Why the Arctic matters for Canada’s security, plus a look ahead to what the US election means for Canada

Lisa Raitt: Thank you for tuning in to The Raitt Stuff. I’m your host, Lisa Raitt. And in this podcast, I’m going to share insights on current hot topics in the areas of public policy, politics and business with some guests along the way. And welcome back to The Raitt Stuff. Today I have with me the Director of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute, Dr. Christopher Sands. And if you’re wondering what the Canada Institute is, let me tell you, it’s the largest policy research program on Canada outside of Canada. It’s based in Washington, DC. And it’s also the leading source of scholarship on US-Canada relations in Washington, DC. Now, Chris has previously directed applied policy research programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Hudson Institute, has published extensively over a career of more than 30 years in Washington think tanks. He’s also a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and he directs the Hopkins Center for Canadian Studies there. But more importantly, he is often and frequently mistaken for being a Canadian because of all his scholarship in the area. But he was born and raised in almost Canada and Detroit, Michigan. Thanks for joining me, Chris. I appreciate you being here.

Dr. Christopher Sands: Great to be here, Lisa. I always say Detroit is just like Canada, but with crime and better sports teams.

Lisa Raitt: Okay, we won’t talk about the Lions, but we can talk about the Lions.

Dr. Christopher Sands: Oh, yeah, that’s still sore at this point, but yes.

Lisa Raitt: I thought I’d let the listeners know that what we’re going to launch here today is a bit of an in-depth look at U.S. Canada relations. There’s an election going on in the United States. There’s going to be an election in Canada in 2025. And a lot of folks are thinking about the US-Canada relationship as a result of that. I would submit, Chris, that we should always be thinking about the US-Canada relationship. You write extensively on the topic. The Canada Institute really is the go-to. I’m wondering from your perspective. This US-Canada relationship, it’s noted as being special, but is it in trouble? I mean, the Alagier survey said 61% of Canadians identified the US as their closest ally, but you know what? The Americans, they’re not feeling it. Only 47% of Americans identify Canada as their closest ally.

Dr. Christopher Sands: I’ve seen similar numbers before. And I think one of the challenges is that when Americans think of ally, they think of military. And as you see in the Red Sea and other places, Britain often comes up ahead of Canada on the strictly military side. But if you talk about trade partners, over the course of my career, certainly at the beginning, if you ask people who our largest trading partner was, Canada was almost never the answer. People would guess it was Britain or it was China or it was Japan. And gradually, thanks to NAFTA, USMCA and some of the dialogues, we’ve come to realize that Canada is really an important economic partner. So I think there’s something to be worried about, but the core of the relationship is still in good shape. It’s a relationship we don’t acknowledge enough. We take it for granted on the US side. And I think that’s the source of a lot of problems, that we simply assume Canada will be there for us. We don’t value it as we should and we figure you’ll forgive us if we ever do something really bad, which we don’t deserve.

Lisa Raitt: It’s true. The Wilson Center also has a Mexico US collaboration. Do you find yourself doing work with the Mexican Institute as well?

Dr. Christopher Sands: I do, partly for the sake of studying North American dynamics, supply chains, critical minerals. We have a North American semiconductor strategy between the three countries and so we’ve been following that. But also, it’s interesting, I appreciate you used my line in the intro that we’re the largest research program in Canada outside Canada. And so we often are talking to the Mexicans and Mexican business people who are trying to understand Canada. It is very different to what they’re used to. And I think sometimes they expect Canada to be like the US, sort of other gringos in the North, and yet you’re not exactly like us. And I find myself talking to Mexicans quite a bit. I talked to Venezuelans a bit. I talked to Norwegians, folks in Europe, all trying to understand Canada. And it’s nice that they ask me, probably it’s because they were coming through Washington and they didn’t have time to go to Ottawa. But I take a real responsibility for that because I want to make sure that as I try to interpret Canada for other people, I interpret Canada at its best and help them to find the Canadians who can tell their own story even better than I can. 

Lisa Raitt: I appreciate that. There’s a lot of areas of policy between the US and Canada, obviously. Some of the areas have had friction in the past. We had a border that was shut during 9-11, also a border that was severely restricted during COVID. And I know that the Canada Institute did, I think, some fantastic work around showing how important the border is and the ability of people to be able to move and goods to be able to move across that border. But where’s your energy being focused right now in terms of a hotspot of a policy friction between the US and Canada?

Dr. Christopher Sands: There are a couple of things. One thing that I’m worried about is our mutual dysfunction when it comes to building infrastructure. We both want to get to net zero by 2050. That’s going to be difficult if we don’t start building things. And what’s really frustrating to me is that we are trying to solve our problems of permitting, especially when they go across multiple jurisdictions, states and provincial lines, etc., independent of each other. And yet so much of our infrastructure actually crosses the border. We’re democracies, we believe in having people be able to scrutinize big projects that might affect their property values or their way of life. So that’s really important. And of course, in Canada, there are indigenous issues in terms of First Nations who have rights that may or may not be settled on treaty, and they need to say. And I think we want those people, those groups to be able to weigh in. But at the same time, we also need to move forward and we need to get things done. And I think one of the things that we both suffer with is this idea, the sort of a modern idea of social license. If you asked Sir John A. Macdonald or Thomas Jefferson, they would say social license is provided in a democracy because we have representatives of the people who sit in Congress or in Parliament, and they, on behalf of the people they represent, they provide social license. We no longer believe that that’s enough. And we need sort of a conversation among NGOs and individuals. And we’re so individualistic in North America now that it’s an army of one, it’s a veto of one. And that’s one issue where I think we could do a lot more working together. And the reason for that is that what we need out of our system is resilience. We need to be able to recover from hurricanes, earthquakes, shocks that the weather throws at us, whether it’s wildfires in Canada or a hurricane in the Gulf. And the degree to which our systems can lean on each other and get the power back on and get us rolling again, that’s a huge asset that we wouldn’t have. I thought about that when Hawaii had the volcanic explosion. Most of Canada and most of the continental US, if there’s a fire, we have fire bombers that we can loan each other and we can help out. Poor Hawaii is like a control. It’s the control group. It’s so far away that it doesn’t get any of the benefit of good Canada-US relations. So when they have a fire, it’s just devastating. There’s not much we can do to help. So it’s often in those kinds of moments you realize that we do really depend on each other and we have to safeguard that and continue to make it work as much as we can.

Lisa Raitt: Let’s talk about the North. I know that definitely the Wilson Center and Canada Institute put a high focus on talking about the North and highlighting it, not just from a Canadian point of view, from an American point of view. So why the importance in the North? It’s not just about resources anymore, is it?

Dr. Christopher Sands: No, and in fact, I think one of our global fellows here at Wilson, Heather Exner-Pirot quotes a figure that it’s about two and a half times as expensive to do mining or critical minerals development in the north compared to the south. And given the prices even for the most valuable critical minerals, it’s just not that economic to do the work up there. It’s good to know it’s there. Sort of like offshore oil drilling in the Beaufort. That was a big thing for a while, but then oil prices shifted and it just didn’t look economic. Not that it’s a bad idea, but it’s nice to know that resource is there. I think what’s really focused American attention, as it often does, is the great power rivalry dynamic because we don’t have a Cold War. We actually have something of a daggers drawn conflict with China and with Russia. And China is more of a concern because they’re starting to see the North Sea route, the shipping route that goes over Russia on the Russian side as solving a lot of the problems they have with the Belt and Road Initiative, which has stumbled. And Russia owes them. There’s no way Russia can say no. So a combination of Russia and China in the Arctic with every other country on the Arctic being NATO, it really sets up a potential conflict zone. And if you look at the NATO front line from Alaska all the way through to Finland, Canada is the weakest link. It’s where we have the weakest domain awareness, we have the weakest response or even search and rescue capability. And so it’s something that really we have to find a way to step up. And I feel terrible about this because the government, your government and the current government have been working on NORAD modernization and it’s expensive and you’re putting a lot into it. And I’m afraid that the message is gonna come out that that’s not enough. We appreciate it, but we need more. And it’s so hard. I know how hard it is to get money for defense. I know how hard it was to do NORAD modernization. It’s a very expensive project and the Canada’s taking the lead. And for us to then say, thanks very much, we want more, I think is going to be a potential tension point in the next administration here and potentially the next government there.

Lisa Raitt: So let’s just do a little geographic lesson for folks who may not understand the polar map. So explain the difference between the North Sea and the Northwest Passage.

Dr. Christopher Sands: Well, if you looked at the map, you would see Russia has a few islands offshore, but it’s more or less a kind of normal coastline and it has been passable for a long time. There is ice, but where the ice really clusters are on islands and Canada’s north and many of your listeners will know is an Arctic archipelago. And so around every island, there’s a collar of shelf ice. And then there’s the ice that sort of moves through the passage around and the Northwest passage. when we were kids was not very viable because it was frozen much of the year. And it took so long to traverse that you could start but you couldn’t finish. And that poor Franklin and his expedition found that out. You know, it just couldn’t move fast enough. But what’s happened is that as climate has changed, it’s now possible to navigate those waters a bit more, but also more dangerous because the loss of ice means more icebergs, more things floating around that could potentially could sink your ship. And we still haven’t resolved sort of basic search and rescue so that if you send a cruise ship up or any ship and you have a medical emergency or there is a crash with an iceberg, our ability to save those people is a problem. And at the very end of the George W. Bush administration, you may remember, President Bush on his last day issued a National Presidential Decision Directive that the US would provide search and rescue and other services across the Canadian Arctic, until the Canadians could do it themselves. And that was to reassure insurance companies. They didn’t want to insure ships going through the Northwest Passage. But all of this comes to a head when suddenly, Russia owns the best way across and China wants to use it. And Canada and the US are still bickering over a boundary dispute, which you’d think as such good friends, we could find a way to resolve.

Lisa Raitt: And let’s talk about the boundary dispute because I don’t think people understand. I mean, if I were to ask you who owns the North Pole, Chris Sands, the answer is?

Dr. Christopher Sands: Santa. (laughs)

Lisa Raitt: Okay. Other than Santa, who owns the North Pole and all the riches up there?

Dr. Christopher Sands: Oh, it’s absolutely Canadian. And even in the disputes that we’ve had, we have never said that the land isn’t Canadian. It’s all about the waters. So this is clearly an area of Canadian sovereignty, but we’ve also seen something interesting, which is the magnetic North Pole does move. You know, that little magnetic post, and that has huge impact on defense and communications because the magnetic part of the pole, and we get the beautiful aurora borealis from that, it scrambles the ability of satellites to see what’s going on. And so Canada maintains satellites that uniquely give us some visibility there. And that’s one of the big priorities, just to have domain awareness so that we know what’s going on. And then the second thing is to be able to respond. But we have a lot of work to do there.

Lisa Raitt: We do, but the US kind of surprised all of us a little bit in December when they put in their claim for the continental shelf and the waters around it as being a lot more than they had claimed in the past.

Dr. Christopher Sands: Yes, and this is something that was very interesting. Had been in the works for a while, the US is not a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, sometimes called UNCLOS. We didn’t join it during the Reagan administration, what was first promulgated because of a dispute over undersea minerals. And we talk about critical minerals, but there are a lot of minerals on the seabed. And the US had some early technology to be able to mine those things. And the UN’s first draft of this said they’d create a UN agency, and that all the mining under the sea would be taxed, and the money would be owned by the UN and distributed, including to countries that had no oceanfront property, the landlocked countries of Africa and South America and so forth. And the US rejected that. They went back. They tried to change it to accommodate the American concerns, but the US has still not been willing to sign onto that treaty. So normally you’d say, well, then the US gets the 12 mile exclusive offshore limit and that’s it. Not the 200 mile exclusive economic zone, which is allowed under the law of the sea. Well, the State Department decided they were going to file the 200 mile claims anyway, using their new mapping of undersea. That matters because we do have the technology that we didn’t in the Reagan days to be able to exploit some of those minerals. But it’s a particularly important, given China, because China is resource poor, and they’re going to be looking at undersea mining, something that hasn’t been as hot an issue in years, but the International Mining Authority is very much looking at what’s going on undersea and foresees a boom in mineral development. And so the US is positioning itself very nicely for that. That affects our border between Alaska and British Columbia. It affects the border between the lower 48 and British Columbia offshore, and the Swahiliwanda Fuca. the Georgia’s bank in the east, which has always been an issue with Maine and New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and it affects our Arctic border. We still have not settled where the Beaufort Sea divide goes, and on the other side, the border between Greenland and Labrador, and kind of where those are. You may remember the Hans Island dispute. So all of these are really small if you try and take them one by one, but together it’s a significant potential debate for the lawyers, but also for the diplomats. And what was it, someone once said, I’m going to forget who said it, possession is nine tenths of the law.

Lisa Raitt: Nine-tenths of the law. I don’t know who said it. I’m thinking Al Capone.

Dr. Christopher Sands: Well, whoever said it, it was smart. And if it’s possible for us to operate in those zones and sort of physically manifest ourselves, that claim will become significant. So I think it caught a lot of our allies off guard. It was snuck in on a Friday right before the holidays. And I’ve been surprised that people have objected more. And I think we’re going to hear a lot more from governments about this, not just between Canada and the US, but also with Mexico, because we’re claiming a lot in the Caribbean as well.

Lisa Raitt: Yeah, I did not know that. And just one last geographic lesson. China is not a polar nation.

Dr. Christopher Sands: No, but they claim themselves as a near Arctic nation. And as the Arctic is heated up, we’ve had a couple of those. Britain, for example, claims to be a near Arctic nation. Well, Britain does do a lot of science and exploration in the Arctic. We mind that less, but China has been acting that way. So is South Korea, which makes some of the best icebreakers in the world and produces more of them than either of our countries combined. So there are these countries that are nearby that have an interest to the extent that that’s a positive interest, that’s okay. We have an Arctic Council that includes the actual Arctic states, and we have observer status for some countries. But it’s hard to see the Arctic Council and other institutions working when Russia, which has a legitimate stake in the Arctic, is such a poor sort of bad behaviour actor on international law in so many other ways. So the dream of internationalists is that we can come up with these institutions, we can talk reasonably, we can come up with rules, we’ll follow the rules. And that would be great. But given the way Russia is now, the way China has been behaving, I’m afraid might makes right more often than groups like that. And we’re going to have to work. Those of us who believe in a liberal world order of institutions that cooperate and we settle this peacefully, that isn’t on trend right now. And we’re going to have to fight. But it’s one of the reasons that I think the U S needs to take Canada much more seriously. After World War 2, we built a lot of great institutions because American leaders valued the Canadians. Donald Trump really focused on big threats to the United States and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Canada. I think president Biden is a little disappointing. I mean, he does work obviously on Canada’s relations issues. But when he thinks about things, like when he was able to negotiate with the Chinese for the return of the two Michaels, did he give Canada credit? Did he let Canada have some visibility as part of the negotiating team? He really didn’t. And when we’re engaged in this Red Sea fight, Canada does send some sailors to be part of the international effort to protect shipping in the Red Sea, but doesn’t get nearly the profile from President Biden that it would have gotten if it was President Eisenhower. So I think generationally, we need to see that if we have allies, and they’re willing allies, nobody wants to be a poodle, but they do want to be allies. But you need to give your allies some chance to get a word in edgewise, to be able to contribute and be seen to contribute. And there are a few areas where Canada is, but I think there’s a re-evaluation of Canada and its importance to the United States is overdue.

Lisa Raitt: We both have elections coming up. The United States has your election in November. We have our election most likely in 2025. How important is the choice of the individual for the office of Prime Minister or the office of President vis-a-vis the U.S.-Canada relationship?

Dr. Christopher Sands: To my mind, the President and Prime Minister are the fire department for the relationship. They don’t manage every day, but when something’s on fire, they’re the ones who have to go and put it out. And so if they have a good relationship or even just a respectful relationship, when we do get into a crunch, they’re able to step up and usually work things out. Their staff help, of course, too. Most of the relationship, the average every day, it’s the General Motors, it’s the CIBCs, it’s the big companies that keep us working together. We have friends and family across the border, that part of the relationship is pretty solid. And I think it’s as good as ever. We don’t have the relationship with Canada on the ballot in the US in that sense. Like no choice is going to be anti-Canadian, we’re going to be still friends. And it’s true even in Canada, you haven’t had a real anti-American sort of push for years. I mean, a few people, but never like a party that says, hey, we’re going to stick it to the Americans, which is wonderful. It’s great for the friendship. But when we get in trouble, if there’s some chemistry, if there’s some mutual respect, it makes a huge difference. And so I’m afraid I see a lot of trouble on the horizon, most of it coming from the outside in, but also things like climate change, big challenges we have to solve together. So I’m really hoping that whatever configuration we both decide on, and you may vote in 24, but probably in 25, and we’ll vote later this year, that we end up with some sort of compatibility because it’ll make a big difference when the chips are down and we’re really in a crunch.

Lisa Raitt: Thanks, Chris. Okay, so here’s your last chance to give a plug for your podcast in case our listeners want to listen to you.

Dr. Christopher Sands: Well they’re absolutely welcome. We have a podcast with Beth Burke at the Canadian American Business Council and it is called Canusa Street. The cohosting is we’re both Americans. Beth is an American from Wisconsin. She and I spending all our time thinking about Canada are a bit weird. I mean, we’re weird for Americans. But we wanted to open the door on what goes on in the back and forth of the relationship. We’re almost to our 100th episode. So find a link on the Woodrow Wilson website.

Lisa Raitt: Awesome. I encourage you to take a look at the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and to listen to what Chris Sands has to say because he’s a pretty smart guy. Thanks, Chris, for joining me today.

Dr. Christopher Sands: You’re very welcome. Thanks for listening.

Lisa Raitt: Thanks so much for tuning in. Now, if you have any questions or comments or even requests on topics to discuss, drop me a line at [email protected]. Your interactions actually will make this better. I’m your host, Lisa Raitt, and this has been The Raitt Stuff.

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