assert sovereignty in a territory you cannot sustain people in.

Opinion: Northern bases need outside-the-box housing Back to video

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The Arctic is not like Petawawa or Trenton, where a surrounding community, however strained, can absorb overflow demand. Remote northern postings offer no such buffer. In a paper published recently by the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen’s University, Marcus Wong argues that Arctic recruitment and retention challenges are compounded by regional isolation, limited availability of services and the high cost of conventional construction methods in permafrost conditions. The military’s Joint Task Force North, which oversees Arctic operations, relies heavily on personnel provisionally allocated from other units because it lacks the capacity to sustain a permanent, full-strength force. But high turnover means constant re-learning of basic knowledge.

The instinct in government procurement will be to address the housing gap the way Canada addresses most infrastructure challenges: through a slow, expensive, conventional construction program that takes a decade to plan, costs twice what it should and delivers half what was promised.

Conventional construction in the Arctic is not just expensive, it is prohibitively slow and logistically nightmarish. Material costs are three to five times higher than in southern communities. Much skilled labour has to be flown in. Permafrost requires specialized foundations. The building season is short. In brief, the math for housing a growing military presence across the North in anything like a reasonable timeframe simply doesn’t work.

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There is a better approach, however. Factory-built, modular, off-grid housing units can be designed, manufactured and deployed to remote locations at a fraction of the time and cost of conventional builds. The technology exists now. Companies operating in Canada are already building units designed for off-grid operation. They integrate solar and wind power, compost waste, are thermal efficiency-rated for extreme cold and can be transported by road, rail or air and assembled on-site in days rather than months.

A single modular unit that arrives 90 per cent complete from a factory can be airlifted to a forward operating location, requires no connection to municipal water or power and can sustain one to four occupants in temperatures below minus 40 degrees. It and units like it are exactly what the Arctic defence strategy requires. Unlike traditional quarters, modular units can be reconfigured, relocated and scaled as operational requirements change. A forward operating location that needs to expand from 12 soldiers to 40 in a single season requires only a logistics order and a flatbed, not a new building permit and two years’ construction time.

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In view of Ottawa’s new Defence Industrial Strategy, Canadian manufacturers of modular and off-grid housing need to step forward and let military buyers know they’re there. Procurement planners thinking mainly about radars and frigates need to meet housing policy planners watching the waitlists grow at CFB Esquimalt and elsewhere and wondering what happens when the new recruits start showing up.

The same units that house soldiers at a northern forward operating location can also house construction crews building Arctic infrastructure, civilian contractors supporting base operations and personnel attending training rotations at facilities that currently can’t accommodate them. The case for rapid-deploy, off-grid modular housing in the defence context isn’t narrow. It’s pervasive.

The uncomfortable reality the budget documents won’t concede is that you cannot recruit 13,000 new members into a force that already has 3,700 people on housing waitlists, nor retain experienced personnel in a community where junior sailors are being directed to Habitat for Humanity. And you cannot build a near-permanent Arctic presence with personnel who rotate in and out every few months because no one can live there sustainably for long.

Housing is not a soft problem on the margins of the defence expansion. It is a critical component that directly affects recruitment, retention, operational readiness and Arctic sovereignty. The $20.4 billion allocated for recruiting and retaining a strong fighting force cannot do its job if the people being recruited have nowhere acceptable to live.

Canada is spending $82 billion to rebuild its military. A small fraction of that, directed at the right kind of housing innovation, could solve the problem that is quietly making the rest of the investment less effective than it should be. We know how to build things fast when we decide to. The question is whether the people making the procurement decisions are willing to think differently about what “defence infrastructure” actually means.

Brad Cartier, former naval combat information operator and intelligence officer with the Canadian Armed Forces, is founder and CEO of Blair Capital, a construction company in the Ottawa area.

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