THE CANADIAN NORTH
AND THE COLD WAR
“Apparently we have administered these vast territories of the north in an almost continuing state of absence of mind. I think all honourable members now feel the territories are vastly important to Canada.”
– LOUIS ST. LAURENT,
Prime Minister of Canada, 1953
Canada has always had two strong allies on its northern flank, what Canadian military historian C.P. Stacey called “those two famous servants of the Czar, Generals January and February mount[ing] guard for the Canadian people all year round.” For decades, Canada relied on a simple geographic truth: the North was cold and icebound for most of the year, and no nation on earth had the capacity to move quickly across the land and frozen waters to pose any real threat to southern Canada. The RCMP provided the basics: the flag was flying in remote islands across the Arctic, Canadian law was nominally enforced, and the country’s claims to northern sovereignty seemed well protected from foreign challenges. Why spend money on a region that lacked economic importance, faced no strategic threats, and had a tiny and widely scattered population that was content to be left alone? Vilhjalmur Stefansson might raise fanciful ideas about the northward course of civilization, but few saw his speeches as more than parlour talk. Stacey understood the situation perfectly. The North, he wrote, was “clearly not particularly important, and this fact greatly narrows, for practical purposes, Canada’s actual area of defence.” What Canadians were concerned about in the 1930s was not the abstract question of sovereignty, but where their next meal was coming from. Stefansson’s talk of an “Arctic Mediterranean” during the 1920s may have been prophetic, but it was nothing more than fodder for after-dinner speeches until the military significance of the Canadian North became clear during the Second World War and particularly the ensuing Cold War.
Between the two world wars, Canada was strongly isolationist and timid in its approach to international affairs. William Lyon Mackenzie King, arguably the most wily and thus the most successful of all our prime ministers, at least in terms of survival, had a single goal throughout his career: the preservation of national unity (his secondary goal, on which he believed the first depended, was staying prime minister forever). King, afraid that involvement in international affairs would harm national unity, as had happened in the First World War, shared Senator Raoul Dandurand’s view that “Canada was a fireproof house, far from flammable materials.” Canada would avoid committing itself to overseas conflicts, in hopes that this would prevent internal divisions. Mackenzie King’s frequent refrain that “Parliament would decide” was a way of defusing controversies and avoiding commitments. In any case, geography insulated the country from European and Asian crises. As for the United States, Canadians had not been at war with their southern neighbour since 1815, and prided themselves on sharing the longest undefended border in the world. This was not a time for alarm. The North was not even on the national radar; in fact, radar hadn’t been invented.
A shared continent meant that the defence of Canada was vital to American interests, and vice versa. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which pledged that the United States would respond to any external aggression in the western hemisphere, extended north as well as south. “We as good neighbors are true friends,” American president Franklin D. Roosevelt assured Canadians in 1938, going on to say that the United States would “not stand idly by” if any foreign power threatened Canadian soil. Nowadays such a statement would certainly raise hackles on the Canadian political left, but then it was received joyfully, especially because it suggested that Americans would do the heavy lifting of continental defence. Mackenzie King declared that Canada also had its obligations as a friendly neighbour to ensure that no enemy forces would ever be allowed to pass through Canada on their way to the United States, though how Canada would prevent such a thing with its tiny armed forces he did not say. In any case, these were easy promises to make while the likelihood of invasion remained remote.
The Second World War
The Second World War sent the “fireproof house” theory up in a puff of smoke. When war broke out, Canadian policy-makers assumed that the Arctic was a natural defensive barrier and that the threat of an Axis foothold in North America was impossible. Later on, when the Japanese captured territory in Alaska and German submarines popped up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and sank American merchant ships within swimming distance of Miami, they found they were wrong. In 1940, fears that Nazi Germany might conquer Britain led to the Ogdensburg Agreement between Canada and the U.S. to provide for the shared defence of North America. The Americans were particularly concerned about the security of Alaska, whose far-western tip was uncomfortably close to Tokyo, and the overland and air routes to their northernmost territory. Any land route to Alaska, of course, would have to go through Canada.
As Vilhjalmur Stefansson and others had noted before the war, the shortest air route from the continental United States to the Far East went over western Canada. In wartime, such considerations assumed heightened significance, particularly after the Soviet Union entered the war in the summer of 1941. To help the Soviets fight the Germans on the Eastern Front, the allies promised aircraft as part of the Lend-Lease program. In the same year the Canadian government began to build the Northwest Staging Route, a series of airfields and radio ranging stations between Edmonton and Fairbanks, Alaska, for civil aviation and defence purposes. Warplanes built in the United States were flown over this route to Fairbanks, where they were handed over to Soviet pilots, many of whom (to the surprise of the Americans) were women. The route became vital later that year when on December 7 the U.S. Pacific Fleet was devastated at Pearl Harbor, and the Royal Navy warships at Singapore three days later. Hong Kong fell, and in a rapid succession of victories Japan secured control over southeast Asia. The winds of war blew closer to Canada, and isolation no longer suggested security but vulnerability.
U.S. Army trucks somewhere on the Alaska Highway in the early primitive stage of its construction, summer 1942. The original caption is “Through the Wilderness.”
U.S. National Archives, 111-SC-139950
Although even at the time military planners doubted that there would be a serious invasion from the North, Alaska was vulnerable to attack: a fact made painfully clear when the Japanese captured the islands of Attu and Kiska in July 1942. Americans had wanted a highway to Alaska since the 1920s, but the Canadian government had refused to support a project that it felt would offer little benefit to Canada; it was a lot of money to spend on a road to the Yukon, which had only 4,000 or so residents in the 1930s. But the war swept aside considerations of cost.
Building the bridge over the Sikanni Chief River on the Alaska Highway in northeastern British Columbia, 1943. The original rough bridge has been replaced with a more permanent one. U.S. National Archives, 111-SC-322949
In early 1942, the United States government, alarmed by the thought that Japanese submarines might cut the sea link between Alaska and the contiguous lower forty-eight states, drew up a plan to build a road link to Alaska. President Roosevelt approved it on February 11. This road, originally called the Alcan and later the Alaska Highway, was one of the greatest construction projects ever undertaken. Laid out to link the airfields along the Northwest Staging Route, and thus winding a circuitous and treacherous course, the highway had a dramatic effect on northeastern British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Mackenzie Valley. The Canadian government cheerfully gave the Americans the right to build the road where they pleased, and to use whatever natural resources they needed, so long as the U.S. paid for it, and it was turned over to Canada after the war. It was not a sophisticated work of engineering: the original dirt road, opened to truck traffic eight months after construction began, had to be rebuilt immediately. Nevertheless, the Americans had conquered 2,400 kilometres (1,491 miles) of country, largely unknown to planners, in remarkably short order.
A major military-industrial project in the Northwest was more controversial. The Canol (Canadian Oil) project was initiated in 1942 to ensure a supply of oil to Alaska in case the maritime route was cut off. It was also designed to fuel defence efforts along the Alaska Highway and the staging route. Production was expanded at the small Imperial Oil facility at Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River, and a 1000-kilometre (621-mile) pipeline to a new Whitehorse refinery was built. American military officials pushed for the project, and a reluctant Canadian government went along, on the condition that the pipeline and facilities would be controlled by the Americans during the war, but the Canadian government would be given the first option to purchase them when the conflict ended. The project was plagued by morale and infrastructure problems, however, and the pipeline only operated sporadically for a year after it was finished in 1944. It was dismantled soon after. From today’s perspective it may seem hard to understand why the Canadian government would permit tens of thousand of Americans to operate in the Northwest without any supervision, for it was not until 1943, more than a year after construction began, that Ottawa sent a single liaison officer to represent Canada’s interests in the region. On the whole, Canada neither knew nor cared what the United States was doing in the region.
Nowadays, when the mere suggestion of the sale of water to the Americans sends Canadian nationalists into hysterics, such neglect of a large part of the country would be inconceivable. The reason for this wilful neglect was partly that the Canadian government felt that since the Americans were paying the whole cost and doing all the work, it had no moral right to question them. As well, the government was grateful for the security the presence of the American military guaranteed. Mackenzie King had spent his whole political career trying to detach Canada from its “British connection,” and it wasn’t until later in the war that he began to think that perhaps the rising power of the United States was more of a threat to Canadian sovereignty than the fading British Empire. When British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald and Vincent Massey, Canadian High Commissioner to Britain, raised the sovereignty issue, King replied that “we were going to have a hard time after the war to prevent the U.S. attempting control of some Canadian situations. [MacDonald] said already they spoke jokingly of their men as an army of occupation.”1
The result of this neglect was that the Americans ran northwest Canada from early 1942 until the end of the war as a kind of friendly army of occupation. They changed the face of Whitehorse and the other small communities along the highway, building water treatment plants, theatres, baseball diamonds, and all sorts of other facilities. American military police enforced American law, sometimes on Canadian civilians. There were cases where First Nations women claimed abuse by soldiers that were never properly investigated—the men in question conveniently disappeared, and since environmental regulations were non-existent, there were quite a number of cases of serious pollution of lakes and streams.
These northern military projects raised sovereignty concerns for the Canadian government. Nearly 40,000 U.S. military personnel and American and Canadian civilians worked on the wartime projects in the Northwest. These transient workers represented more than three times the prewar population of the region. They also were given the right of extraterritoriality: American military and civilian employees were answerable to American, not Canadian, authorities. At first, this fit with Ottawa’s “out of sight and out of mind” approach. By 1943, the government’s “fit of absence of mind,” to borrow Undersecretary of State for External Affairs Norman Robertson’s apt characterization, was equalled by Washington’s ignorance of what was actually happening on the ground.2 Prime Minister Mackenzie King told British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald in March 1942 that the Alaska Highway “was less intended for protection against the Japanese than as one of the fingers of the hand which America is placing more or less over the whole of the Western hemisphere.”3 If by that he meant that the Americans had plans to assert political control over northwest Canada, he was wrong. The Americans did not want to govern Canada; they simply wanted to build the highway and the pipeline, secure Alaska, and then go home, which is what they did soon after the war ended.
African-American troops of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building a timber bridge on the Alaska Highway, summer 1942. U.S. National Archives, 111-SC-139940
Canadian ignorance of and indifference to what the Americans were up to in the Northwest did begin to change in 1943. King appointed a special commissioner for defence projects in the Northwest, and Brigadier (later Major-General) W.W. Foster, based in Edmonton, became the eyes and ears of Canada in the region. Of course, he was only one man, really a token presence. More significantly, American plans to build more roads and air-staging routes were blocked, agreements were reached that American troops would leave the North after the war, and the Canadians agreed to buy back from the United States those facilities and installations that were already built or in progress in the North. The Americans, although sometimes begrudgingly, complied with each of these requests.4
To all but those who are pathologically suspicious of the United States, the Americans’ attitude to northern Canada can be seen not as ominous, but as a reason for cautious optimism. American author-i saw Foster’s appointment as an effort to improve and simplify the Canadian-American liaison in the Northwest, centralizing Canadian authority in the area. According to the official American army historian, Stanley Dziuban, U.S. officials found Foster agreeable and cooperative, which suggests that he did not make a nuisance of himself, and they were pleased to have a Canadian counterpart with wide powers. The Canadian government, for its part, saw an opportunity for a show of control over American activities and protection of Canadian sovereignty. There were still occasions for Canadian concern after 1943, but the Cabinet War Committee had a representative in the field. American indiscretions were now dealt with through diplomatic channels.5
The U.S. Army established control points along the Alaska Highway in 1942. Local traffic was monitored, and civilian traffic through to Alaska was forbidden until after the war. U.S. Army Corps of Engineeers photo
The highway and pipeline were the largest wartime projects in the Canadian North, but other activities also ushered in new modes of communication and transportation and reshaped social relations. Allied planners, with few offensive options in 1942 and overoptimistic faith in strategic bombing, believed that American aircraft production was the key to victory in Europe. With U-boat wolf packs prowling Atlantic shipping routes, the safest way to get airplanes to Britain was to fly them over an air bridge across northeastern North America. The hub of the Crimson Route, as this chain of air bases was called, was Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit) on Baffin Island. Major airfields were also built at Southampton Island, Churchill, and The Pas.6 By 1943, Goose Bay, Labrador (then part of the separate colony of Newfoundland), boasted the largest airfield in the western hemisphere. As the region’s first large-scale development project, the military base changed life in Labrador. Radio sites were also established throughout the Canadian North, greatly facilitating communications over vast distances. Defence activities thus drew the Arctic increasingly into the southern web and highlighted the region’s potential value to friend and foe.
Despite the amazingly passive attitude of the Canadian government, wartime developments actually strengthened Canadian sovereignty claims to its North by the end of the war. Physical development had occurred, the ownership of permanent facilities passed into Canadian hands once the war was over, and negotiations with the United States yielded various provisions indicating that Canada needed to be consulted and agreements reached before activities could be undertaken on or over its territory. Canada’s de jure sovereignty had been asserted. While de facto sovereignty had been unclear at times, the withdrawal of American troops at war’s end alleviated some of these concerns.
The war had revealed several fundamental aspects of Canada’s security position vis-à-vis the United States. Given Canada’s overseas commitments, it needed to be responsive to American concerns about continental defence, especially once the Cold War began. Northern development projects had been completed on a scale that Canadians could not have achieved alone, and fortunately, dismal failures like the Canol project wasted only American money. The Yukon had been given a boost in population and facilities that it never completely lost, and it continued to grow after the war. Most importantly, American compromises during the war demonstrated that the United States had no desire to mount a legal challenge to Canadian sovereignty. Why should they, when Canada gave them anything they wanted just for the asking? Why buy a cow, as the old country saying goes, when you could get milk through the fence?
There remained, however, a feeling that United States military commanders in Canada had been rather insensitive to the niceties of Canadian sovereignty and in a few cases had come close to regarding Canada as occupied territory. R.J. Sutherland later reflected, “Whatever the justification for this feeling—and it is true that the number of incidents was not very large—it has had a significant bearing upon Canadian policy and attitudes.”7 In reply, the Americans would probably have said that the middle of a colossal war was no time to worry about “niceties.”
In 1945, the Cabinet War Committee decided that Canada would take full responsibility for defence measures on Canadian soil—a pledge easier voiced than implemented, given the shadow of the Soviet Union looming just over the northern horizon.
The Cold War
Before the war had ended, Canadian and American military planners began to think about possible Soviet-American conflict in the postwar world. When in September 1945 a cipher clerk in the USSR embassy in Ottawa named Igor Gouzenko defected, exposing Stalin’s efforts to steal nuclear and other secrets from his allies, it was clear that the wartime friendship, never very warm, would not long survive the peace. Polar projection maps were hauled out, forcing Canada to rethink its strategic situation. “The war and the aeroplane have driven home to Canadians the importance of their Northland, in strategy, in resources and in communications,” Lester Pearson (soon to be minister of external affairs) wrote in 1946. “We should no longer be deceived by flat maps and ‘frigid wasteland’ tales of our public school geographies. The earth remains round, and the shortest routes between many important spots on it lie across the Arctic ice and over the North Pole.”8
Geography meant that Canada was now sandwiched between two increasingly hostile superpowers. History, ideology, and geography placed Canada in the American camp, and decision-makers in Ottawa had to take American views into account, even if they thought their fears of Russian intentions and capabilities were exaggerated. American security was inextricably linked to Canada’s, and diplomats and military officials from both countries got together regularly to discuss continental defence. “The proximity of the northern land masses and the increasing range of aircraft are two factors which lead to the inevitable conclusion that the defense of North America must now be treated as one problem and not as the separate concern of either Canada or the U.S.,” Major-General H.F.G. Letson, the Canadian army member on the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, noted in December 1945. “Canada is interposed between the U.S. and the polar sea and is therefore the buffer state for any attack which might come across the polar cap.”9
The concept of “defence against help” is key to understanding Canadian defence decisions during the Cold War, particularly in terms of continental defence. This theory sees Canada as having a security dilemma based on the idea that the United States, in the process of guaranteeing Canada’s safety, may itself become a threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Canada, constituting as it does the northern approaches to the United States, would not or could not defend itself from its enemies (or from the Americans’ enemies), then the U.S. would be forced to help out in whatever way it believed necessary to ensure its own safety. If Canada was unable or unwilling to defend its territory, then the Americans would be compelled to take whatever measures they felt were needed, regardless of Canadian preferences. So Canada needed to defend against the Soviet Union, as well as its American ally.
If Canada allowed the U.S. to mount that “long polar watch” by itself, historian David Bercuson observed, “Would this not be an admission that whatever sovereignty Canada claimed in the polar regions was weak at best and nonexistent at worst?”10 Canadian officials recognized this dilemma and stressed that the country could not retreat to an isolationist posture after the Second World War. Joint planning with the United States for peacetime defence was the only feasible way to grapple with the core dilemma: how could Canada help protect the continent against the Soviet Union, something it could not do alone, while, at the same time protect the Canadian North against the United States?11
Whatever the answer, it could not be allowed to consume significant government resources. The promised “peace dividend” to Canadians was the new welfare state, not military expenditures in remote parts of the country. Although some lessons had been learned during the war, Ottawa did not plan to spend much money on northern sovereignty and security. “Neither the United States nor Canada looked on the North as a place to be protected because of some intrinsic value,” military historian Kenneth Eyre has suggested. “It was seen as a direction, an exposed flank.”12 If Canadian soldiers were needed to respond to potential diversionary attacks in the Arctic wastelands, Mackenzie King concluded that these did “not warrant the establishment of an elaborate defence scheme employing our resources in a static role.” A small number of airborne forces, based in southern Canada, were more politically saleable—meaning cheaper—than permanent garrisons stationed in the Arctic. Thus the Mobile Striking Force (MSF) concept took shape. In theory, aircraft could fly specially trained paratroops into the Arctic, drop them in to counter any enemy presence on Canadian soil, and sustain themselves in the field. Assisted by the Canadian Rangers—untrained, northern volunteers given only a rifle and an armband—these forces would be Canada’s front-line northern defenders.
The Mobile Striking Force, an air-portable and airborne brigade group designed as a quick reaction force for northern operations, was an inexpensive solution to the question of how Canada could deal with an enemy in the Arctic. DND photo PC-7066
The Americans’ emphasis on developmental sovereignty contrasted with the Canadians’ symbolic sovereignty. If the Canadian military built major installations in the North, particularly airfields, it would have to think about local defences. In the Canadian government’s view, the simplest solution to the North was not to rush to build infrastructure that an enemy might use. As one senior officer remarked, Canada’s northern regions offered, “from a military point of view, nowhere to go, and nothing to do when you get there.” Lester Pearson, in a cheeky turn of phrase in the influential American magazine Foreign Affairs, called this the “scorched ice” approach.13 If you left the Arctic alone, as a deserted wasteland of ice and snow, it would be useless to an enemy, which would have to fight the natural elements simply to survive, never mind mount an attack. This mentality certainly fit with the Liberal government’s desire to keep defence spending and commitments to a minimum. At its core, government policy was to spend public money where the votes were, and there were not many of these north of the Arctic Circle.
Given the paltry Canadian resources devoted to continental defence, American decision-makers worried about the “gap between Alaska and Greenland,” as U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson described Canada to President Harry Truman.14 Almost immediately after the U.S. military left northern Canada at the end of the war, it asked to return to build airfields and meteorological stations. A leaked 1947 U.S. Air Coordinating Committee report, suggesting that the Americans should conduct reconnaissance flights to look for undiscovered islands that could be claimed as sites for weather stations, fuelled official Canadian fears of unilateral American action. Although much has been made of this memorandum, which hardly constituted general U.S. policy, a broader survey of the documentary record reveals that American officials recognized Canadian insecurities about sovereignty in the North15 and actually made the solution to Canada’s dilemma less difficult than it might have been. The State Department knew that it had to respect and attempt to soothe Canadian sensitivities. Although it occasionally acted too informally for Canadian tastes, it did not try to bully the Canadians when they were uncomfortable.16 American military officials wanted bases in the North if these could be reasonably obtained through negotiation, but there was never any serious threat of moving unilaterally. Indiscretions by lower-level American officials (usually military) were always met by loud Canadian protests, and high-level decision-makers respected Canadian sovereignty concerns. After all, American members on the Permanent Joint Board of Defence wanted to ensure U.S. military access to specific Canadian sites, but they were committed to “‘signing Canada on’ as a faithful postwar ally” more generally.17
What Canada needed was a guarantee that the Americans would not defend the Arctic themselves and leave Canada out of the picture. But given the Liberal government’s postwar focus on cutting defence expenditures, Canada could not afford to secure its northern front alone. It was not a choice between security or sovereignty: the solution had to offer both. When senior American and Canadian decision-makers met, United States representatives were much more open and flexible than the prime minister had anticipated. The idea of U.S. fighter bases in the Far North was dropped, and the emphasis shifted to mapping and meteorology. The proposed projects were of the sort that the prime minister could sell to the public for civil purposes. Mackenzie King gloated that “the Americans had come around to his own way of thinking,” and the United States was pleased to have Canada “sign on” to the general principle of joint defence co-operation, especially in the North.18 In fact, the “safeguarding principles” on sovereignty desired by the Canadians were deemed “immaterial from the standpoint of United States interests.”19 There was no secret American plot, and the general principles of U.S.–Canadian defence co-operation acknowledged Canada’s sovereignty. No mention was made of the sector principle on which Canada had staked its northern sovereignty and to which the Americans remained noncommittal; the wording of the recommendation avoided contentious language. Instead, the Joint Arctic Weather Station (JAWS) agreement announced in March 1947 was a compromise that satisfied both parties. Liberal “minister of everything” C.D. Howe announced that nine Arctic weather stations would be built over the next three years, and the co-operative undertaking would be done on Canadian terms. “Thus ended,” legal scholar Nigel Bankes noted, “what was the last potential legal threat to Canadian sovereignty over its Arctic lands.”20 But not, unfortunately, over Arctic waters.
Air defences and radar
So long as the Cold War was more bluster than bang, the pressure to invest considerable military resources in Arctic defences remained light. Once the Soviets detonated an atomic device in 1949 and war broke out in Korea in 1950, however, the perceived need to heighten continental defences became more acute. NSC–68, the American strategy report that served as “the blueprint for the Cold War,” declared that the Soviet Union wanted “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Defence analysts noted that the Soviets were approaching technological parity in bombers and atomic weapons, and the most direct route for those bombers to the military and industrial heartland of North America was over the Arctic. R.J. Sutherland explained that strategists now grappled with the best means to achieve advanced warning of a strategic air attack. “By extending the air defence system northwards such bombers could be engaged before reaching their intended targets,” he explained. “Almost equally important, by extending the area of radar coverage the risk of saturation of the defences could be reduced. Finally, by locating strike aircraft or refuelling aircraft on the northern bases, the range and speed of response of the strike forces could be improved.”21 In short, the North American allies sought defence in depth. By extending their military outposts to the farthest reaches of the continent, they might gain four to six hours’ notice before Armageddon—enough time to get their own strategic bombers in the air and respond in kind.
As early as 1946, Canadian and American authorities began to consider the possibility of building a radar chain in the Arctic to give warning of any Soviet attack. At that time, the available tech-n could not guarantee complete coverage of the northern frontier or accurate tracking of aircraft, so investing huge sums in an ineffective early-warning system was ill advised. Conditions changed by 1949, however, and convinced the Canadian government that it should construct a radar line along the U.S. border. The United States decided to build a similar early-warning chain on its northern border that same year. Joint discussion led to a co-operative effort, the Pinetree Line, consisting of thirty-three radar stations across the mid-north from Vancouver Island to Labrador. This radar network was completed in 1954. By that time, the Soviets had upgraded their bomber force, prompting more ambitious plans to increase North American radar coverage by building stations farther and farther north. Longstanding Canadian minister of national defence Brooke Claxton had discussed the construction of an Arctic chain with the Eisenhower administration in early 1953, but no firm decisions were made. When the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb that August, the question became more urgent.
As the spectre of Soviet long-range bombers delivering hydrogen bombs became more real, the Americans turned to a new defence strategy. In October 1953, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower unveiled his “New Look” strategy based on “massive atomic capability, including necessary bases; an integrated and effective continental defence system; ready forces of the United States and its allies suitably deployed . . . and an adequate mobilization base.” Continental defences would be critical to deter communist aggression. “We and our allies have and will maintain a massive capability to strike back,” President Eisenhower proclaimed in his January 1954 State of the Union address.22 “Massive retaliation” would depend upon adequate warning times so that the Americans could mobilize their strategic forces. Although building a complete radar “fence” around North America was out of the question, multiple radar lines extending northward—the only likely direction of an air attack—could provide adequate warning. The Liberal government in Ottawa was a willing partner. In June 1954, defence research scientists recommended the construction of a mostly unmanned Mid-Canada Line, along the 55th parallel, paid for entirely by Canada. This project was attractive for several reasons. First, the technology was available in Canada, and had been developed by Canadian scientists (hence its nickname, “the McGill Fence”). Second, building radar stations in the middle North would be less expensive than building an Arctic chain. Canada could afford to build and support a sub-Arctic network. Third, a Canadian project averted the troublesome issue of American presence on Canadian soil—sovereignty would not be an issue. Ninety-eight Mid-Canada stations were built by 1957 at a total cost of $250 million.23
The U.S. Air Force, however, insisted on more lead time to mobilize their deterrent than the Pinetree and Mid-Canada Lines could offer. It contracted American scientists to engineer a bolder solution that would use the vast, distant Arctic to provide maximum advance warning of an attack. The only contact that most of the scientists had with the actual North was maps and survey data, but this was enough for them to design radar systems to monitor the northern approaches. These “wizards of Armageddon” proposed a comprehensive long radar chain across the 17th parallel, and in June 1954 the Canada–U.S. Military Studies Group urged that a radar network be built stretching more than 8,000 kilometres (1,969 miles) from Alaska to Baffin Island (and eventually to Greenland). Under pressure from its American allies and the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian government consented to these plans. The government felt that it was already stretched thin honouring its NATO commitments in Europe and could not afford the kind of defence installations required to satisfy its superpower ally. The Americans would have to pay for and build the Arctic radar network, even if three-quarters of it was in Canada.
In November 1954, Canada and the U.S. reached a formal agreement to build the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. In its press releases, Ottawa insisted that this radar network was part of the comprehensive continental defence system, not a stand-alone project, along with NATO, collective security, and the United Nations. Furthermore, Lester Pearson explained, military megaprojects were most effectively completed by placing responsibility with a single party: Canada would thus build the Mid-Canada Line, and the U.S. the DEW Line.24
Canadian negotiators reached an advantageous agreement with the Americans: the United States would bear the full cost of construction, but American firms would have to subcontract to Canadian companies and hire local indigenous labour to help with construction; Canada retained ownership of the sites located in Canada; and the major stations were to be commanded by Canadians. This was a major coup for Canadian sovereignty: the Americans officially acknowledged that all of the islands in the Far North explicitly belonged to Canada. “As a result of the DEW Line Agreements,” R.J. Sutherland explained, “Canada secured what the United States had up to that time assiduously endeavoured to avoid, namely, an explicit recognition of Canadian claims to the exercise of sovereignty in the Far North.”25
Although nationalist critics have often claimed that the DEW Line was a shameful example of how Canada’s sovereignty in the North was undermined by American strategic priorities during the Cold War, the truth is quite different. In an article published just after the first press tour of the line, Baltimore Sun reporter Mark Watson painted a picture of a project that was co-operative, not dominated by Americans:
It was obvious that the cost would be great (wild guesses went up to $2,000,000,000 and even higher) and that Canada, with one tenth of the population of the United States, could not pay as much in cash, however proud the Canadians were of paying their own way. . . . But there was more than cost to consider. Sovereignty was involved. That is why Canada, properly jealous of her own control of everything within her own borders, had properly insisted on building wholly from her own resources the Mid-Canada Line. . . . In the case of DEW Line Canada was reluctant to yield, even to an ally, any aspect of her own sovereignty.
In the agreement, these old-time partners in joint defense recognized both sovereignty and budgetary facts. The United States would pay all the cost of DEW Line. . . Canada would make large contributions of items in which she was rich, in cooperation, reconnaissance, many supplies, policing, transportation by land, sea and air to a large degree, maritime support, and in personnel with a large and intimate knowledge of the difficulties to be encountered in the wild Northwest Territories over whose largely unexplored northern fringe most of the new line would run.
In an effort to make clear that this is Canada’s soil, with all that is implied, the United States agreed that if in the future Canada desires to take over the whole set of installations, Canada can do so. Here is a dramatic working-out of one of the world’s most enduring examples of international reliance, that shines like a good deed in an increasingly naughty world.
The agreement did everything possible to safeguard Canadian interests, but in the remote reaches of the Canadian Arctic “there could be no assurance that the fine print would be scrupulously observed.”26
The 22-station DEW Line was completed in 1957, its creation an extraordinary feat of geographical engineering that altered the military, logistical, and demographic characteristics of the territorial North. Yet concerns about sovereignty continued to be voiced in the press. The U.S. acknowledged that Canada had legal ownership to the Arctic islands, but did we have any practical control over the North? Canadian reporters and politicians on the Opposition benches painted a disturbing portrait. “Stories of the impairment of sovereignty, sometimes true, sometimes partly true, sometimes wholly false, but always disturbing, began to trickle down from the north country into Parliament and the press,” political scientist James Eayrs recounted. “Tales were told of American discrimination against Canadian contractors; of violation of Canadian customs and immigration procedures by American snow trains and aircraft bringing in men and equipment; of American flags flying where Canadian flags (whatever they might be) ought to have flown; of American security regulations forbidding Canadian journalists and, occasionally, Canadian officials from visiting DEW Line stations.” The “whatever they might be” recalls that, at the time, there was no official Canadian flag, so the Americans can hardly be blamed for not knowing what to fly. For all the protections that the 1955 agreement offered on paper, and despite satisfactory explanations or responses to each alleged American transgression, concerns about American influence lingered, especially among people who were naturally inclined to suspect and dislike the United States.27
The DEW Line raised concerns about American encroachments on Canadian sovereignty. Suggestions that Canada would become “the northernmost banana republic” never came to pass, thanks to persistent Canadian vigilance to ensure that its interests were protected. DND image PCN-1656
For example, Ralph Allen, the editor of Maclean’s magazine, wrote an article that asked the core question “Will the DEW line Cost Canada Its Northland?” “It is the charter under which a tenth of Canada may very well become the world’s most northerly banana republic,” Allen asserted. “For a sum of money that has been officially estimated at four hundred million dollars we have at least temporarily traded off our whole northern frontier. In law we still own this northern frontier. In fact we do not.” In his view, we did not simply allow our American allies to take control, but insisted that they do so. This was not a passive loss of sovereignty, but the Canadian government’s decision to “thrust it on a friend who did not really want it but who, having been forced to take it, must inevitably use it in ways that will impair our friendship.” For roughly the amount of tobacco taxes that Canadians would pay between 1954 and 1957, the country “handed the expense and operation of this radar network—perhaps obsolete already—to the United States,” Allen lamented. In so doing, Canada also handed over part of its national independence.28
The U.S. did foot the bill, flew its flag at DEW Line sites, and exercised the right to turn away Canadian visitors without security authorization. Journalists and members of the Opposition in Parliament used these issues to generate controversy. For the most part, this was muckraking—searching for sensational stories to prey upon anti-American sentiments and discredit the government. Much of this was mere posturing. Of course journalists and members of Parliament couldn’t wander about DEWLine facilities without permission, any more than they could wander about Canadian military bases elsewhere in Canada. When federal officials took their concerns to Washington, they reached mutually satisfactory solutions that showed the Americans were respectful of Canada’s insecurities about sovereignty. “Nothing exists which one could call United States control in the north,” minister Jean Lesage explained in the House of Commons on August 3, 1956. “It is Canadian control. Our northern service officers are constantly touring the line. The R.C.M.P. are . . . looking after order, peace and good behaviour on the part of everyone concerned. It is clear that Canadian law is applied and enforced, and that the control is in the hands of Canadians.”29 Partisan dialogue inflamed alleged irritants far beyond their actual severity. Maclean’s journalist Blair Fraser admitted that journalists’ allegations of American attacks on Canadian sovereignty had been overblown. “This has tended, in Washington, to magnify Canada’s reputation for being a hypochondriacal fuss-bucket, a reputation not yet widespread, but growing enough to worry some Canadian officials who would rather see Canada hold her fire for things of more importance.”30 Canada’s hypersensitivity over sovereignty in this context was largely a product of a long history of inaction and underdevelopment. It should not be misread as caused by American perfidy.
Like the journalists who harped on Canada’s claims as though this would reinforce them, many historians have cited the DEW Line as an example of the Canadian government sacrificing sovereignty in the name of American security. This requires a selective and unbalanced reading of the historical record. The DEW Line contributed more to Canadian sovereignty in the North than it took away from it. It was run in the spirit of partnership, allowed Canada to “defend against help” (particularly after the Royal Canadian Air Force took over the management of Canadian sections of the line in 1959), and did not drive Canada into bankruptcy. Indeed, the employment of both Inuit and southern Canadian men, who represented 97 percent of the personnel along the Canadian section of the line by 1963, entrenched Canada’s claims to “effective occupation” of its Arctic.31
In terms of its actual military usefulness, however, the DEW Line was questionable. It was designed to detect the approach of long-range Soviet bombers flying over the Pole, but critics suggested that its radar and communications could be jammed. The counter-argument would be that jamming would have sent a strong signal that the Soviets were up to something. In theory, Soviet aircraft could swing wide and come into North America from the Atlantic or Pacific. Given the range of Soviet aircraft in the 1950s, this was unlikely, particularly when “Texas Towers” (offshore radar towers) extended the range of the DEW Line. All told, the radar network did its job in helping the Canadians and Americans— united in the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) after 1957—to meet the manned, long-range bomber threat.
By the time the DEW Line became operational, new threats emerged that proved more unnerving than bombers and drew strategic attention away from the Canadian North. In 1957, the Soviets placed Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in orbit. This was a major technological breakthrough, raising fears that the Russians were winning the space race. If they could launch a satellite into outer space, they could also launch intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): nuclear-tipped missiles that could cross entire continents much faster than planes, thus overwhelming the existing air defence network. The bomber threat remained, but the superpower fight for technological supremacy had moved to the next round. In due course, NORAD implemented the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) to work in conjunction with American satellites to detect a potential Soviet missile attack. Canada’s geography was not needed for this system, which was stationed in Alaska and Greenland. As NORAD moved away from static radar lines, preferring to invest in more versatile satellites, the Mid-Canada Line was phased out of service in 1965, and most DEW Line and Pinetree stations closed. The DEW Line would maintain its lonely vigil for several more decades, just in case the Soviets launched a bomber attack, but the priorities of the U.S. and Canada had shifted elsewhere.
Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker speaks at the official opening of the town of Inuvik, 21 July 1961. Distracted by other divisive issues, Diefenbaker failed to deliver on his Arctic research, transportation, and resource development program. LAC image PA-166413
By the 1960s, the politics of defence in Canada were increasingly divisive. John Diefenbaker campaigned in 1957 partly on his “northern vision,” but this was based on exploiting the natural resources of the region rather than on military preparedness. His tenure as prime minister, from 1957 to 1963, was marked by clashes with the Canadian military and with the Americans, with public debates over the cancellation of the Avro Arrow, the decision to acquire BOMARC and Honest John missiles instead, and the requirement to arm these weapons with nuclear warheads. The government’s blundering during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 led to a Cabinet crisis, and its failure to convince the Americans that it would fulfill its defence commitments promoted the outgoing NATO commander to tell a news conference that Canada was reneging on its alliance obligations. When the U.S. State Depart-m called Diefenbaker a liar, and the American ambassador in Ottawa derided the Conservative government publicly, his government fell. In the ensuing 1963 election, Dief’s vitriolic anti-American campaign held the Liberals to a minority government. There were still elements of “defence against help” in Canadian strategic thinking, and concerns about the sovereignty implications of being partner to the American behemoth, but these no longer included the threat of American soldiers and airmen occupying Canadian tundra against our will.
As continental defence priorities shifted to missiles and outer space, Canada’s concerns over the American sovereignty threat to the Arctic diminished. Strategist Colin Gray observed that by the mid-1960s there was “no military incentive to urge the Canadian Forces to be active in the North.”32 The navy’s northern cruises in the summer ceased, surveillance flights were scaled back, army exercises were cancelled, radio and highway systems managed by the military were turned over to civil departments, and the Canadian Rangers were virtually abandoned.33 If the Americans did not have any pressing security needs that might cause them to act alone and jeopardize Canada’s sovereignty, military activities seemed irrelevant. “The sovereignty of a great majority of modern states is in fact protected, not by their military power, but by international law and a somewhat more nebulous but important factor referred to as ‘world public opinion,’” a defence paper on the role of the armed forces in maintaining Canadian sovereignty noted in 1968.34 Nevertheless, the Canadian Forces would soon be called upon to help the federal government react to a new sovereignty threat, one posed by the commercial interests of our closest friend and ally.
The driving force behind Canada’s approach to the Cold War Arctic was the need to “defend against help.” As long as the Americans perceived the Arctic as a strategically significant approach to the North American continent, these security concerns placed Canada in an awkward situation. If it opposed American plans, its southern ally might take unilateral action to defend its own interests, thus undermining Canadian sovereignty. If Canada went along with plans that it could not conceivably carry out itself, however, it would still have to turn to the Americans for “help” that, in practical terms, might diminish its de facto sovereignty. Partnership, however, offered the Canadians a say in decision-making, solidified its alliances with the Americans, and could guarantee both security and sovereignty. It could not be an either/or equation. Cold War decision-makers knew that solutions had to offer both.
Canadians are ultrasensitive when American plans or actions seem to hurt their feelings or threaten their interests. This was equally true of the North, where Canada’s passive approach of symbolic sovereignty ran up against American developmental sovereignty in wartime (both hot and cold). Canadian officials had some valid concerns, particularly about de facto sovereignty in remote regions. A balanced reading of the evidence, however, makes it difficult to fault the Americans unless one assumes, as all too many Canadians do, that every American foreign policy is malevolent. Certainly the Americans acted in their own interests in the Canadian North, often in what they saw as a power vacuum, and sometimes behaved as if the North was theirs to exploit. Given the lack of Canadian military presence, however, coupled with new continental security concerns, the American military could hardly be faulted for perceiving itself as discoverers of a new land. When Canadian government officials realized that they were acting in a “fit of absence of mind” and pressed their American allies to respect the Dominion’s sovereignty, the U.S. observed the proper diplomatic niceties. Negotiated solutions allowed the two nations to reach mutually satisfactory outcomes to most problems they encountered. After all, the Americans did not wish to assert formal sovereignty over Canada’s North, in this or in any period since the War of 1812. To suggest otherwise is to misread and misrepresent the evidence. The Americans had specific interests in the North as a strategic frontier that demanded attention, and Canada found ways to meet American needs and avoided spending itself into oblivion on defence projects, all the while quietly reinforcing its legal claims to its northern territories.
Although Canada’s terrestrial sovereignty claims were not in dispute, the perplexing matter of the Northwest Passage remained outstanding. “Since World War II Canada has, for all practical purposes, acquired another ocean,” political scientist Thomas Tynan observed in 1979. “Before that time the Arctic Ocean was impassable and unchallengeable. Now it is a major pathway for the exchange of hostilities between the two great superpowers, Russia and the United States, and Canada is caught in between. Moreover, the fragile environment of this region opens up the possibility that commercial pollution could cause it irreparable damage.” As the next chapter reveals, the greatest challenges to Canadian sovereignty over the last fifty years have come from the Americans: the voyages of an oil tanker, the Manhattan, in 1969–70, and then the Polar Sea icebreaker in 1985. Canada’s response has been to extend our jurisdiction over “our” Arctic waters, ahead of international law, and challenge American views of the passage as an international strait.35 Peculiarly, throughout the Cold War, the military remained the instrument of choice to show Canada’s commitment to defending its North, even when the “enemy” was not a hostile superpower but its southern neighbour and closest ally.