Michael Den Tandt: ‘Use it or lose it’ – Harper’s Arctic strategy more than just… – National Post
August 24, 2014
“I love all waste and solitary places; where we taste the pleasures of believing what we see is boundless — as we wish our souls to be.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
CAMBRIDGE BAY, Nunavut — Of all the sovereignty-boosting, patriotism-inducing, national myth-building projects this prime minister has taken on over the past eight years — and there have been a few of them now — Stephen Harper’s quixotic quest to find the lost ships of the doomed 19th-century English explorer John Franklin may appear the most vainglorious. The same applies, at first glance, to the Conservatives’ entire Arctic strategy.
Canada, a northern power to rival newly aggressive Russia? Pshaw. Canada, asserting property rights over a body of water, the Northwest Passage, that even the United States politely insists is international? Silly. And yet, it isn’t. It’s actually quite clever — and possibly, good for the country to boot.
Friday, in Fort Smith, in the Northwest Territories, the PM went as far as he has yet in asserting that he deems Vladimir Putin’s Russia to be a strategic threat to Canada in the Arctic.
