Vanguard Magazine

is to increase the number of ships that are obligated to report to NORDREG, and to require them to continuously emit on AIS while in Canadian waters. As I suggested at the Canadian Maritime Advisory Council Prairie and Northern Region meeting in Québec City, on 11 May 2023: "Amend the Northern Canada Vessel Traffic Services Zone Regulations as fol- lows: • That vessels of 15 tons and above be prescribed as classes of vessels for the purposes of subsections 126(1) and (3) of the Act in respect of the NORDREG Zone • That vessels over 15 tons maintain an Automatic Identification System ac- tive while operating in the NORDREG Zone" These requirements would result in sig- nificant benefits. All federal ministries with responsibilities in the Arctic would benefit from a more complete domain awareness. The vessels themselves would benefit from increased safety: in the case of an emer- gency, the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG), which manages NORDREG, would im- mediately know which vessels would be the closest to provide assistance. The in- cidence of search-and-rescue (SAR) op- erations could be reduced, as well as the impact on annual community resupply. Indeed, among the tasks performed by the CCG, the SAR function has a higher priority than annual community resupply. Therefore, the annual resupply of an Inuit community risks being delayed or even cancelled whenever CCG icebreakers must attend a SAR situation caused by an un- prepared vessel. Any delay on the delivery increases the cost of the annual sealift re- supply of arctic communities. The Nunavut Association of Municipali- ties is fully supportive of the recommenda- tion to increase the NORDREG reporting and transmitting on AIS. They are increas- ingly concerned with the growing number of super yachts arriving unannounced on their doorstep, entering marine protected areas, or worse: fouling their traditional harvesting area and threatening their food security. "The Nunavut Association of Munici- palities fully supports the recommendation for vessels of 15 tons and above to be pre- scribed 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 in- formation, 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 long-range 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 re- dundancy 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 Arc- tic is that surveillance is presently episodic in nature. The AOPS and CCG vessels only operate there in the summer and cov- er a small radius around them. The AGC report indicates that the RADARSAT Constellation, which provides space sur- veillance, does not have sufficient capac- ity, 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 ac- tual 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 instal- lation of three systems to provide persis- tent 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. A R C T I C 20 JUNE/JULY 2023 www.vanguardcanada.com Slide from the 2000 briefing to Defence management Council Proposed location of HFSWR to monitor approaches

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