Canada's Arctic is a massive, treacherous, and largely inhospitable place, stretched out over nearly 4 million square kilometres of territory - but with a small population roughly equal to Blackburn in England or Syracuse, New York.
"You can take a map of continental Europe, put it on the Canadian Arctic, and there's room to spare," Pierre Leblanc, the former commander of the Canadian Forces Northern Area told the BBC. "And that environment is extremely dangerous."
Standing at the defence of that massive landmass is an aging string of early warning radars, eight staffed military bases and about 100 full-time Coast Guard personnel covering 162,000km of coast, about 60% of Canada's total oceanfront.
The Arctic region is the scene of intense geopolitical competition, bordered by Russia and the US on either side of the North Pole - and increasingly attractive to China, which has declared itself a "near Arctic state" and vastly expanded its fleet of naval vessels and icebreakers.
Standing in the middle is Canada, whose population is a small fraction of the larger Arctic players.
