By Sweekriti Pathak, February 20, 2026
The Arctic is no longer insulated from global tensions. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Arctic Council – long a symbol of co-operation and peaceful coexistence – has weakened, raising real questions about whether that era of stability can continue.
Strains within NATO, along with recent American threats to buy and/or annex Greenland, further underscore an uncomfortable truth: we can no longer assume alliance unity will always hold.
For Canada, this matters. Our security environment increasingly depends on political decisions beyond our borders and outside our direct control. At the same time, authoritarian powers are expanding their use of maritime grey-zone tactics: actions that fall below the threshold of war, where responsibility is difficult to prove, responses are politically constrained, and escalation is unpredictable. Although Russia and China pursue distinct Arctic objectives, both rely less on overt force and more on sustained presence, data collection, and infrastructure development, and the normalization of operations. These activities rarely trigger formal defence responses, but over time they reshape the strategic environment.
Canada has struggled to counter such incursions, and nowhere is that vulnerability more visible than in the Arctic. While alliances remain essential for deterring conventional military threats, Canada’s current security architecture is not strongly equipped to counter grey-zone activity.
The Arctic as a grey-zone theatre: Russia and China’s playbook
As Arctic ice melts at an unprecedented pace, the region is opening up. Navigation windows are getting longer, leading to increased activity by research vessels, ice-capable survey ships, cable-mapping operations, and autonomous underwater systems. In the new Arctic, control will depend less on formal sovereignty claims and more on who shapes maritime access – and who controls the flow of information. Countries that operate consistently in the region establish new precedents. Over time, their presence becomes normalized. When activities are conducted under the cover of civilian or scientific activities, they rarely violate international law or trigger NATO’s collective defence triggers. While such activities rarely provoke immediate pushback, their cumulative effect is to reshape the Arctic operating environment in ways that favour the initiator.
Russia and China understand this dynamic. Their “comprehensive strategic partnership,” signed in September 2024, and their growing joint patrols near Alaska and the Bering Strait reflect the growing closeness of the two naval powers. Russia is rapidly expanding its Arctic military presence through its nuclear icebreaker monopoly, revitalized bases along key sea lanes, a mandatory escort regime on the Northern Sea Route, and extensive seabed and hydrographic surveys. At the same time, Russia and China are rapidly advancing their Arctic-based drone capabilities, outpacing NATO.
These moves are designed to put Western countries on the defensive and to normalize Russian and Chinese control and presence in the Arctic. Beijing, in particular, has used research vessels to collect critical domain information about the Northwest Passage. During its ninth Arctic expedition in 2018, China set up its first unmanned ice station, describing it as “an effective supplement for data collection.” Since then, China has expanded its fleet of polar research and ice-strengthened vessels – including the icebreakers Xue Long and Xue Long 2, the multi-purpose vessel Ji Di, and the deep-sea research platform Tan Suo San Hao – that carry out sustained Arctic expeditions, surveys, and hydrographic data collection in high-latitude waters. Reports also suggest interest in developing a Chinese-made nuclear-powered icebreaker.
These activities are typically framed as scientific. But they also supplement strategic knowledge and normalize Chinese maritime presence in a region where the rules around access, presence, and data collection remain unsettled.
In short, China does not need sovereignty in the Arctic to gain strategic leverage. It needs data, access, and a consistent presence. Together, Russia and China demonstrate that Arctic competition now unfolds across a spectrum, from overt military activity to quieter, data-driven positioning below the threshold of conflict. Canada’s maritime strategy is struggling to effectively counter either model, as it is designed to litigate sovereignty, rather than contest presence, access, or information dominance.
The Canadian gap and the limits of crisis-driven security
Canada’s alliances are not well designed to deal with today’s growing hybrid threats. NATO has no Arctic grey-zone doctrine, while the US prioritizes global competition, not comprehensive Arctic governance. NORAD, meanwhile, is built primarily for air defence – not for tracking and responding to ambiguous maritime activity. In other words, our alliances are built to deter open conflict, but they do not manage ambiguity – yet that is how Arctic competition is currently playing out.
The problem for Canada is not lack of awareness or intent. Canadian authorities frequently detect grey-zone maritime activity. The difficulty lies in responding. Our policy tools tend to split into two prongs – diplomatic protest or military escalation. Grey-zone activities that intentionally blur legal, civilian, and military components rarely trigger either.
Another reason for Canada’s grey-zone response gap is institutional fragmentation. Before August 2018, a Cabinet Committee on Intelligence and Emergency Management coordinated federal responses to national security incidents and emergencies. These responsibilities for crisis coordination now rest largely with the Incident Response Group and Public Safety Canada. While effective for acute emergencies, the Incident Response Group is not suited for anticipatory, cross-domain planning. Similarly, Public Safety Canada has a largely domestic domain, making it harder for Canada to counter grey-zone activity at sea.
Canada’s current system isn’t built for the kind of speed and coordination grey-zone threats demand. Even the United Kingdom’s long-standing COBRA system has faced criticism for political overreach and slow decision-making. That should give Canada pause: if a mature system struggles under pressure, a less developed one will face even greater challenges.
Grey-zone actors largely operate outside the military domain. Responding effectively means bringing together multiple stakeholders to leverage all available instruments of national power for effective deterrence and signalling. In a grey-zone environment where delay favours the initiator, these structural weaknesses risk leaving Canada reactive rather than strategic.
Policy recommendations
- Build a robust grey-zone strategy: Canada should move beyond a sovereignty-as-law framework and treat maritime data, access, and persistent presence as core security assets. Rather than broadly labelling everything a security threat, Canada should distinguish between threats in, to, and through the Arctic, shifting from rhetorically defending sovereignty to exercising An existing example of exercising sovereignty is Operation LIMPID, Canada’s domestic, all-domain surveillance operation that maintains continuous awareness of activity in Canadian airspace, waterways, and sub-surface environments. While LIMPID is not designed specifically to counter grey-zone tactics, it shows how routine, integrated state activity can assert authority without escalation. In a maritime grey-zone context, this logic needs to extend beyond simply detecting activity to responding to it. This requires clearer rules, a defined response ladder against grey-zone behaviour, and reliable attribution tools that allow Canada to “name and shame” the bad actors when necessary. It also means using proportionate measures: conditioning access to Canadian waters, requiring foreign research and survey vessels to share data, enforcing compliance through civilian maritime authorities, and treating seabed mapping and sensor deployment as activities subject to sovereign oversight rather than passive observation. By doing so, Canada would shift from rhetorically defending sovereignty to exercising it through consistent, coordinated action.
- Make Arctic awareness year-round, not seasonal: Canada’s Arctic posture remains largely seasonal and tied to specific ships or deployments. That creates a built-in disadvantage against competitors who maintain a continuous presence and steadily build up data over time. Ottawa should prioritize persistent Arctic domain awareness – knowing what is happening in the region at all times – rather than relying on episodic deployments. Current limitations within the Canadian Coast Guard, including aging fleets, surveillance gaps, communications constraints, and long procurement timelines, directly undermine Canada’s ability to contest grey-zone activity. Both the Royal Canadian Navy and the Coast Guard need a modern system that integrates vessels, autonomous platforms, coastal sensors, and AI-powered analytics to create a dynamic, real-time maritime picture. This requires changes in procurement priorities, moving from asset-based readiness to domain-based During his speech at the World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Mark Carney mentioned “unprecedented” investments in radar systems, submarines, aircraft, and “boots on the ground” in the region. The recent Canadian budget also allocated a $1 billion, four-year fund to improve “dual-use” infrastructure projects for both civilians and the military, such as airports, seaports, and all-season roads. Such investments should be evaluated for their contribution to continuous monitoring, access regulation, and early response.
- Employ a whole-of-government approach: Canada’s Arctic security strategy should build on existing inter-agency frameworks and audit recommendations to close long-standing coordination and maritime domain awareness gaps. The Auditor General’s Arctic Waters Surveillance Report highlights persistent weaknesses in information sharing and tracking activity in northern waters, and calls on National Defence, Transport Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard to improve integrated maritime domain awareness across departments. Enhancing co-operation within Marine Security Operations Centres, expanding the sharing of vessel tracking data, and better integrating community and Indigenous-led monitoring will further close critical gaps that currently hamper persistent Canadian maritime domain awareness.
Conclusion
Canada is facing growing maritime grey-zone pressure at a time when the assumptions that once underpinned its Arctic security posture are becoming less reliable. The central risk for Canada in the Arctic is not that it will suddenly lose territory. It is that it will slowly lose strategic ground through inaction. Unless Ottawa develops the tools to contest presence, data, and access below the threshold of conflict, competitors will continue to reshape the Arctic operating environment in ways that formal sovereignty claims and alliance guarantees cannot reverse.
Sweekriti Pathak is a research intern at the Observer Research Foundation and holds a master’s degree in political science and international development from McGill University. Her research focuses on maritime security, with particular emphasis on Chinese maritime strategy and grey-zone competition in the Indo-Pacific and Arctic regions.
