COMMENTARY: Trump’s icebreakers are a good move in the Arctic, even for a North that fears him

Two answers on the same Monday

The September 21 poll

A poll published by Global News on Monday, September 21, gives the North’s answer. For 48% of respondents, the greatest threat to the Arctic is Donald Trump’s United States.

Not Russia. Not China. The United States.

The same day, in New York, Foreign Minister Anita Anand takes a seat at a table convened by Marco Rubio. The subject: Arctic security.

Two answers. One North.

A ship from 1969

Meanwhile, up north, the Louis S. St-Laurent breaks ice for the Canadian Coast Guard. Built in 1969. More than eleven thousand tonnes. A hundred and twenty metres. Noisy propellers, The Walrus writes.

It cuts through up to three metres of ice. When force is not enough, it blows compressed air below the waterline. The bubbles rise along the hull. They loosen the ice gripping it.

It is 57 years old. It is our heaviest.

Two maps of the same North, on the same Monday.

A table in New York

Eight ministers around Rubio

Around Rubio, on September 21: Canada, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden. Eight foreign ministers, according to the State Department readout.

No Russia at the table. The meeting is held in a New York hotel, on the sidelines of the General Assembly, AFP reports.

The text says what the allies agreed. Arctic security requires continued investment. To protect the region. To deter “strategic competitors.”

It also speaks of sovereign military and economic capabilities. Of critical infrastructure. Of reliable access. Of investment security.

Words of deterrence. Not words of tariffs.

Very much at the table

On September 27, on The West Block, Anand sums it up: the United States is “very much at the table.”

She speaks of a frank discussion. Of the collective need to work together on Arctic security. She says she discusses it regularly with Rubio, including how to advance shared interests within NATO.

On September 26, from the UN podium, she welcomes the meeting of the “Arctic Seven” convened by Rubio.

To the south, tariffs. To the north, a table.

Europe is looking toward the cold too. Its top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said recently that Europe needs icebreakers, according to the same dispatch.

Beneath the tariffs, a table stays set.

Trump’s good move

A sentence from the State Department

The readout contains a sentence not to miss.

In it, Rubio presents the ICE Pact, between the United States, Canada and Finland, as a model. A model of industrial cooperation. A model of burden sharing.

The text adds this. That model is strengthened by Trump’s commitment to significantly expand the American icebreaker fleet.

I will say it plainly.

It is a good move.

Eleven ships ordered

A good move, because the United States has not built an icebreaker on its own since 1976, CSIS writes. A good move, because in May its Coast Guard signed a US$3.5 billion contract for five Arctic security cutters. A good move, because in July it ordered six more, for US$3.3 billion.

Eleven ships. Four built in Finland. Seven in the United States. They will supplement, then replace, the Healy and the Storis.

More than 2,400 jobs announced for the first contract. About 300 more workers for the second, at Bollinger.

This is not about liking Trump. It is about counting hulls.

A West that can break ice can show up where Moscow and Beijing already sail.

Even with Trump’s signature, a good move is still a good move.

One shipyard, two timelines

Helsinki, owned by Davie

The Helsinki shipyard belongs to Chantier Davie. A Quebec company, The Walrus notes.

It will build two of the icebreakers the US Coast Guard ordered in May. The first is expected in 2028, according to CSIS.

It is also building Canada’s future polar icebreaker. The Arpatuuq. Expected in 2030.

Its mission will be fourfold. Carry scientists. Conduct rescues. Resupply isolated Indigenous hamlets. Maintain Canada’s presence.

Same shipyard. Same owner. Two customers.

Two years apart

Helsinki will deliver to Washington in 2028, to us in 2030.

The other Canadian polar ship, the Imnaryuaq, will come out of Seaspan, in Vancouver. In 2032.

Canadian and Finnish companies supply the designs, the technology and the shipyard know-how for the American icebreakers, The Walrus also writes.

In other words, our know-how already breaks other people’s ice. Not yet our own.

This is no reproach to Washington. Washington placed its order. We are waiting.

Our designs sail before our hulls do.

Fifty-seven against nineteen

Moscow’s fleet

Russia fields 57. Russia sails eight nuclear-powered ones, the only ones of their kind. Russia put one more into service in 2025, the Yakutia.

Canada counts 19. Two heavy. Seven medium. Ten light. Plus two hovercraft on the St. Lawrence, according to The Walrus.

The United States has only two in the Arctic. The Healy and the Storis, CSIS writes. The Polar Star, 50 years old, remains its only heavy icebreaker in the Antarctic.

Twenty-one on the other side

Fifty-seven on one side. Twenty-one on the other, adding Canada and the United States together.

In the Arctic, showing up is already power, Wesley Wark writes. Moscow has understood that. Its icebreakers keep the Northern Sea Route open. They lengthen the season. They maintain a presence.

Canada, for its part, long had the second-largest fleet in the world, behind Russia. It let it age. Nineteen is a lot on paper. On the water, it is old.

And yet it is Washington that the North names as its greatest threat.

Ice is counted in hulls, not speeches.

What Moscow calls a risk

Further and further north

Anand tells Global News that the Russian threat is moving “further and further north towards the Arctic Circle.”

Threats to Canada’s Arctic have “shifted significantly,” she says. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in 2022.

She recalls Operation Reassurance, on NATO’s eastern flank. And she asks that the Alliance base its view on a strategic assessment of the North. Not only of the East.

The Russian warning

At the same moment, a senior Russian official, quoted by Global News without being named, issues a warning. Any strengthening of security in the region would raise the risk of incidents with potentially disastrous consequences.

Who creates the risk?

CSIS recalls what Moscow is doing. Beijing and Moscow have stepped up joint military and scientific missions in the Arctic. They are clearing a commercial shipping route there.

The Kremlin extends its presence. Then it warns those who equip themselves.

A conventional military threat against Canada’s Arctic remains distant, experts tell Global News. The same article reports that European intelligence services have considered imminent Russian action to test NATO, according to the Guardian.

Whoever fields 57 icebreakers should not lecture us on risk.

The Louis S. St-Laurent, still there

Forty years of promises

There was the Polar 8, promised in 1985 after an American ship went through, abandoned in 1990.

There was the John G. Diefenbaker, promised in 2008, C$720 million, never delivered.

There is the Terry Fox, acquired as a stopgap, 43 years old today, in dry dock to extend its life.

There is the Louis S. St-Laurent, which will turn 60 before the end of the decade.

There are the new polar ships, whose designs only took shape between 2021 and 2024. All of this, according to The Walrus.

The Polar 8 had grown on paper to the size of a battleship. Too big for the Arctic’s shallow waters.

The fact that stings

That is the fact that troubles my reading. The delay is not American. It is Canadian. And it spans governments.

The Coast Guard fleet will be more modern, not bigger, Wesley Wark concludes.

I publish it because it costs something. It takes away Canada’s comfort of blaming Washington for everything.

Forty years of promises, one ship from 1969.

The Northwest Passage

Huebert’s fear

The strongest rebuttal comes from here at home.

Robert Huebert, of the University of Calgary, fears an enlarged American fleet could one day be used to challenge our position. The Northwest Passage, Canadian internal waters. He told the CBC, The Walrus reports.

The precedent exists. In 1985, a US Coast Guard ship went through the passage without Canada’s formal authorization. Ottawa saw it as a direct challenge to its claim.

The pact, Wark also notes, fits neatly into the president’s plans for hemispheric dominance.

Watch the pact very closely

Vincent Rigby, a former national security adviser, says not to panic. But to watch the pact very closely.

Today’s good move could equip tomorrow’s challenge.

And if a brand-new icebreaker, under a friendly flag, one day entered the passage without asking…

The fear is no fantasy. The North, as we will see, shares it.

Today’s friend breaks the ice its own way.

Being there is holding on

A pact from before Trump

And yet one fact turns the fear around. The ICE Pact dates from 2024. It was reaffirmed in 2025, The Walrus recalls.

It covers information sharing. Workforce training. Supply chains. Cooperation between shipyards.

It does not hand over the passage. A passage is defended by presence. Not by a neighbour’s weakness.

Presence is built. With hulls. Holding a passage means going through it. Often. In winter too.

Six ships promised to Quebec

In late August, Ottawa announced that a Quebec shipyard would supply six new icebreakers to the Coast Guard. Chantier Davie will deliver six medium ones, Seaspan up to sixteen, according to The Walrus.

The government promised Canada the largest icebreaker fleet in NATO.

Wark immediately adds a caveat. These medium ships are fair-weather ships. Once winter comes, their usefulness drops.

A stronger American fleet would threaten our claim only if ours stayed at the dock.

Our sovereignty is proven at the bow.

Forty-eight percent

From 37 to 48

In the North, 48% see the United States as the greatest threat. In the North, the figure was 37% in September 2025. In the North, Russia drops from 35% to 30%, China from 17% to 12%.

The poll was conducted for the Arctic Policy and Security Observatory, in Quebec. In Nunavut. In the Northwest Territories. In Yukon. In Nunavik.

Its director, Mathieu Landriault, says he is surprised by such a high number. He sees in it support for one idea: developing our Arctic capabilities, if need be with as little American involvement as possible.

Words, not ships

Global News attributes it to Trump’s talk of annexing Canada. And to his threats over Greenland.

That is the bad move. It does not cost a dollar. It costs the trust of the people who live where security is at stake.

Up there, villages wait every year for resupply by sea. The icebreaker opens the route for them. They know the price of a ship. They also know the weight of an annexation threat.

And 60% want Ottawa to hold a “firm line” in the Arctic. Only 26% prefer a negotiated compromise.

I admit this number stopped me. For generations, Global News recalls, Canada and the United States defended the North together against the Soviet Union. Today, the North fears the ally more than the aggressor of Ukraine.

The cold does not frighten the North. Words do.

Nuuk, then Anchorage

Two consulates

Anand points to the Canadian consulate opened in Nuuk, Greenland. Another is planned in Anchorage, Alaska.

At the UN, she also welcomes the agreement between Greenland, Denmark and the United States on security in the High North. One sentence. No more.

Canada is an Arctic nation, she says. A region of growing competition. But for many Canadians, the Arctic is simply home.

She adds that these investments are made in consultation with Indigenous Peoples.

A flagship project

Ursula von der Leyen wants to make the Arctic a “flagship joint project” between the European Union and Canada, Global News reports. People in the North, Landriault says, have a positive view of European countries.

The Arctic Council turns 30 this year, Anand recalls. She says she is aiming for a region of cooperation.

A consulate is not a ship. It is a presence of another kind. People who listen, who report back, who weave ties.

And yet cooperation today plays out around Rubio, in New York, without Moscow.

Nuuk and Anchorage hold the same thread.

Submarines and two percent

Twelve submarines

Anand ties the North to the military spending decided by Mark Carney. A contract with Germany’s TKMS for up to 12 submarines. Fighter jets whose purchase is not yet settled, Global News specifies.

At the UN, she puts a number on the effort. $80 billion in defence investment in last year’s budget. Two percent of GDP today. The NATO pledge: 5% by 2035.

Our commitment to the Alliance is “ironclad,” she says.

Summer ships

The Walrus asks a hard question.

Can a submarine that patrols the North only in summer replace an icebreaker that works there in winter?

The icebreaker carries no weapon. It opens the route for patrol ships. It resupplies bases, radar stations, villages.

The Navy’s new Arctic patrol ships get through some ice. Not the thickest winter ice, Wark writes.

Without an icebreaker, the rest waits for the thaw. An icebreaker does not make headlines. It makes winter possible.

A weapon without a route stays in port.

What Ottawa can still build

Heavier, faster, elsewhere

We need to build heavy icebreakers, more of them, not just newer ones. We need to build faster than 2030 and 2032. We need to build where capacity remains, since our big shipyards are full, The Walrus writes.

The ICE Pact adds no capacity, Wark warns. It shares what exists.

And the North’s projects demand it. The port of Churchill, in Manitoba, locked in by ice. The Grays Bay project, a deep-water port on the central Arctic coast, with an airstrip and a road where there is nothing. Without a heavy fleet, Wark writes, these plans remain maps.

The Arctic accounts for 40% of Canada’s territory. For 70% of its coastline. An archipelago of 1.4 million square kilometres.

An admission

I admit some discomfort. It is unpleasant for me to write that a Trump move serves the North, when 48% of the North fears him.

I write it anyway. An act is judged by its effects. Eleven more icebreakers in the Western camp is an effect.

One less word about annexation would be another.

What remains to be built is our share.

What remains to be built carries our name.

Ice does not negotiate

The old ship, on Monday

The Louis S. St-Laurent is still sailing. It is no longer just an old ship. It has become the calendar of our delay.

On its deck, frozen metal sticks to gloves. Under the bow, the ice cracks. The sound is the same as in 1969.

What falls to us

Meanwhile, a Helsinki shipyard, Quebec-owned, is to deliver its first icebreaker to Washington in 2028.

What are we prepared to cut elsewhere so that a heavy Canadian icebreaker leaves the yard before 2030?

The North answered a poll.

Now Ottawa must answer with steel.

A good move for Washington in 2028, and for us, 2030.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Global News — Anita Anand on The West Block, the threat in the Arctic, September 27, 2026
• State Department — readout of Marco Rubio’s meeting with Arctic allies, September 21, 2026
• Global Affairs Canada — Anita Anand’s address to the UN General Assembly, September 26, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Global News — OPSA poll on perceived threats in the North, September 21, 2026
• CSIS — the US polar industrial base and icebreaker contracts, September 17, 2026
• The Walrus — Wesley Wark on Canada’s icebreakers and the ICE Pact, September 9, 2026