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Want to Defend the Arctic from Trump? Build More Icebreakers

Canada’s fleet is aging and isn’t being replaced fast enough 

Canada is an Arctic country. The region accounts for 40 percent of its landmass and 70 percent of its coastline. Its northern archipelago alone beggars the imagination, encompassing some 1.4 million square kilometres, scattered across thousands of islands.

But is Canada an Arctic power? Does it have the capacity to secure and defend such a vast territory? When we think of the machinery of northern sovereignty, we think of fighter jets, early warning aircraft, helicopters, naval ships, and submarines—all have been promised as Canada engages in an ambitious program of military modernization.

In the rush to bolster northern security, however, it’s easy to underestimate one of the most important instruments of Arctic power: the polar icebreaker. Big, hulking, unarmed, and slow-moving, these vessels clear channels for naval patrol ships and the heavy-equipment resupply of military bases, radar stations, signals intelligence sites, and related infrastructure. They are also a lifeline for many small, isolated, often ice-locked Inuit communities that dot the length of the Northwest Passage, opening the way for cargo ships bringing vital goods during the annual “sealift.” They are the ultimate dual-use technology.

Canada’s heaviest version is the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent. It can smash through ice up to three metres thick and shoulder aside frozen ridges as high as thirteen metres. Its hull is blunt and reinforced, its propellers loud. When brute force isn’t enough, an “air-bubbler” system blasts compressed air from below the waterline, churning bubbles along the hull to loosen the ice gripping it. At more than 11,000 tonnes and stretching 120 metres, the Louis S. St-Laurent is roughly twice the weight, and about fifteen metres longer, than the new class of Arctic and offshore patrol ships, the Royal Canadian Navy’s principal vessels for operating in Arctic waters. (They are capable of traversing some frozen conditions but unable to plow through heavier winter ice.)

Canada should be an icebreaking superpower. Geography alone demands it, but the geopolitical threat is equally urgent, as Russia expands its military presence across the Arctic and China pushes deeper into the region. The threat now includes the United States, under an aggressively annexationist president, who may turn again to challenging Canada’s claim to the Northwest Passage.

The prime minister’s announcement in late August suggested Canada was well on its way to that goal. A Quebec shipyard would supply the Canadian Coast Guard with six new icebreakers. Amid a potentially devastating new round in the tariff wars between Canada and the US, it was an irresistible good news story—supporting the province’s economy and hard-hit steel industry while reinforcing Mark Carney’s “Canada Strong” message. Ottawa cast the ships as something bigger still: a boost to security in the North that would make Canada “the home of NATO’s largest icebreaking fleet.”

Look past the headline, however, and the picture is considerably less ambitious. Much of this new capacity will replace ships Canada already has rather than add to them.........

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