Eighteen years ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a rallying cry for Canadians.
“Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” he said on the shores of Esquimalt Harbour, B.C., while announcing plans for a fleet of new Arctic offshore patrol ships (AOPS) and a deep-sea port to be used as their base.
“We either use it or lose it.”
But two decades later, amid a flurry of Arctic-focused announcements, one project still languishes unfinished, more than a decade past its completion date — an unwelcome reminder of the challenges of building a military presence in the North, whose melting waterways are increasingly contested.
The Nanisivik Naval Facility, Harper’s deep-sea port meant to support the AOPS, is still not finished. It has become the white elephant in Canada’s north.
Now a part-time, summer-only maritime gas station, the significantly stripped-back Nanisivik port project is mired in construction delays, cost overruns and serious questions about its long-term viability.
And now, Global News can reveal the construction company building the facility went into receivership a year ago — leaving the Department of National Defence to backtrack on its earlier plans for a long-awaited 2025 opening date.
One worker on the project, who did not want to be named, also said there were now structural issues with the wharf that could make the project untenable within a few years. DND did not respond to questions about these issues.
The government is aware of its failure and doesn’t appear to have any concrete ideas on how to ensure it won’t happen again.
“The challenges we have faced at that particular facility have demonstrated that that’s not the way to go forward,” Defence Minister Bill Blair said in response to a question from Global News in Iqaluit last week, during the location announcement for three Arctic operational support hubs.
Meanwhile, foreign powers such as Russia and China increase their presence in the region and U.S. President Donald Trump jockeys to buy Greenland as a strategic Arctic outpost. And for residents of the northern provinces, the looming shadow of Nanisivik provides little solace that the government will fulfil its more recent promises to protect them from outside threats.
“People in the Arctic are truly worried,” says Nunavut MP Lori Idlout.
“I’ve been travelling to Nunavut the last few weeks, and every community has raised their concerns about Arctic sovereignty and Arctic security. And investments are needed more now than ever.”
To the rest of the world, the legal and political status of the Arctic waters remains an uncertainty. But to Canada, it’s simple.
Since the 19th century, Canadian governments have laid dubious claims to the frozen lands and icy waterways that make up the Arctic Archipelago — including the Northwest Passage, a contested network of waterways that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
The Northwest Passage is proving to be the most contentious. As ice melts, the waterway has the potential to slash shipping times by thousands of kilometres, because vessels no longer need to travel through the Panama Canal.
Foreign powers — such as Russia and China — have taken note of the potential of the Arctic. Russia in particular has reopened several of its Soviet-era military bases in the Arctic and poured money into modernizing its naval fleet.
Meanwhile, the number of vessels travelling through the area is increasing, quickly.
Maritime traffic data from the Canadian Coast Guard shared with Global News shows a large uptick in Arctic maritime traffic in recent years. Full transits of the Northwest Passage have risen by 50 per cent compared to 2012, and the number of vessels reporting to the Iqaluit Marine Communications and Traffic Services Centre is up 45 per cent.
As Steve Bannon told Global News, the Arctic is going to be the “Great Game of the 21st century” and a military weakness that he calls Canada’s “soft underbelly.”
But asserting sovereignty of the North cycles in and out of political discourse.
In 1988, after years of failed negotiations with the U.S. over the status of the Northwest Passage, former prime minister Brian Mulroney famously gave former U.S. president Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic and said, “Ron, that’s ours. We own it, lock, stock and icebergs.”
But it was Harper who brought the Arctic onto the political map.
When he announced the Nanisivik Naval Facility, the project was going to cost Ottawa an estimated $100 million with a completion date of 2015. The site would provide a critical refuelling facility for the Royal Canadian Navy and other government vessels operating in the Arctic, including Harper’s $3.1-billion fleet of Arctic and offshore patrol ships (AOPS).
The facility, a former lead and zinc mine on Baffin Island, already had basic docking platforms and a fuel tank storage facility. But it wasn’t the most strategic location (100 km south of the actual Northwest Passage), and it was also widely criticized for its lack of community benefits — located 35 km from the nearest community at Arctic Bay.
The challenges only mounted.
Between 2009 and 2011, the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB), the agency responsible for assessing any environmental, health, and socio-economic impacts of proposed projects in Nunavut, said DND did not respond to repeated requests for information and rejected the proposal.
In 2010, engineers discovered that the wharf was sinking.
By 2012, with construction still not having started, the budget had ballooned to $258 million, resulting in the waning of political support. So the project was downsized significantly.
Originally supposed to house an office, accommodation and workshop buildings, a jet-capable runway, improvements to the aging 1970s-era jetty, and to be staffed year-round, the final plans reduced the scope to minor wharf improvements, an unheated warehouse and a smaller tank farm that can store only one year’s supply of fuel — meaning it would only function for about a month per year.
The jet-capable runway was scrapped, meaning the military will have to either come in by sea or fly to nearby Arctic Bay, land on a gravel runway and then drive 33 km to Nanisivik. And the budget was still $114.6 million.
In 2014, Almiq Contracting was finally awarded the $55 million contract to construct the facility. What followed was 10 years of delays caused by supply chain issues and the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2023 report from the auditor-general later panned the project, saying it would provide “little value” to Canada’s Arctic surveillance.
And as of February 2024, the contractor, Almiq Contracting, has gone bust — with its parent company, Quebec’s Laval Fortin Group, struggling under a debt of $43 million.
Johnny Mikijuk, the owner of Almiq, has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
A worker on the Nanisivik site, who asked not to be named, said no work on the site was completed in 2024 — which DND disputes, but declined to elaborate..
In a response to a long-delayed request for comment, DND would not answer a question about who the new contractor was, but said the Surety Intact Insurance Company was the bonding agency. They would not disclose how much work was left to do, but said, “We are still finalizing the work plan.”
Surety Intact said they had “fulfilled the obligations of the surety bond” and would not comment further.
Nanisivik was supposed to form part of Canada’s wider Arctic strategy. That plan included the AOPS fleet and an ambitious project to extend the lives of current icebreakers, and procure several more. It also intended to purchase new submarines to counter threats from Russia in the ocean and in the air.
But without a refuelling station in the area, ships currently can only operate in the region for as long as their fuel allows.
Intercepts of Russian military aircraft have become commonplace in the Arctic. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) says while incursions into Canadian Air Defence Identification Zone (CADIZ) and the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) fluctuate annually, but have been as high as 15 in one year, to as low as zero. CADIZ incursions are less frequent, with an average of less than one per year over the past decade.
In July 2024, NORAD intercepted two Russian TU-95 Bear and two Chinese H-6 bombers flying near Alaska — the first time the two countries have been intercepted while operating together. Capt. Rebecca Garand of NORAD told Global News it was the first time Chinese H-6s had been seen in the Arctic.
Numbers dipped during the COVID pandemic and at the beginning of the Ukraine war, she said, but the numbers had returned to pre-COVID levels.
It’s important to note, however, that NORAD does not consider these sorties a threat. However, Garand would not speculate on what purpose the flights might serve.
Regardless, given the growing interest in the region from these foreign powers, locals say the government should follow through on their commitments.
“I am concerned, you know […] Canada has the longest coastline in the world. We are a naval country, and when the politicians cut budgets […] then all of a sudden the government wakes up and we have to start doing catch up,” Arctic Bay resident and manager of Arctic Bay Adventures Chris Mitchell says.
“So yes, I’m very concerned.”
Asserting Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic and Northern regions is “the most urgent and important task we face,” the federal government said in April 2024 while unveiling a major update in the country’s defence policy.
Several Arctic-focused announcements followed — a dedicated Arctic foreign policy in December that set out plans to boost Canada’s Northern sovereignty, an Arctic ambassador, new Canadian consulates in Alaska and Greenland, and a pledge to build up the military footprint with several northern military operational support hub, at a cost of $218 million.
The locations for those operational support hubs were announced in Iqaluit last week, when Defence Minister Bill Blair said that the federal government will spend $2.67 billion on the first three hubs in Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Inuvik.
Confusion ensued over the investment amount, with Blair seeming to confirm a large increase in spending in response to questions from reporters.
DND later told Global News the accounting methods used to talk about the hubs had changed, and previous references to the hubs were an “accrual-based figure of $218 million” as they were being spent over 20 years.
Blair’s announcement did not give away any further details — no mention of how many hubs would be built, when they would be operational or which items of infrastructure would be upgraded to support the hubs.
Asked by Global News how local communities can trust the government to fulfil its commitment, given the delays at nearby Nanisivik, Blair said the project was “well intended,” but it “failed to take into account the circumstances” of building in the region.
“We clearly need a place for our ships to be able to refuel in the North and we’re still trying to fulfil that particular project, but the challenges that we have confronted with that project have shown us that there is a better way to do this and we are committed to that better way,” he said.
When asked what he considered a successful Northern project that worked with local communities and the regional government, he cited the 3,000-foot extension of the Inuvik runway.
“That partnership worked,” Blair said.
Except, it didn’t. Or at least it hasn’t yet.
Announced in 2019, the project was supposed to be a key operating location for the Air Force and a “matter of Arctic sovereignty.”
It was supposed to cost $100 million and meant to be completed by 2024, but the date was later pushed back to 2025, and then to 2027 while its budget ballooned to $230 million.
Other government pledges remain works in progress. The Canadian Arctic ambassador position remains unfilled, according to a Global Affairs Canada spokesperson, and Canadian officials have engaged with foreign officials on the new consulates, but they aren’t open yet.
Conversations remain ongoing with Denmark over our border dispute over Hans Island, and with the United States on the Beaufort Sea — but Global Affairs didn’t say if any conversations had taken place with the U.S. on this since Trump became president.
In February, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rode in on the Arctic bandwagon when he travelled to Iqaluit to announce a permanent military base there, should he win the election.
This announcement, too, was light on concrete details. There was no monetary figure provided on how much this would cost or how it would be achieved in the two-year timeframe Poilievre offered. Nunavut also has a housing crisis, raising questions about where military and construction workers might live.
That comes in addition to increased infrastructure needs. Poilievre also pledged to build the base within two years — a speed unseen for any other Arctic project on this scale.
Conservative shadow minister for National Defence James Bezan told Global News they would work with the city of Iqaluit and Government of Nunavut to “invest in dual use housing, power, water, and waste management systems.”
The base would be staffed year-round, he said, with troops living in the military barracks at the NORAD forward operating location in Iqaluit, and additional housing constructed by opening up federal Crown land to house troops and their families.
Bezan would not comment on how much the base would cost, however. “Further details will be forthcoming,” he said.
It was another example of “pure political theatre” in the Arctic, according to Rob Huebert, Arctic security expert at the University of Calgary.
“It shows the importance of being able to basically counter each other on this issue rather than a strategic plan,” he said.
“One can make an argument that the policy pronouncements tend to be more politically motivated than anything to do with sort of strategic evaluation,” he says.
Huebert argues that the delays were less about issues constructing projects in the North and more a lack of “political will.”
Nunavut MP Lori Idlout agrees. She says the facility was an example of “another failure of federal governments” in the North.
“Not only have they made huge announcements, but they’ve also broken their promises by making reductions […] So this is just another indication that whether it’s Conservative or Liberal, the Arctic has never been as high on their priority as it should have been.”
Idlout says Trump’s threats on Greenland and annexing Canada should be taken seriously, and the most effective way forward for Arctic investments is to consult Inuit.
According to Blair, that’s where Harper failed. And without collaboration, if we’re to believe threats from south of the border, we might lose it — instead of use it.
