Canada and Iceland used a foreign ministers' meeting in Reykjavík this week to press for a stronger NATO presence in the Arctic and North Atlantic, as Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand carried Canada's Arctic policy to the region's largest annual gathering.
Anand travelled to Iceland from October 8 to 9 for the Arctic Circle Assembly, delivering keynote remarks on Canada's Arctic leadership and joining a panel marking the Arctic Council's 30th anniversary. In her bilateral meeting with Icelandic foreign minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, the two ministers underscored support for a strengthened NATO posture in the region, according to a Global Affairs Canada statement.
The agenda reflects how completely the Arctic has shifted from a low-tension zone of scientific cooperation into a theatre of strategic competition. Melting sea ice is opening shipping routes and resource frontiers; Russia has rebuilt its northern military infrastructure; and Canada — which claims sovereignty over the Northwest Passage and hosts NORAD's northern radar lines — has committed to its largest Arctic defence investments in generations, from over-the-horizon radar to new patrol capabilities.
Ottawa's Arctic Foreign Policy, rolled out over the past two years, rests on pillars visible throughout the Reykjavík programme: meaningful engagement with Indigenous peoples and northerners, co-located diplomacy — Canada and Iceland pointed to their shared diplomatic presence in Nuuk, Greenland as an example — and defence cooperation under an updated bilateral memorandum signed earlier this year.
The ministers also ranged beyond security: they discussed modernising the free trade agreement between Canada and the European Free Trade Association states, reaffirmed support for Ukraine's sovereignty, and agreed to establish a Canada-Iceland geothermal network linking governments, private companies and Indigenous partners to develop clean-heat projects for northern and remote communities.
For Canada, the geothermal thread is more than symbolic. Dozens of northern communities still burn diesel for heat and power at punishing cost; Iceland, which heats most of its buildings geothermally, is the world's standing proof that northern geography can be an energy asset rather than a liability.
Anand's trip also included a visit to Keflavík Air Base, the hub of NATO air policing over Iceland. The symbolism was deliberate: Canada is asking allies to treat the North Atlantic and Arctic as shared strategic space — and signalling it intends to be present in it, diplomatically and militarily, rather than merely claiming it on maps.
The Arctic Council anniversary panel carried its own freight. The council, built in 1996 as the circumpolar world's cooperative forum, spent three decades keeping military questions formally off its table while Indigenous permanent participants sat as near-equals of states — an institutional experiment unique in international relations. Russia's invasion of Ukraine froze its working groups; the forum's survival since has been an exercise in doing science and stewardship with one of its eight members in the cold. Marking thirty years in that condition, as Anand did in Reykjavík, is both celebration and triage.
Canada's claim in these rooms rests on geography it cannot move: the world's longest Arctic coastline, an archipelago whose channels the United States and others regard as an international strait, and northern communities whose consent Ottawa now treats — constitutionally and politically — as the foundation of its sovereignty argument. The Arctic Foreign Policy's insistence that sovereignty is exercised with northerners, not merely over the North, is the thread connecting the geothermal network, the Nuuk co-location and the radar investments announced alongside them.
The Assembly continues this week, with Canada's delegation arguing that the top of the world is where its foreign policy now begins.
