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northern development mandate (Vanderklippe, 2012). Indeed, in conjunction with its focus on
releasing hectares for oil exploration, the Conservative Government has also recently implemented
some massive changes to environmental regulation requirements for megaprojects such as oil
extraction and pipelines:
Ottawa has placed 905,000 hectares of the northern offshore up for bids, clearing the way
for energy companies to snap up exploration rights for an area half the size of Lake
Ontario. The scale of the offer indicates eagerness in the oil patch to drill for new finds in
Canada‘s northern waters less than two years after such plans were put on hold following
the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a major Arctic drilling safety review.
The Arctic exploration auction resumes as the Harper government is promoting greater
development of the country‘s resources. It has taken steps to speed regulatory approvals
for major energy projects such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, promising to
limit the ability of environmental groups and other opponents to block or delay new
developments.
The prospect of further drilling fits squarely with that mandate, said Jason MacDonald,
spokesman for John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development
Canada, which oversees the northern land auction‖ (Vanderklippe, 2012).
Indeed, in conjunction with its focus on releasing hectares for oil exploration, the Conservative
Government has also recently implemented some massive changes to environmental regulation
requirements for megaprojects such as oil extraction and pipelines.
Beyond Nanook
By the time that Operation Nanook was underway in 2013, the press and academics were divided
both on the ability of the Harper Government to deliver on its promises, and even the necessity
for doing so. This parallels the way in which Canada‘s government itself positions climate change
and resource accessibility as the foundations for a new Northern Strategy which includes
challenges to sovereignty, social and economic development, environment and defence
(Northern Strategy, 2007). The Canadian Northern Development Agency, for example, situates
its mandate and it is partly through this, and other similar agencies, that economic development is
being facilitated. On the other hand, there is a link between economic and security discourses
which although shifting, have ostensibly been ‗reconciled‘ through geopolitical naturalizations. As
Williams (2011) reminds us, even as the Canadian government developed its human security
mandate though foreign policies and international agreements in the years between 2000 and
2007, the very broad basis of human security created the technology for its implosion, if simply
because ―environmental human security concerns appear within the same policy documents that
call for developing oil, gas and minerals‖ (Williams, 2012: 245).
Rather than replacing sovereignty discourses, such policies expand and embed them more deeply,
and rely upon the same ‗naturalizations‘ to do so. For Flanagan (2013), reporting on Operation
Nanook in 2013, there is both a political strategy and a degree of pragmatism here:
Even as Conservative military policy for the Arctic has been scaled back to reasonable
proportions, Mr. Harper has stuck with the North, while shifting his attention to other