rangers protecting our sovereignty and ensuring our resources ...

'Nunalivut' Rangers show the flag
Two-week long, 5,000-kilometre Arctic patrol battled rough ice, blizzards and roving polar bears
CanWest News Service, April 10, 2006

{'The only disputed territory in the Arctic is Hans Island, where Canada's spat with the Danes brought sovereignty questions to the forefront. ... Canada and the United States both claim a triangle of the Beaufort Sea that's rich with petroleum, and Ottawa disputes ownership of the Northwest Passage with the rest of the world.'}

RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut - Driving their snowmobiles at speeds barely faster than a crawl, an armada of snowmobiles crept across the frozen tundra through a shrieking cloud of blowing snow Saturday night in the name of Arctic sovereignty.

With winds gusting up to 72 kilometres an hour and visibility dropping nearly to zero, the men and women on the massive patrol crossed one of the last stretches of Operation Nunalivut, named after the Inuktitut word for "land that is ours."

On Sunday, most of the 45 snowmobiles on the two-week patrol stopped on the ice in front of Resolute Bay, Nunavut, completing their 5,000-kilometre trek across the most frigid and isolated territory in Canada. Most of the men and women were Canadian Rangers, part-time reservists whose role is to protect the country's sovereignty through the most difficult of conditions.

But there are mounting concerns that despite their skill on the land, the Rangers aren't enough to defend the country's Arctic sovereignty, or respond to emergencies in the Far North.

Nonetheless, the patrol was a dramatic and arduous undertaking in the best of weather that the blizzard made nearly impossible.

"We were losing people 10 feet (three metres) in front of us," said Joshua Esau, a Canadian Ranger from Sachs Harbour in the N.W.T.

As the weather continued to rage, they stopped to set up camp and retreat inside the fiercely flapping walls of canvas tents. A few hours later, Maj. Chris Bergeron woke to what sounded like someone scraping snow from the outside wall.

"It was a polar bear, running through the tents," he said. "I went out and yelled, and it went away."

Northern military planners designed Nunalivut to test their ability to work in the hostile Arctic while providing a federal presence in the most remote and uninhabited parts of the country.

"If you're going to say it's yours, you'd better be there. So, we wanted to be able to demonstrate that we could be here. And I think we've done that," said Lt.-Col. Drew Artus, the chief of staff for Joint Task Force North.

Maintaining their course using a combination of GPS and traditional Inuit navigation skills, the Rangers stopped at half-a-dozen abandoned runways to assess their usability in case of future emergencies. They ate a diet of military rations, caribou and Arctic hares, which they hunted along the way. Brutally tough ice conditions forced the military to airlift in a pair of replacement snowmobiles, but the patrols reported no injuries save frostbite.

The patrol cost an estimated $1.5 million -- but didn't touch on any land where Canada's ownership has been challenged, raising questions about its effectiveness.

The only disputed territory in the Arctic is Hans Island, where Canada's spat with the Danes brought sovereignty questions to the forefront. But with the two countries now negotiating a long-term settlement, the barren 1.3-square-kilometre island is the least of the country's Arctic worries.

Canada and the United States both claim a triangle of the Beaufort Sea that's rich with petroleum, and Ottawa disputes ownership of the Northwest Passage with the rest of the world.

Still, though the Rangers crossed only a sliver of the passage, their presence on the frozen ocean is important, said Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia who holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law.

"Having these Inuit Rangers patrolling out on the ice as an official Canadian government activity is actually pretty useful," he said. "Because part of Canada's claim to the Northwest Passage rests on the thousands of years of use and occupation by the Inuit of the sea ice."

But the Arctic is changing, and warming temperatures are melting away the thick ice that once shielded it from outsiders. Climate models suggest the ice could entirely disappear by the summer of 2050, prompting worries among security experts that the Arctic's vast and sparsely populated borders could make it a target for criminal groups or illegal migrants looking for an easy way into the country.

And Rangers on snowmobiles can form only part of the surveillance solution in an area that forms a full 40 per cent of the Canadian landmass.

One solution could lie in project Polar Epsilon, which will soon begin making regular surveys of the Arctic with Radarsat-2, a new satellite scheduled to launch this December with a high-

resolution sensor that will be capable of spotting ships. Even so, the military lacks the ability to respond quickly to unusual Arctic sightings, which are now occasionally phoned in by Rangers.

"We get sightings of stuff that's almost out of the X-Files because we can't get out there fast enough," said Capt. Ken Bridges, the second-in-command of operations at the military's Yellowknife headquarters.

By the time they do, "it's too late to find out if what (the Ranger) saw was a whale or a submarine or a boat."

Rangers are tasked simply with being the eyes and ears of the Canadian Forces in the North, a role that requires them to conduct annual patrols and report any unusual activities or sightings within 300 kilometres of their hometowns.

But community patrols aren't currently equipped with satellite phones and the Rangers are neither certified in First Aid nor trained in search and rescue, limiting their ability to respond to an emergency like a plane crash.

That will begin to change this spring, when Ranger instructors start learning ground search and rescue techniques.

The air force is also hoping to augment or replace the four Twin Otter aircraft it has stationed in the North to resupply Ranger patrols.