From Partner to Threat: How Canada’s Arctic Narrative on Russia Changed After Ukraine

In 2009, Canada described Russia as a pragmatic partner in addressing shared Arctic challenges. By 2024, Ottawa presented Russia as a principal challenge to Canada’s Arctic security. This transformation reflects more than the deterioration of Canada-Russia relations. It demonstrates how governments construct security through the narratives they use to interpret a changing world.

The Arctic’s Changing Security Environment

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev first proposed transitioning the Arctic into a “zone of peace”, a vision largely realised following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as interstate relations in the region became more cooperative and relatively insulated from broader geopolitical tensions. However, by the mid-2000s, debates began to emerge over whether the Arctic was entering a period of renewed geopolitical competition. These questions were primarily motivated by the effects of climate change, as accelerating sea ice melt began to enhance the navigability of regional maritime routes and the feasibility of resource extraction.

From 1968 to 2024, summer sea ice area in Northern Canadian Waters declined by approximately 7.2 per cent per decade. The decline has increased the seasonal navigability of the Northwest Passage, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Correspondingly, from 2011 to 2024, ship traffic in Canadian Arctic waters increased by over 46 per cent, driven primarily by an increase in freighters transporting natural resources.

Heightened interest in the Arctic’s potential as a shipping route and site of resource extraction has prompted two decades of growing attention to the military capabilities of Arctic and non-Arctic states. This interest extends to Russia, which has significantly expanded its Arctic military capabilities since 2010, illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Four Canadian Arctic policy documents, published between 2009 and 2024 by the Harper and Trudeau governments, provide insight into Ottawa’s evolving discourse on the Arctic and Russia’s role in the region. Canada’s Northern Strategy: Our North, Our Heritage, Our Future (CNS) was published by the Harper government in 2009, and the Statement on Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy (SAFP) followed in 2010. In 2019, the Trudeau government released the Arctic and Northern Policy Framework (ANPF) to replace the CNS, and later published Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy (CAFP) in 2024.

Although Prime Minister Mark Carney has not released a comprehensive Arctic foreign policy document of his own, despite placing significant emphasis on Arctic security and infrastructure, these four documents remain the clearest record of Ottawa’s evolving Arctic narrative. Examining their evolution is significant because it reveals how Ottawa has used discourse to redefine national priorities, justify policy shifts, and shape Canada’s broader approach to Arctic governance.

The Cooperative Tone of Canada’s Early Arctic Strategies

In 2009, the Harper government released the CNS, structured around four priority areas, of which only “exercising Arctic sovereignty” is explicitly security-related. The remaining priorities emphasise measures aimed at enhancing the well-being of Canada’s northern communities, thereby positioning the Arctic as a space for policy engagement. Further, while the notion of exercising Arctic sovereignty could have securitising implications, it is primarily framed in the CNS as an ongoing governmental function rather than as a response to any specific threat.

Threat construction is largely absent in the CNS, aside from references to growing international interest in the Arctic due to climate change-induced economic opportunities. Russia also does not feature prominently within the document. It is mentioned alongside the United States and Denmark when discussing the determination of their respective continental shelves. Still, the CNS notes that this process, while lengthy, is not adversarial and is not a race. In its only paragraph focused on Russia, the document highlights several examples of Canada-Russia bilateral cooperation on subjects such as Indigenous peoples and environmental protection, further supporting a non-securitised framing of Arctic relations.

The SAFP was released in 2010 as the international extension of the CNS, and the distinction matters: where the CNS spoke to a domestic audience about Northern development, the SAFP was written for other Arctic states and the wider world. Like the CNS, it emphasises and endorses cooperation as the primary mode of governance among Arctic states. The document repeatedly stresses the importance of Canada exercising Arctic sovereignty but does not connect it to any specific adversaries or imminent risks. While it mentions increased international attention in the region due to climate change, it says the full extent of the changes will take many decades to realize. It also explicitly downplays conventional military challenges, stating that Canada does not anticipate any in the Arctic and believes the region is well managed through existing institutions.

Russia is not framed as a distinct security concern within the SAFP. Instead, it is only briefly mentioned alongside other Arctic states as an actor with whom Canada hopes to pursue shared interests. This framing reinforces the broader construction of the Arctic as a manageable, non-adversarial region, where strengthening existing institutions and diplomatic relationships is the best avenue for addressing potential challenges. Consequently, Russia and other Arctic states are positioned not as security threats but as potential partners within a cooperative Arctic order.

How Ukraine Changed Canada’s Arctic Discourse

The 2019 ANPF indicates a shift toward a more complex and partially securitised Arctic. Its stated main objective is to address longstanding socio-economic and governance gaps between northern and southern Canada, a goal reflected in its co-development with Indigenous, territorial, and provincial partners rather than with Ottawa’s foreign-policy establishment. But it also introduces a narrative of strategic lag, suggesting that Canada must restore its eroded Arctic leadership and warning that other circumpolar nations are making significant investments in the region. External interest in the Arctic is framed as surging, as actors seek access to the region’s natural resources and strategic position.

While the ANPF maintains that Canada sees no immediate threat in the Arctic and the North, it cautions that growing regional competition requires Canada to be ready to respond and that cooperation must not result in complacency. Russia is not integrated into this emerging threat narrative; it is referenced only to call for renewed bilateral dialogue. The document does not even mention the 2014 annexation of Crimea, despite it being widely understood as a stimulus in the deterioration of Canada-Russia relations.

That silence is not simply an oversight. Canada had already tried, and failed, to import the Crimea crisis into Arctic governance once before. As chair of the Arctic Council in 2014, the Harper government pushed to suspend Russia’s membership over the annexation. Other Council members refused, arguing that continued cooperation on Arctic-specific business, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and scientific research served everyone’s interests better than a rupture, and Arctic cooperation generally deepened in the years that followed. Ottawa’s push was widely criticised at the time as needlessly provocative. Five years later, and under a different government, the lesson had evidently been absorbed: linking Ukraine to Arctic governance had cost Canada credibility with fellow Arctic states without changing Russian behaviour. The ANPF’s silence on Crimea reads less like an oversight than a deliberate return to the norm of Arctic exceptionalism that Ottawa itself had tested in 2014 and found wanting.

The 2024 CAFP updates the ANPF in response to shifting geopolitical conditions, most notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It rejects previous perceptions of the Arctic as a low-tension, cooperative region, arguing that this approach had significant benefits but no longer reflects reality. It frames the Arctic as now connected to broader geopolitical tensions and positions Russia as the primary source of this shift, stating that the 2022 invasion has fundamentally changed the geopolitical landscape, with spillover effects in the Arctic. The Canadian government no longer treats Russia’s pursuit of its economic and strategic interests as something contained to other parts of the world, instead emphasising the spillover of broader geopolitical tensions into the Arctic.

The CAFP highlights Russia’s decade-plus of investment in Arctic military infrastructure and capabilities, as well as its geographic proximity to Canada, as additional reasons for concern. It also frames Russia as an ideological adversary that has constructed its own narrative of a hostile, unfriendly West. This language is accompanied by more explicit securitising discourse and an assertion that there will be no business as usual with Russia. A companion document released the same year, the defence policy update Our North, Strong and Free, goes further still, describing Canada’s Arctic as NATO’s northern and western flank and committing to defend it accordingly; the CAFP and this defence update reinforce each other’s framing even though they are separate documents from separate departments. While cooperation with other Arctic states is still endorsed in the CAFP, Russia is consistently cast as a potential disruptor of these relationships, reinforcing its construction as the principal challenge in an increasingly contested Arctic.

Unlike the ANPF, the CAFP was shaped by consultation with the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the United States, Canada’s fellow Arctic states and, with one exception at the time, fellow NATO members. Where the ANPF spoke mainly to Northerners about development and governance, the CAFP spoke mainly to allies about deterrence. That difference in audience helps explain the difference in tone as much as anything Russia did between 2019 and 2024.

Why Canada’s Arctic Narrative Matters

Canada’s changing portrayal of Russia reflects how governments construct security. Security threats are not simply objective realities waiting to be discovered; they are also socially constructed through the narratives governments produce and disseminate.

Political scientist Thierry Balzacq offers a helpful framework here, arguing that security threats are not created through language alone but through how powerful actors use that language, in specific contexts, for specific audiences, to convince those audiences that danger is present. Audience is not incidental to this framework; it is one of Balzacq’s three central variables, alongside context and the power the speaker holds. Canada’s own documents illustrate the point without needing much interpretation: the SAFP addressed other Arctic states, the ANPF was co-developed with Indigenous and territorial partners, and the CAFP was shaped in consultation with NATO allies. A framework written with Northern communities was never going to land on the same threat narrative as one shaped alongside allied defence ministries, even holding Russian behaviour constant.

None of this means the 2024 shift was manufactured from nothing. Russia’s decade of Arctic military investment, its 2014 annexation of Crimea, and its 2022 invasion of Ukraine are independent events, not narrative devices, and several Arctic security analysts have argued that Canadian defence posture, if anything, trailed Russian military investment through most of the 2010s rather than exaggerated it. The evolution of Canada’s Arctic strategies demonstrates that Russia’s securitisation in Canadian Arctic policy is shaped by changing contextual conditions, and those conditions were real. What the securitisation framework adds is not a claim that the threat was invented, but an explanation of why the same underlying trend, a decade of Russian Arctic military buildup, read as routine in 2019 and alarming in 2024. The audience being addressed, and the diplomatic memory of 2014’s rebuffed attempt to force the issue, shaped which story could credibly be told, even before Russian conduct itself became as dramatic as the language now used to describe it.

This also clarifies the agency point. Although Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea could have served as the basis for a more explicit securitising discourse, Ottawa largely refrained, having already learned that Arctic allies would not follow. It was only after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, an event severe enough to override that earlier lesson, that Ottawa embraced a decisive securitising shift. Context did not determine the narrative on its own; it created the conditions under which a specific, previously rejected narrative became viable again.

The Balancing Act

Fifteen years ago, Ottawa presented the Arctic as a region in which sovereignty could coexist with cooperation, and Russia remained a pragmatic partner on shared Arctic challenges. Today, Russia is portrayed as a principal challenge to Canada’s Arctic security and a source of regional instability. The shift tracks Russia’s own conduct closely enough that dismissing it as mere rhetoric would be its own kind of distortion.

However, the framing of security can influence the policies governments pursue, the resources they allocate, and the strategic options they consider feasible. Employed carefully, strategic narratives are valuable for mobilising political will and responding to genuine security challenges. But when political rhetoric begins to substitute for continuous strategic assessment, it risks narrowing policymakers’ understanding of an increasingly complex Arctic.

The challenge for Ottawa is therefore not whether to recognise Russia as a serious security concern, but how to ensure that its evolving threat perception does not become so dominant that it constrains its ability to view the Arctic beyond the logic of adversarial and strategic competition.

The stakes extend beyond Canada’s approach to Russia. As Prime Minister Carney pursues an enhanced military presence in the Arctic and a broader realignment of Canada’s international relationships amid heightened tensions with the United States, Ottawa must ensure that the urgency of these shifts does not limit its attentiveness to on-the-ground realities. In the Arctic, steps such as maintaining channels for pragmatic engagement, regularly reassessing defence priorities against conditions on the ground, and incorporating northern and Indigenous perspectives into strategic planning can help Ottawa preserve that balance.