If a major undersea fibre-optic cable serving Northern Canada were disrupted tomorrow, Ottawa would face a problem it is not fully prepared to handle. The government would need to respond quickly, co-ordinate across multiple jurisdictions and communicate clearly to the public — all before it knew whether it was dealing with an accident, negligence, reckless behaviour or deliberate interference. It would also need to show allies, including NATO, that Canada can contribute credibly to a growing co-operative effort to manage undersea risk in the Arctic.
The hard part is not only protecting cables, but responding when the cause of a failure is unclear. In the Arctic, North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans, a cable outage may look the same no matter what the cause. Governments are faced with the difficult task of deciding what they can lawfully do before officials can say with confidence what has happened.
In that crucial early period, the question would be whether Canada could produce a visible and ordered response while the facts were still being determined. This has become a core requirement of security in the North.
TeleGeography and other industry trackers have long shown that undersea cables carry almost all international data traffic. They underpin financial systems, emergency services, public administration and military communications. They are also difficult to monitor, largely privately owned and vulnerable to tactics that, while disruptive, do not amount to open military aggression. This makes cable security a governance and security problem not only one of infrastructure.
Canada’s preparedness gap
Canada faces a distinct challenge and is not yet prepared. Approaches into its Arctic, North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans are vast. Monitoring is uneven. Infrastructure is sparse and often lacks backup capacity. Repair is slow and depends on a small number of specialized vessels. Even a limited disruption could have larger effects in Canada than it might in a denser, better-served region.
The challenge is magnified by growing Russian and Chinese activity in the Arctic, including surveillance, military movements, cyber operations, misinformation and other tactics that target areas where Canada is vulnerable.
In this setting, even a limited outage can become a problem. Communications failures can disrupt evacuations, emergency co-ordination and basic services in remote communities. Inadequate reports to the public can also create space for misinformation and political confusion while authorities are still trying to establish what happened.
Learning from the Baltic Sea
Damage to pipelines, electricity interconnectors and data cables in the Baltic Sea since 2022 has exposed a recurring pattern. The most effective responses did not depend on quick public explanations, but on officials visibly taking action while investigations remained open.
Authorities increased monitoring, inspected vessels and shipping activity (where the law allowed), began repair and restoration work and updated the public regularly as new details emerged. What mattered was not only what governments said about an event, but whether people could see things being done while key facts were still unclear.
Credibility does not depend on certainty. It depends on whether uncertainty triggers co-ordinated action.
What Canada could do
Conditions are especially difficult in the Arctic and North Pacific. Canada does not yet have a co-ordinated response designed for this environment. Distances are greater. Monitoring is thinner. Weather limits both detection and repair. Infrastructure is less robust.
The problem is also institutional. Responsibility is distributed across federal departments, territorial governments, Indigenous authorities and private operators. There is no focused federal approach to undersea infrastructure failures. Legal tools for responding to deliberate damage beyond territorial waters are limited. Co-ordination with operators and repair providers is ad hoc. Northern and Indigenous authorities, who are often closest to the effects of disruptions, are not yet integrated into a national response plan.
The government could address these shortcomings by:
- Establishing a small interdepartmental unit to co-ordinate incident response, integrate information from operators and northern authorities and align domestic actions with those of allies and partners.
- Adopting a response protocol for undersea disruptions that includes sharing detection of an anomaly across federal departments, operators and key allies followed by precautionary measures, restoration planning and public communication. Better tracking of ships that switch off or manipulate their location signals would improve maritime awareness near cable landing sites, repair routes and planned Arctic cable corridors. That in turn would allow authorities to scrutinize the behaviours of suspicious vessels sooner. A response plan that waits for full explanations risks paralysis.
- Treating repair and backup communications —including satellite alternatives — as strategic priorities. Undersea cables are easier to damage than to repair. Arctic conditions make restoration slower and more uncertain. Canada depends on private operators and globally scarce repair capacity, a problem highlighted in recent work on subsea cable resilience. Ottawa should pinpoint repair bottlenecks, develop clearer restoration plans and strengthen backup communications for remote communities. If disruptions can be contained quickly, their strategic value declines for potential perpetrators.
- Integrating northern and Indigenous leadership. Territorial, local and Indigenous authorities are central in the Arctic to how disruption is detected, interpreted and managed. They are often the first to see its effects. A credible federal response must include their knowledge, authority and decision-making roles.
NATO as part of the effort
Arctic Sentry — NATO’s enhanced vigilance for the Arctic and High North — gives Canada an opportunity to contribute more actively to allied thinking on undersea infrastructure risk. Canada already plays a role through its Arctic operations and links to Norad. The question is whether we can use that role to help shape how NATO responds to ambiguous disruptions in the North. Perspectives we could bring to the table include the northern realities of distance, difficult repair conditions, few backup options, private ownership and the role of local and Indigenous authorities.
But any contribution will only be credible if the government is also building a stronger domestic response to undersea interference. Better monitoring will not by itself solve the problem if Canada cannot move quickly from detection to action.
Canada’s northern cable-security gap is not just about protecting one piece of infrastructure. It is about whether the country can manage disruptions across a vast and complex region, maintain communications and essential services during outages and contribute credibly to NATO’s wider Arctic posture.
Closing the gap would not eliminate accidents, technical failures or hostile interference. But it would reduce the ability of adversaries to use uncertainty, delay and disruption to create political pressure, weaken public confidence or expose gaps in allied co-ordination.
That is now a basic requirement for security in the North.
