From Arctic voyage as a boy to keeper of Canada’s North
Signs of a new Cold War loom for Rear Admiral John Newton
HALIFAX— Rear Admiral John Newton was just a boy when the Arctic seduced him.
He was a kid on a Canadian warship, invited on a northern voyage with other navy children, and a bit lost in the world. When he reached one of the most starkly beautiful places on Earth, the son of a sailor was hooked.
The spell wouldn’t let go, long after the teenager’s ship sailed.
So it hurt when, as a rising naval officer in the early 1990s, Newton wrote the report that halted the Royal Canadian Navy’s Arctic missions, after decades of Cold War patrols of Canada’s most northern borders.
But he was duty bound to tell his commander that sending warships back to the Arctic could flout federal law.
A quarter-century later, Newton now commands the Atlantic naval forces that play a major role in Canada’s Far North. He faces ominous signs of a new Cold War in the Arctic. Russia has been steadily building its already overwhelming military power while Canada has struggled to back up diplomatic claims over disputed northern borders with military
strength.
It’s a lesson in the costs of what military analysts have long complained is a boom-and-bust cycle in Canadian defence spending, especially on shipbuilding.
In early 1991, Newton was a junior officer who had just returned from serving in the Gulf War as navigator on HMCS Protecteur, part of the coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of neighbouring Kuwait.
He was reassigned to the same position on her sister ship, HMCS Preserver, a replenishment vessel that carries food, water, fuel and other supplies.
It was spring and the crew was just settling into its homecoming from war.
They were looking at a July deployment in the Arctic, one that was supposed to be routine: another northern voyage in a line dating back to the late 1940s.
The ship’s captain tasked Newton with reading up on a new law, passed five years earlier, that set strict regulations to protect the pristine Arctic against pollution.
They included restrictions to prevent the discharge of waste and garbage and also required safeguards against fuel leaks.
Newton’s job was to figure out how the law affected the ship’s next assignment — she would have to haul thousands of litres of fuel north to keep her engines running while on patrol.
It didn’t take long for the new guy on the bridge to realize he was going to be the bearer of bad news.
By using fully laden ships that weren’t reinforced against the crushing strength of the ice or hidden hazards such as shoals, “we could not do due diligence to prevent an oil spill,” Newton told the Star in his office, which has a commanding view of Halifax Harbour.
“It’s so clear to us today that you don’t send tankers like we did (then) ... fully loaded with fuel, just for the sake of sovereignty, security and science.”
Newton advised against assuming risks that, he warned, would contravene the aim and spirit of the new law.
His report was an early version of an environmental assessment, now routine.
“That stopped the deployment of soft-skinned warships to the North,” Newton said.
“And that stopped our development as a navy, developing our competencies in our sailors.
“I wanted to go on that summer deployment (to the Arctic). I didn’t want to write a thesis that said we shouldn’t deploy. But the voyage was cancelled. And we stopped deploying to the North all through the ’90s.”
A series of world crises that followed the 1991collapse of the Soviet Union — in places like the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia — made it harder to argue the Far North should be a priority.
Canada’s navy was still self-exiled from the Arctic in the summer of 2001when Newton became a deputy chief of staff at Canadian Forces Base Halifax. He was in charge of scheduling the Atlantic fleet’s activities, such as committing ships to annual military exercises, or fisheries and sovereignty patrols.
He calls that period as “some of the most charged days I have ever experienced in any rank or capacity. My staff, along with much of the rest of the East Coast navy, were in a massive planning and deployment effort following the terrorist attacks on the U.S.”
Newton was chief planner of Operation Apollo, which sent five warships to the Arabian Sea for 18 months following Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 strikes. The navy was the vanguard force in what became the Canadian Forces’ bloody,12-year mission in Afghanistan.
But Newton still kept an eye on the Arctic. He was determined to plot a course back to the Far North.
The return happened in 2002 with a joint land and sea mission, which became the full-scale military operations that are an annual display of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.
It was suspicion of what the Russians could be up to in Canada’s Arctic that provided essential ammunition for the argument that Canadian warships urgently needed to head north again.
Canada’s military was stretched thin, trying to recover from combat in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, when Newton began steering the navy back to the Arctic. Older hands warned he wouldn’t find the money or interest he needed to make it happen.
But Newton had read credible Inuit reports of suspicious sightings in the same Arctic waters he wanted to patrol. The mystery had been building for some three years.
There wasn’t much hard evidence: the claim of a “suspicious wake” spotted in a far-off inlet, unexplained “footprints in the sand” near a remote hunter’s camp, unknown outsiders “the Inuit had seen coming into the north,” Newton recalled.
“And there were a bunch of barrels found ashore on a beach at Milne Inlet,” he added.
One of the most tantalizing reports included a silhouette of a submarine sketched by an Inuk man.
“We looked at it and went, ‘That’s almost item for item a Russian boat,’ ” Newton said. “Does that mean there was a Russian boat sighted by the Inuit? Perhaps. But perhaps not.”
The military had handed out silhouette cards listing the shapes of foreign nuclear vessels to help local people keep an eye out for intruders. The Inuk man could have been inspired by an image on one of the cards.
Newton thought it best to check things out anyway.
Expert submariners went to talk to the Inuit. A joint eight-day aerial patrol with the Air Force flew over isolated Arctic hamlets, mines and ships.
“From those patrols, including one I participated in, we said, ‘The Canadian Armed Forces has to return and start doing things in and around communities.’ ”
The blaring message was change: As sea ice broke up sooner, or froze later, pressures were building on an Inuit way of life that had allowed their culture to survive thousands of years in a harsh environment.
The answer was for Canada’s military “to be there seasonally, to monitor cruise ships, adventure-seeking yachters, potentially illegal activities,” and to help monitor fisheries that had expanded north, Newton said.
No one found proof of foreign subs, spies or other national security threats then — at least not anything declassified.
But Russia has done more than enough to feed fears, despite calling the Arctic a “the territory of dialogue,” where it insists any differences can be worked out through diplomacy.
While Canada was refitting its aging navy ships to meet pollution standards, Russia was pushing through the chaos of the Soviet Union’s breakup, and now an economic crisis caused by collapsing oil prices, to massively increase its Arctic military power.
Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin created an Arctic Command, with responsibility for vast areas of the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole, which Canada also claims.
The new northern military force is led by the most powerful arm of Russia’s navy, the Northern Fleet, whose massive arsenal of warships includes several strategic nuclear submarines and the aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov.
Stepped-up deployments will also send a brigade of marines and a unit of advanced Pantsir-S1 air-defence missiles to guard refurbished airfields across the Russian Arctic, where several new military bases were built last year, Russia Today reported in December.
It’s an Arctic roar to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s shout.
Seven years ago, his Conservative government announced a plan to build as many as eight Arctic and offshore patrol ships for the navy. Last month, a $3.5-billion contract was awarded to Halifax’s Irving Shipbuilding.
Instead of eight Arctic patrol vessels, the shipbuilder only expects to make six. Skeptics ridicule them as “slushbreakers” because the vessels will only be able to do light icebreaking on their own.
But Newton calls the new Arctic patrol ships a significant leap in the navy’s northern capabilities.
They are much larger vessels than the current Kingston-class ships, with more room for equipment, such as helicopters.
They also carry enough fuel to boost the patrol distance by hundreds of kilometres, to 9,600 kilometres.
Newton is fired up to be back in the Arctic, with what he sees as a longterm plan to stay there and support Canada’s sovereignty claims.
He’s the son of a hard-hat diver, a rare breed who descend the depths in diving helmets, tethered by hoses attached to compressors that pump air from ships high overhead.
Their specialty is working on the bottom, often doing the dirty, dangerous job of salvaging wrecks in the darkness of the seabed.
It can also be traumatic: When there are bodies to recover underwater, hard-hats usually get the call.
Newton was only 15, an adolescent with attitude, when his father sent him to the Arctic in 1973.
The navy allowed crew members to bring some of their children aboard HMCS Protecteur, the sister ship of Preserver, on her voyage through the eastern end of the Northwest Passage.
Newton’s dad thought a taste of the Arctic would teach the boy that life isn’t as easy as it seems to an invincible teen.
He saw muskox and polar bears, but what really stuck with him was the view of Beechey Island, where Sir John Franklin’s expedition spent its first winter in 1845-46 during their failed attempt to complete the first transit of the passage.
Three of the expedition’s 129 men were buried there. No one would survive.
Most perished on the long trek south, before they could find their way to safety on the mainland. The generations of searchers who followed filled in vast blanks on the map of Canada and helped define it as an Arctic nation. Newton, and the men and women he commands, are keeping that legacy alive.
By tradition, anyone who crosses the Arctic Circle by sea for the first time must endure a ceremony in front of King Neptune and his courtiers, played by crew members.
It’s a light hazing, mostly involving the stinking, bloody guts of various marine life.
It ends with a cleansing dunk in ice-cold seawater.
Newton still has the laminated certificate of his rite of passage, which shows a chart tracking the voyage and a drawing of King Neptune, rising from the top of the world with trident in hand.
A glimpse is enough to transport the admiral back to the Arctic. He keeps the boyhood memento close.
“I relive this every day.”
Newton is the son of a hard-hat diver, who took the dangerous task of salvaging sunken wrecks