5 Uncle Louis’ Attic: Sovereignty and Security in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago

The period after the Second World War was a time of both opportunity and anxiety for Canada. Led from 1948 to 1957 by Louis St. Laurent, a man honoured with the title “Chief Wise Leader” by Indigenous peoples, Canada’s long-serving Liberal government was tasked with defending the country against the threat of Communism from across the northern pole and an American ally threatening Canada’s Arctic sovereignty closer to home.^[1] Our modernized, navigable, and undeniably Canadian north is a tribute to St. Laurent’s long-term efforts to uphold our sovereignty there; however, the “old colonial reflexes” he employed in relocating Inuit peoples to remote Arctic communities undermine this legacy.

Canada gained authority over its Arctic territories in 1880 when Great Britain transferred its holdings in the high north, first claimed by Martin Frobisher in the 1600s, to the Dominion of Canada.^[2] This vast, cold territory accounted for 40 percent of the country’s land mass, but until the 1920s the federal government had little interest in patrolling or protecting it.^[3] American whalers navigated the Hudson’s Bay waters freely, and explorers such as Otto Sverdrup even discovered and in 1898 claimed Canadian islands near Greenland for Norway.^[4] Denmark had a presence in Greenland, and at times, both Norwegian and American explorers occupied parts of Canada’s far northern Ellesmere Island.^[5] The United States, which had a foothold in Alaska since 1867 and defined sovereignty as the occupation and colonization of a territory, was capable of further intrusions should Canada continue to neglect its northern frontier. An unfavourable ruling in the Alaskan boundary dispute of 1903 left Canadian negotiators feeling cheated out of valuable coastline and fearful of American “manifest destiny” spreading across the border.^[6]

To uphold the international standard of territorial occupation, in the 1900s Canada sent five expeditions north to survey the Arctic and build state infrastructure, including post offices and police detachments.^[7] A 1920 dispute over Greenland Inuit trespassing on Ellesmere Island to poach muskox caused the Danish government to claim Ellesmere Island as a “no man’s land,” a challenge Canada responded to by constructing additional RCMP posts on both Baffin Island and Ellesmere Island and legislating officers stationed there to act as representatives of the territorial government.^[8] A murder on Baffin Island in 1923 became an opportunity to assert state authority when a magistrate was sent north to conduct a trial. Britain’s recognition in 1920 of Greenland as a Danish possession and Canada’s agreement in 1929 to reimburse Otto Sverdrup for his earlier discoveries removed all remaining sovereignty challenges. Nevertheless, only 116 RCMP officers patrolled the entire Canadian Arctic in 1931, a small contingent, indeed, when compared with the Russian or American presence in the area at that time.^[9] In the summer of 1934, Canada attempted its first Arctic relocation program, moving Inuit from Baffin Island further north to Cape Dorset. The endeavour was a planning and logistical failure. Although the families were returned in 1936, anthropologists such as Diamond Jenness continued to advocate for using the presence of Inuit people to claim and settle the far north.^[10]

When the Second World War broke out, in September 1939, neither Canadian nor American officials foresaw any threats to Arctic security and defence of the last North American frontier, relying heavily, as they did, on the assessment, “there [being] … nowhere to go, and nothing to do when you get there.” That all changed with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Lacking sufficient naval capabilities, the US government decided to build highways, airstrips, and pipelines overland through Canada to transport troops and supplies to Alaska.^[11] These projects were all on Canadian territory, but Canada was unable to provide the “resources, manpower, or expertise to do the jobs … even if the United States paid the costs.”^[12] Between 1940 and 1943, 43,000 American troops were stationed on bases in Alaska and Greenland, three times the number of citizens in northern Canada.^[13] Vincent Massey, who served as Canada’s governor general from 1952 to 1959, reported that “[the Americans] have apparently walked in and taken possession [of the Far North] … as if Canada were unclaimed territory,” and he advocated for a more vigorous occupation of Canada’s sovereign lands.^[14]  A 1943 report by Britain’s High Commissioner to Canada warned that extensive American highway and airport infrastructure in Alaska suggested American interest in the Canadian Arctic had increased, just as technological advancements were piercing the Arctic curtain separating Canada from Russia.^[15]

The postwar period saw the Soviet Union, Canada’s wartime ally, transform into a Cold War antagonist orchestrating a “formidable ring of polar outposts, meteorological and radio stations, [and] military and air bases across [from] … the little-known, only incompletely explored, and inadequately administered and patrolled Canadian Arctic.” During the war, the United States cooperated with Canada to build bases on Baffin Island and in northern Quebec and Labrador, but Arctic islands northwest of Hudson’s Bay remained neglected and susceptible to a polar invasion.^[16] Alaska’s Seward Peninsula was close to the Soviet Union, and fear of troop movements or missile attacks over the Arctic Circle spurred the US government to seek Canadian integration in Arctic defence and intelligence initiatives. Canada’s inability to keep up with the US injection of money and material for Arctic defence was an embarrassment for the governing Liberals, who became “extremely sensitive to the potential derogation of Canadian sovereignty.” Although the list of sovereignty-challenging incidents remained low, there was a perception among Canadian officials that their American guests were insensitive at best, and occupiers at worst.^[17] The perception was so widespread that in February 1947 Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King addressed the matter in the House of Commons. He denied receiving requests from the United States to build Arctic bases and stated that Canada would not have anything resembling France’s infamous post–First World War Maginot Line in its north. King did admit that technology was making the Arctic an increasingly navigable route, primarily by air, but Canadian efforts there were scientific in their aims.^[18]

King retired in November 1948 and was replaced as prime minister by Louis St. Laurent, who wanted to shed Canada’s image as a British colonial appendage – just as Canada’s American neighbour was beginning to press its own imperial agenda.^[19] Upon receiving a popular mandate in the general election held in June 1949, “Uncle Louis” set to work transferring the administration of the Arctic away from the “northern trinity” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the RCMP, and church missions, and returning it to federal control.^[20] Failure risked the de facto military occupation of Canada’s north by the United States.^[21] St. Laurent knew it was in Canada’s interest to have sovereignty contingencies in place should any claim arise during this period of increased Arctic interest, and he commissioned several reports.^[22] The 1950 Macdonald Report on Arctic sovereignty stated that Canada’s claim to its Arctic archipelago was strong, supported by RCMP patrols from 1884 to 1948. Canada’s coastline, however, was highly complex, with bays, archipelagos, and offshore islands that were still only partially mapped, especially around Ellesmere Island. If a foreign power were to discover a new island, a challenge to Canadian sovereignty could be launched by both its discovery and effective occupation.^[23] Another concern was that there were only “200 Whites and 8,374 Eskimos” distributed across the entire Arctic. The 1950 Cantley Report suggested better utilization of the approximately 1,100,000 square miles of Canadian territory, classified as “occupied by or potentially available to the Eskimo race.”^[24] James Cantley wrote:

It would seem that the age is past now when any country can continue to hold such a vast territory without occupying it or attempting to develop its resources, however sparse they may be. A territory that, fifteen or twenty years ago, may have been regarded as useless has now become, if not an asset, at least a liability of another kind. Instead of a hinterland, it has become a potential frontier, and as such, it quite evidently interests countries other than our own. Whether we want to or not, it would appear that we shall have to revise our attitude towards the Arctic and take a much greater interest in its affairs than we have done in the past.^[25]

Canada was a founding member of the United Nations, established in 1945, and of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949. The deterrence offered by the NATO alliance was predicated on the ability of the United States to launch missiles from North America that could hit Europe should the Soviets manage to destroy continental deterrents. To achieve this, missiles would have to travel over the Arctic Circle. A series of reports and technological advancements in the late 1940s and early 1950s laid out how the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line would be built and the jurisdictional procedures for its operation. The DEW Line was announced to Parliament in 1954, and it would be fully operational by 1957. A separate, sovereign warning system, the Mid-Canada Line, was also built further south using different technology and would provide a second layer of protection should Soviet countermeasures deceive DEW Line installations.^[26]

Military spending under Prime Minister St. Laurent skyrocketed to reflect his foreign and domestic military commitments, including the Korean War. In 1952, the defence budget was 1.9 billion dollars, accounting for 42 percent of the entire federal budget. The invention of long-range Soviet bombers in 1948 and the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear device in 1949 further spurred Canada and the United States to invest over 50 billion dollars in a continental air defence system over the next decade. The challenge St. Laurent and his Cabinet faced was not just the disproportional US funding of these Arctic defence projects, but the fear that regardless of how committed the Americans were to upholding Canadian sovereignty, “a massive and quasi-permanent American presence in the Canadian North … could lead, gradually and almost imperceptibly, to such an erosion or disintegration of Canadian sovereignty that the real authority in the region, in fact if not in law, would be American.”^[27]

On 22 February 1953, Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson alerted the Cabinet that five of the Joint Arctic Weather Stations were already operating with a balanced staff of Canadian and American personnel. The United States intended to construct roughly 40 radar stations across the Arctic and had allocated 20 million US dollars for the establishment of additional experimental stations. The United States was also expected to seek Canada’s permission to develop its own air strips on both Ellesmere Island and Baffin Island to more easily resupply its Greenland air bases and fly heavy aircraft throughout the Arctic. Canada was unable to keep pace with these US commitments, with only an airbase at Resolute Bay, a weather station at Pond Inlet, and fewer than 50 federal officials throughout the region. The numerical disadvantages meant the United States staffed an exclusively American weather station at Padloping on Baffin Island, as well as a floating ice base in Canadian waters.^[28]  Pearson warned that continued federal negligence of the Arctic could constitute a “de facto exercise of U.S. sovereignty … [and] present[ed] risks of misunderstandings, incidents, and infringements of the exercise of Canadian sovereignty.” He recommended that the dormant Advisory Committee on Northern Development, established in 1948, reassert its presence in the Arctic to counter these American influences.

Prime Minister St. Laurent recognized the sovereignty implications of a foreign country constructing and occupying installations in neglected Canadian territory and argued that, were this to persist, Americans might conduct “the only form of human activity in the vast wastelands of the Canadian Arctic, and this was the problem that had to be met.”  He suggested extending customs and immigration facilities further into the Arctic, and his Cabinet agreed that the principles of cooperation with the United States needed clarification.^[29] A subsequent Cabinet meeting that February approved the US proposal to construct the first three installations of the Distant Early Warning radar line. If successful, they would form a “chain of 40 stations stretching to the northern tip of Greenland.”^[30] A resounding electoral victory in August of 1953 emboldened St. Laurent to adopt more activist policies in the Arctic to insulate Canadian sovereignty from US security interests.^[31]

Speaking in the House of Commons on 8 December 1953, St. Laurent announced that a new federal Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources would “administer the interests of the Canadian people in our northern territory … [and] develop knowledge of the problems in the north and the means of dealing with them.” He stated that previous governments had administered the north “in an almost continuing state of absence of mind [unsuited for] … a Canadian northland [lying] between the two greatest powers in the world at present, namely, the United States of America and the U.S.S.R.” Northern Affairs would be the new federal authority in the Arctic. The prime minister also implored the “Eskimo people” to become “honest citizens of the Canadian nation,” by assisting the federal government with their “active occupation and exercise of sovereignty in these northern lands right up to the pole.”^[32]

The St. Laurent government, like most progressive governments of the time, did “not want to appear neglectful of native peoples, even though [he found] it difficult to provide a sound economy for them.” The Inuit were largely romanticized by Canadians and seen as separate from adversarial “treaty Indians” in the south.^[33] Public interest in the plight of Inuit people had risen after the Second World War, when US soldiers reported on the squalid living conditions of the Inuit people near their bases, and authors such as Farley Mowat wrote of Inuit starvation and destitution.^[34] The collapse of the Arctic fox fur market devastated traditional trapping livelihoods, and welfare data showed that Inuit peoples were increasingly destitute and relying on government assistance.^[35] Widespread prejudice assumed that Inuit were still essentially primitive, needed minimal luxuries to be satisfied, and could be manipulated back to their untainted lifestyles if placed near ample game.^[36] It was thought that moving these citizens to the northern islands could solidify sovereignty claims over the Arctic, even if the motivations were economic.^[37] As Alexander Stevenson, the officer in charge of the 1950 Eastern Arctic Patrol of Ellesmere Island, noted, “Why not give our natives a chance to cover this country and also, if it is considered necessary, help improve the position regarding sovereignty rights.”^[38]

Most of the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic did not live on the far-northern islands but were spread out across areas with abundant wildlife.^[39] Communities existed on Baffin Island around Frobisher Bay – modern-day Iqaluit – and Pond Inlet, but the majority of the Inuit lived further south.^[40] In northern Quebec, the Inuit population was large enough to pressure existing game herds, and many Inuit there relied on government assistance since the collapse of the fur trade. Eventually, because of its high number of social assistance recipients, the community of Port Harrison – also known as Inukjuak – in northern Quebec was selected for relocation. Starvation had not been reported there, but future fears about it justified the relocation agenda.^[41] At a meeting between representatives of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and Northern Development Deputy Minister Bent Sivertz on 10 August 1953, Sivertz is recorded as saying, “The Canadian Government is anxious to have Canadians occupying as much of the north as possible, and it appeared in many cases the Eskimo were the only people capable of doing this.” Government officials employed vague and coercive recruitment practices to solicit Inukjuak families to move thousands of miles north without adequate supplies, something that was absent from comparable RCMP and military recruitment.^[42]

The federal Eastern Arctic Patrol, established in 1922, was tasked with scouting potential relocation sites in the Arctic. Having enough “country food” for the Inuit to hunt and with which to supply themselves was paramount, even if the government were forced to provide rations. Moreover, ships could only supply Ellesmere Island once a year and did so with monies from the newly created Eskimo Loan Fund, which was a system of credits at trade posts used by the government to fund the relocation program and keep federal costs low. Locations needed to be close enough to RCMP detachments to be adequately supplied and supervised, and a primary goal was to determine whether Inuit could return to traditional lifestyles. Despite the RCMP and Hudson’s Bay Company having an established presence throughout Baffin Island, the federal government chose sites farther north on Ellesmere Island and on Cornwallis Island, where the RCMP had recently re-established detachments to enforce Canadian sovereignty. Archeological evidence of prior Inuit settlement was cited as the reason for choosing the isolated northern sites of Resolute Bay and Craig Harbour; coincidentally, they were also close to existing federal infrastructure.^[43] The children of the relocatees would have to pause their studies in Inukjuak, which had a school. They would be unable to continue their studies further north, as federal schools did not exist in the Northwest Territories until 1949, and only 5 percent of Inuit children even attended school before 1953.^[44]

The relocation program was launched in the summer of 1953, when seven families embarked from Inukjuak (Port Harrison) on their 1,500 kilometre journey.^[45] Three additional families were picked up at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island before arriving at Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island that August. On arrival, and without notice, the families were split up and moved either to Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island or to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. A third group was to go to the settlement of Cape Herschel, near Greenland, but that plan was abandoned, and those families were sent to Grise Fiord in September. In all, 54 people would be relocated to Resolute Bay and 22 to Grise Fiord. The Pond Inlet families from Baffin Island were placed in both camps to ensure the Inukjuak families had a chance of survival and to help them learn to hunt local birds and sea life.^[46] The Inuit families were to test the viability of survival at these far-Arctic sites rather than to become traditional settlers. A 1953 letter indicated that more families might be relocated “if the experiment proves successful.” The first year was incredibly difficult for the relocatees, as they were not accustomed to the long dark period above the Arctic Circle, and there were inadequate shelter and materials available to them; they spent their first winter in tents.^[47]

The Inuit of Inukjuak were promised they could return after two years if they did not like living in the High Arctic: in a memorandum dated 14 April 1953, Deputy Minister for Northern Affairs Henry Larsen stated that the promise of return should be guaranteed in light of failed Inuit relocations back in 1934. Although there is no documentation that these instructions were countermanded, RCMP officers in the field reported being unaware of the provision. Some thought they could send families back but not individuals, or that requests for visits rather than returns were to be denied.^[48] Viewing requests to return as admissions of the program’s failure, RCMP officers were incentivized to downplay or defer them. As such, some relocatees only returned to Inukjuak in the 1970s – at their own expense, and they waited until 1988 for the federal government to finance their promised return. The RCMP officers who surveilled the relocatees “held the power of the law … without the checks and controls that exist in a society of equals,” and they were rarely challenged by their Inuit wards who treated them with “awe and fear.” Yearly reports and updates to the federal Eskimo Committee, starting in 1952, rarely mentioned sovereignty, starvation, or relocations. Unable to return home, the Inuit instead requested that families in Quebec join them in the Arctic, with some additional Inukjuak families being moved north in 1955. When reporting to the RCMP, the Inuit made sure to note that there was ample game to support their extended families, so as not to frustrate them or prevent family reunions.^[49]

Inuit people complained that their concerns were not being heard. In a time of abundance, wealth, and social welfare for southern Canadians, the Inuit of the north continued to be treated like second-class citizens. The RCMP surveilled them, prevented them from interacting with white society, and had their payments for furs and wage labour funnelled through the paternalistic Eskimo Loan Fund. Many Inuit were forced to salvage from garbage dumps to survive and feed their families. Infrastructure like schools and nursing stations would take years, if not decades, to be established while tuberculosis devastated northern communities.^[50] The few media reports written at the time, such as a 1953 opinion article by Lester Pearson, extolled the virtues of bringing Canadian social welfare to the Arctic wastelands north of the tree line.^[51] One, written in 1955 by Northern Affairs Minister Jean Lesage, described the relocation as a paternalistic burden for the government, as it attempted to restore dignity and agency to the Inuit and save them from floundering within the social welfare system.^[52]

In the 1990s, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) investigated the High Arctic relocation and determined that the federal government had prioritized ending welfare payments over preventing overpopulation or starvation in Inukjuak. This Commission reported that the government had misinformed the Inuit people, undersupplied them in their initial move, failed to provide their prompt and promised return, and forced family separations without informed consent. Relocation caused social disruptions through family breakups and made romantic partnerships difficult in the newly created communities. Forcing Inukjuak families to live in small communities with families from Pond Inlet, who had different cultures and customs, created social conflict during the initial years of the relocation. Despite the government’s assertion that the move was done to improve the lives of the Inuit people, the Commission and researchers, such as Alan Marcus, found that sovereignty was a factor that supported an “inappropriate solution to the government’s economic and social concerns.”^[53] The government of Louis St. Laurent, by its own standards, failed to conduct the relocations of 1953 and 1955 with humanity, skill, consent, or good faith. The Commission also found operational oversights with the relocation that would have been fatal if not for luck or happenstance, such as the inability to set up a third Arctic settlement at food-scarce Cape Hershel due to inclement weather, or Northern Affairs being unable to fund promised emergency airlifts to Grise Fiord should that community ever have suffered starvation.^[54] In his autobiography, relocation survivor Larry Audaluk states that “the psychological traumas endured by the relocatees would last a lifetime.”^[55] Inuit people would have to wait until Nunavut was created in 1999 to gain sovereignty over their own lives and lands.

Technological advancements and the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1960s meant fewer personnel were needed to staff weather stations and maintain Arctic defensive infrastructure. As sovereignty concerns dissipated, Canada returned to its “absence of mind” regarding the Far North as defence budgets shrank and the Arctic receded into the realm of “potential” strategic value.^[56] St. Laurent rarely acknowledged the relocation program, nor did he apologize for overseeing it under his watch as prime minister. He left no memoirs, and biographies about him seldom mention Indigenous people and overlook the relocation undertakings entirely.^[57]  It is possible that St. Laurent was not even aware of the relocation program, as it was carried out under the supervision of the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources and was never mentioned in Cabinet meeting minutes.^[58] Nevertheless, even if St. Laurent was unaware of the High Arctic relocations, he was nevertheless responsible for handing over an Arctic “empire” to young and largely inexperienced ministers like Jean Lesage and Gordon Robertson and empowering them “to develop [a] program [that] can transform the future of these [Inuit] people from that of a financial liability to an asset.”^[59] St. Laurent would die before the public hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples were held in the early 1990s, and surviving bureaucrats like Gordon Robertson were tasked with defending the prime minister’s policies.^[60]

The military and diplomatic cooperation that characterized the 1950s “Era of Good Feelings” between Canada and the United States prompted this country to defend its sovereignty from American intervention. This good fortune was undoubtedly a result of St. Laurent’s tact and temperament on the world stage. He was both an idealist and a realist; the man who brought “socialism in a silk hat” to the Canadian people while upholding his anti-Communist credentials. St. Laurent’s efforts and ideals have shaped our modern pension and family allowance systems, and his provincial equalization scheme remains a part of his legacy to this day.^[61] His centralization and modernization plans for the federal government enabled many of his ambitions to be achieved, but they also permitted “experiments” like Jean Lesage’s, which created “tensions, contradictions, and conflict [in order] … to absorb Inuit [people] … into dominant [Canadian] social forms.”^[62] Despite understanding that “smaller nations [contain] human beings,” Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent permitted Inuit people to be treated as flagpoles and test subjects rather than citizens, and his contention that Canada “realized equality must be practised and recognized in a single country” conflicts with the compromises he made to secure our Arctic border.^[63]