Canada's Arctic Army Woefully Unprepared For Northern Role

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It's one thing to hear Canadian troops are struggling with the deserts of Afghanistan but quite another to hear our troops in the Arctic don't have their snow legs either. Doubly embarrassing that this finding comes at a time when Harper's coming over all butch and talking about flexing up Canadian muscle in the Far North.

Only way to make sense of this one is to imagine it as a summer comedy in which Jim Carey joins the Arctic army to skewer a string of Canuck cliches.

As ol' blue eyes prepares to spend billions defending the Arctic, the soldiers who will actually stand guard over that frigid frontier have a shopping list of their own. Nothing fancy, just stuff you'd think they already have. Like warm boots, snowmobiles that run, food that doesn’t freeze and shovels that dig.

The Portage Daily Graphic reported that Internal assessments of a Canadian Forces advanced winter warfare course last March in Resolute, Nunavut are in and they aren't reassuring. It freeze-frames a military still grappling with the basics of working in the North and scary vulnerable to the challenges of extreme weather.

As the operation was intended as a dry run for a permanent winter warfare school based in Resolute, expectations were high.

Before it literally got off the ground, it went all Jim Carey when the snowmobiles were drained of gas on the flight up to save weight. Good for weight, bad or condensation which formed inside the gas tanks, caused the machines to repeatedly stall as water in the fuel lines froze in Resolute’s -60 C temperatures.

In the movie, the bad guys come charging over the hill and find Carey and his Canadian troopers boiling water and pouring it over the frozen sections, trying to get the machine going before the hot water turned to ice.

The standard mess hall food fight takes a Northern twist when the ravenous soldiers are issued standard boil-in-a-bag rations, which promptly freeze, leading to a large consumption of valuable fuel to thaw them out, placing added demands on limited supplies. Ok, so half-frozen dinners every day, who knew?

But the snow shelters, no problem, right?. We've all seen those Canadian Heritage Moments with Inuit throwing up snow condos in 90 seconds. Of course, they weren't using military-issue, aluminum-bladed machetes and square-nosed shovels, totally useless at cutting into dense, wind-compacted Arctic snowbanks.

Ok, fine, but we damn well know how to dress for winter, especially knowing we'll be outside for long periods of time. Incredibly, it slipped someone's mind like a greased baby seal to order up winter gloves for wearing inside the outer mitts, so the troopers froze their hands every time the mitts came off, which is every time the snowmobiles had to be attended to, equipment checked or Carey has to go to the bathroom.

All the billions lying around for Northern Defence could only afford one toque and balaclava per trainee, meaning these vital articles never got a chance to dry out during the week-long exercise. Ditto for the mukluks, whose untested design allowed them to get wet from snow melting along the sides of the snowmobiles. Back at base camp, once out of the wet mukkies, there were no warm slippers to wear.

‘‘Extremities suffered the most in the Arctic,’’ says one of the documents summarizing the problems, with Carey doing the voice over.

You'd think this kind of core evidence coming from within their own camp would give the Harper posse pause. Maybe even reconsider the state of the military in the Far North? Nope. In keeping with the summer comedy theme, the military is calling the program a success, with all 33 candidates graduating.

The movie closes out with Carey in winter whites, both hands and feet bandaged stumps, declaring the Natural Resources Canada facilities in Resolute suitable for ongoing winter warfare courses. Which really happened and means next year, it's gonna happen all over again.