Potentially we could lose sovereignty over our own territorial waters if we’re not proactive in artic defense. This is certainly a policy I can get behind.
Potentially we could lose sovereignty over our own territorial waters if we’re not proactive in artic defense. This is certainly a policy I can get behind.
Instead of spending millions on financing military personnel and material in the Arctic north and creating budgets to invest, support and manage personnel to live and work in the Arctic and high Arctic … why not just provide more supports for the Indigenous Inuit people that already live up there? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more economical to just fund and support that people that already want to live up there and call it their home rather than in spending millions and possibly billions on paying people to go and work up there for a few years or months. If Canada spent millions and even billions on supporting, training and financing the Inuit people up there … you’d end up with a group of people that would live and work up there all their lives.
So the option is … spend millions or billions on temporary workers to go up there
Or spend millions or billions on people that already live up there and could become Canada’s permanent northern defense force as well as make their lives more comfortable.
On the other side of that argument … it shouldn’t take military ideologies and economic considerations to even think about helping out people who desperately need the help from the rest of Canada.
I’m wholly supportive of northern development. If all of the proposed economic activity comes to fruition in the future in terms of resource extraction and shipping then we’ll need the people and infrastructure in place to facilitate that. It’d only make sense for defense and development to go hand in hand. After all a more heavily populated area is much more easily defensible.
Looking back at the article I’m surprised it didn’t touch on that subject. I guess my brain just filled in that obvious gap.