Canada’s domestic spy agency says Russia and China have a “significant intelligence interest” in Canada’s Arctic, and are targeting both the country’s government and its private sector.
In his annual speech on threats facing Canada, Dan Rogers, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), flagged mounting concerns over hostile nations growing increasingly emboldened in the Arctic.
“It is not a surprise that CSIS has observed both cyber and non-cyber intelligence collection efforts targeting both governments and the private sector in the region,” he said on Thursday.
Canada has increasingly flagged the navigable routes that pass through the country’s borders and the troves of critical minerals in the region as reason to increase investment in the north. In addition to new heavy ice breakers, Canada is weighing the purchase of a dozen patrol submarines.
What a shame we don’t have enough armed forces to defend and patrol one of the most remote, inhospitable, largest territories and longest coastlines of any country in the world. You would almost expect that would take a significantly larger military budget than your economic peers, not a vastly smaller one. Funny how that works out.
But yeah let’s just keep selling off all our natural resources for bargain basement prices to a single bidder and doing nothing to defend them from anyone else. Once the natural resources are all gone we’ll have nothing left worth defending anyway. So I guess that’s the long-term strategy?