Harper’s Arctic strategy may decide legacy
Chance to prove PM’S economic plan
He will be accused of indulging in photo-op theatrics, of fleeing Ottawa’s scandals, or just of taking an expensive working holiday at taxpayers’ expense. Such is the lot of a third-term prime minister headed north on his 18th consecutive annual Arctic summer tour.
The irony is that this year, perhaps more than at any time previously, Prime Minister Stephen Harper can legitimately claim that the true North — strong, free and vastly wealthy in natural resources — is central to his government’s agenda. Indeed, it can be argued that, as Harper’s northern strategy goes, so will go his legacy.
This year’s Arctic swing, in keeping with the now wellestablished pattern, was taking the PM to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, via Calgary, on Sunday. Monday he is to visit Hay River in the Northwest Territories. The next day he’ll venture north of the Arctic Circle to Gjoa Haven on King William Island in Nunavut. The remote harbour famously provided refuge to polar explorer Roald Amundsen during his first attempted crossing of the Northwest Passage in 1903.
Wednesday the prime minister flies to Rankin Inlet, on the northwest shores of Hudson Bay. He’ll make a final stop Thursday at Raglan Mine, a nickel-mining complex near Quebec’s northernmost geographic point, before returning to Ottawa on Friday.
As in previous years, the PMO is touting this trip as an articulation of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, and the Conservative government’s commitment to northern economic development. “The North is a fundamental part of our Canadian Heritage, our national identity and is vital to our country’s future prosperity,” Harper’s outgoing communications director, Andrew MacDougall, said in a statement Friday.
Harper will be accompanied by three cabinet ministers — Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. Defence Minister Rob Nicholson will join them for the Gjoa Haven segment, which is to feature the Canadian Rangers’ annual Operation Nanook military exercise.
The Conservatives’ emphasis on the Far North dates back to the Christmas campaign of 2005 when Arctic Sovereignty formed a key plank in the Canada First Defence Strategy. Since then, Harper has annually renewed a set of promises for the Far North — including the planned construction of a new three-season Coast Guard icebreaker, the John G. Diefenbaker; a planned fleet of between six and eight new Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships; and a planned $200-million Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Construction of an all-season road from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk began earlier this year, the PMO said Friday.
The difficulty, as the government has discovered, is that very little happens on schedule in the Arctic, and nothing ever does in the building of ships. The icebreaker and the research station are both due to be inaugurated in 2017. In March of this year, Halifax-based Irving Shipbuilding received the first contracts for design of the Arctic patrol vessels. None of these big-ticket promises will come even close to fruition before the Conservatives face voters again in 2015.
Perhaps partly for that reason, the focus of the PMO’s messaging about the Arctic, beginning in 2012, shifted decidedly toward economics. Though Harper’s patriotic fervour about the Land of the Midnight Sun appears heartfelt — these trips are among the only occasions on which he has allowed himself to wax something close to poetic — he is far more likely to stress jobs, growth and resource development this year than the romance of the Maple Leaf fluttering over the Northwest Passage.
That’s because the government considers so-called “extractive” industries — mining and energy development, primarily — to hold the key to future Canadian prosperity, nationwide. After last winter’s Idle No More aboriginal protest movement, and with northern resource industries hampered by a skills shortage that only stands to grow more acute, there’s new urgency to the problem. Harper’s hope, people familiar with his thinking say, is that northern economic development can be a kind of policy silver bullet, able to mitigate several problems simultaneously.
The strategy, reflected in the 2013 federal budget, is to deploy funding for skills training, for any aboriginal band that is willing to engage, with a view to making remote northern communities partners in development, while at the same time improving living standards by providing well-paying jobs. Among other social ills, Nunavut suffers a suicide rate that is a staggering 11 times the national average. Residents of the Far North also face a cost of living far higher than that enjoyed by southern Canadians.
This is the nub of the northern opportunity, then, for a prime minister on the down-slope toward a decade in office. If he can show measurable gains in northern skills training and employment by 2015, and if northerners are willing to give him credit for such gains, he can argue that his model of economic development can work — not just for the country as a whole, but for its most disadvantaged citizens.
That would be a political plum, one would think, more than worth the annual treks above the tree line.