Summer 2023 // Canadian Government Executive / 25 ARCTIC or worse: fouling their traditional harvesting area and threatening their food security. “The Nunavut Association of Municipalities fully supports the recommendation for vessels of 15 tons and above to be prescribed as classes of vessels for the purposes of subsections 126(1) and (3) of the Act in respect of the NORDREG Zone:” Since the proposed changes are to the regulations, rather than to the Act, the Minister could simply direct these changes under its own authority. Those changes could not be challenged given that, under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries are allowed to impose restrictions to manage their marine environments provided that they are not discriminatory. To create maritime domain awareness, there is a need for multiple sources of information, which can be cross-referenced to identify the bad players. In the case of the Arctic, this means surveillance from space and inputs from a variety of actors including our Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships (AOPS), CCG icebreakers, the Aurora longrange maritime patrol aircraft, the Canadian Rangers, Transport Canada’s National Aerial Surveillance Program, the Long-Range Identification and Tracking System, the Inuit Maritime Monitoring Program, and even concerned citizens. The multiplicity of systems provides redundancy to ensure resilience: for example, if satellites are disabled by a solar storm, Canada will not become suddenly blind. The challenge in the vast Canadian Arctic is that surveillance is presently episodic in nature. The AOPS and CCG vessels only operate there in the summer and cover a small radius around them. The AGC report indicates that the RADARSAT Constellation, which provides space surveillance, does not have sufficient capacity, and that there will be a gap before its replacement becomes operational. It also states that similar gaps will happen in other systems over the years. One of the ways to improve our arctic maritime domain awareness is to monitor the approaches to the Arctic Archipelago using Canadian developed high frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR). This is not a new idea. I recommended it in a briefing on arctic security to the National Defence Council already in 2000. Below is the actual slide from the briefing, showing the NORDREG and the HFSWR among the recommended surveillance systems. High-frequency surface-wave radars can detect vessels on the surface up to a range of 200 nautical miles. One of my clients, Maerospace, a Canadian company based in Waterloo, Ontario, is proposing the installation of three systems to provide persistent 24/7 coverage of the present main approaches to the Arctic Archipelago. The disappearance of the ice may call for a fourth system in time. Slide from the 2000 briefing to Defence management Council The ability to detect vessels approaching the Archipelago using these radars would allow the authorities to deny entry, confirm whether a vessel has reported to NORDREG, and corroborate whether or not it is transmitting the required AIS signal. It is Proposed location of HFSWR to monitor approaches
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