I just completed an excellent visit to Canada, our neighbor and NATO partner just north of the United States.  As every U.S. citizens learns in elementary school, we sit side-by-side along the longest undefended border in the world, completely at peace with good friends who live in a land of remarkable beauty and culture.

Every time I go to Canada, I am struck by the bilingual / bicultural nature of that nation of 33 million.  With a population that has both strong French (30%) and English (60%) linguistic roots, they carefully balance the language, education, government work, and laws to ensure that both languages and cultures are nurtured and protected.  In the Canadian military, for example, the more senior an individual becomes the greater requirement for facility in both French and English.  Living as I do now in the similarly bilingual country of Belgium (French and Flemish, principally), I know this is challenging but important.

My trip to both Ottawa and Halifax balanced previous trips I’ve made to Calgary and Vancouver in the west; and Montreal and Quebec City in the east.  The geographic diversity of Canada is striking, running as it does from the gorgeous rocky eastern coast to the high Rocky Mountains in the west.  But nothing is more dramatic than the high north, over which I have flown dozens of times.

The high north is much discussed these days in terms of a “new Great Game,” i.e. a competition zone among nations for the natural wealth and trade routes that become more accessible as global warming opens the Northwest Passage.  In that regard, my good friend General Walt Natynczyk, the Canadian Chief of Defense, was asked the other day if he was worried about an invasion of the Canadian high north by some unnamed nation in pursuit of hydrocarbons.  He said, slightly tongue in cheek, “if we were invaded in the north, my first duty would be to rescue them.”  It is a humorous way to highlight the harsh conditions and supreme difficulties of even operating routinely “up there.”

 My own view of the high north is that we all need to work hard to prevent the region from becoming a “zone of competition,” and make sure it becomes a “zone of cooperation.”  There is a lot to talk about among the nations involved — Canada, Russia, US, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and others.  Some of the ways we can cooperate include navigation, search and rescue, buoyage systems, climate change, endangered species, conservation, communications, pollution, traffic monitoring, and resolving outstanding territorial disputes.  The Arctic Council, an organization of involved nations, is a good forum for this.

I also had a chance to visit with the very capable Minister of National Defence, Peter MacKay.  I’ve enjoyed getting to know him over the past couple of years, as he has a strikingly focused view of global security activity and leads his military with great enthusiasm and style.  Full of new ideas, he is a strong participant in international dialogue through NATO.

Canada is a strong friend and ally to the US and a forceful participant in NATO operations world-wide.  They have 2,830 troops in Afghanistan, focused in the southern part of the country, doing good work in a tough place.  Their frigate HMCS Fredericton just arrived on station in the waters off Somalia for counter-piracy operations.  My Director of Staff at my HQ in Mons — a crucial job — is a Canadian Brigadier General, Jim Selbie.  Every Canadian military member I met in my three day visit was very upbeat and positive about their involvement in NATO operations, and we are lucky to have them with us!