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Military shouldn’t build Arctic seaport, Senators say

Coast Guard, not DND, should buy new icebreakers, report says

JIM BELL

The Department of National Defence should not spend “scarce military resources” on a deep water port in the Arctic, the Senate committee on defence and security said in a report issued this past Friday.

Instead, they say other government agencies should pay for it.

“If a port is to be built, the costs should be paid by Public Works and Government Services Canada or other government agencies that have a legitimate Arctic mandate,” Senators say.

Gordon O’Connor, the defence minister, is expected to decide by the end of this year on the location of a military-civil sea port in Nunavut.

Iqaluit municipal leaders hope their own plan for a port at Iqaluit, produced in 2005, will dovetail with the defence department’s needs.

But in their report, Senate committee members say they take a “firm stand” against the idea of using military projects to create pork-barrel jobs in poor regions, referring to the now redundant base at Happy Valley-Goose Bay as the “poster boy of warped military spending.”

And they condemn Liberal and Conservative governments alike for using military spending as a substitute for effective economic development strategies.

“If the government wishes to provide economic opportunities for disadvantaged regions, there are other federal agencies with the mandate to do that,” the report says.

The report, called Managing Turmoil, is the third in a series of three put out by the Senate committee, which is made up of Liberal and Conservative members.

In it, Senate committee members say they support the Tory government’s concerns on Arctic sovereignty, but they say the Coast Guard and other federal departments and agencies, such as Transport Canada and Environment Canada, are better suited to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.

That’s because the Senate committee believes there is “not a major military threat to Canada through the Arctic.”

For that reason, the Senate committee pours cold water all over Defence Minister O’Connor’s proposal to have the Navy buy and operate three armed icebreakers.

The committe says it’s the Coast Guard, not the Navy, that should get the new icebreakers.

“Canada’s icebreaker fleet – which is in desperate need of upgrading – is in the hands of the Canadian Coast Guard, not the Canadian Navy. The skills to operate these vessels also rest with the Coast Guard, and to force the Navy to reacquire those skills and purchase a fleet of icebreakers would diminish its capacity to carry out its other military responsibilities,” their report says.

And under the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, they say the Coast Guard has become a “debiliated” operating agency, whose ships are badly in need of replacement.

Arctic shipping companies and governments got a sense of this decline recently, when they learned that the Coast Guard must make $13 million in cuts over two years to its northern operations.

To fix this, the Senate committee says the Coast Guard should – by 2015 – be beefed up and transformed into a maritime “constabulary.”

To better enforce environmental laws and fisheries regulations, Coast Guard officers would be given the ability to board vessels and arrest people, and they would get at least two new icebreakers.

“A revamped Coast Guard would also be the best institution to provide the marine capacity in the Arctic needed to enforce Canadian sovereignty,” their report says.

The Senate committe also supports:

• the establishment of a winter warfare training school at Resolute;
• expanding the Canadian Rangers from 4,000 members to 7,500 members by 2011.
• replacement of the federal government’s “antiquated” search and rescue aircraft, and the basing of more search and rescue aircraft in the Arctic;
• the use of satellites to provide better surveillance of the Arctic;
• monitoring devices installed at “choke points” in the Northwest Passage.

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