Arctic Gateways or Strategic Backdoors? Foreign Investment and Canada’s Dual-Use Dilemma: Pauline Springer for Inside Policy – MLI
October 7, 2025
Canada should take great care when considering dual-use ports, to protect against foreign actors with malign intentions.
Canada is showing an increasing interest in investing in dual-use projects. Dual-use Arctic ports are much more complicated than they seem to our political leaders, with the joint defence and commercial purposes potentially undermining each other in significant ways.
However, a failure to invest in Arctic infrastructure will leave Canada open to either direct military threats (if we commercialize without defending) or duplicitous foreign investment (if we attempt to defend without monitoring foreign investment or seizing investment opportunities in commercial infrastructure domestically).
What we need is not a blanket assumption that dual-use is always the best option. Instead, we need strategic investment in projects that satisfy our defence needs while shutting out the development of foreign-funded commercial ports that would offer adversaries such as China a covert for military applications in our Arctic. In other words, dual-use is complex – but if we do not build strategic dual-use ports for our industry and military, potentially malicious foreign actors will have the opportunity to build covert dual-use ports to conduct hybrid warfare in our Arctic.
