True Patriot Love - July 03, 2026


[Sneak Peek] The Arctic： Canada's Northern Development

Hosted by
Shara Micucci Mike Wixson
Mentioned
Mark Carney B-52s
Manitoba in Focus： Affordability, Opportunity, and Canada's Heartland Barbecues Now a Luxury？ Food Prices Soar! #Canada

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

183.78

Word count

1,828

Sentence count

15

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Arctic Ocean is a hotly contested ocean, and the arctic is one of the most hotly contested oceans on the planet. In this episode, I sit down with Paul Micucci, a former Canadian Air Force pilot, to talk about what it means to be Canadian in the Arctic, and why it's so important that we have a fleet of Arctic patrol ships and nuclear submarines on our borders.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 In the Cold War in the 1970s, B-52s, some American bases, would come up to CFP Trenton in Ontario
00:00:07.480 and practice doing bombing runs over the Arctic Circle to Russia because it was the most direct
00:00:13.560 line if things kicked off. And they would go over into the Northwest Territories or Nunavut,
00:00:20.080 right over our territory, loaded with nuclear weapons, and go right into Russia. And they 0.92
00:00:24.620 practiced those bombing runs all the time. And there was nothing the Canadian government could
00:00:29.320 do to stop them because the fact of the matter is we were not pulling our weight as a country we
00:00:34.800 were not buying material the the military is using old outdated equipment so when they said we're
00:00:40.580 going to do this we were in no position to say no canada doesn't have just two oceans we have to
00:00:50.700 contend with we have three we have the pacific the atlantic and the arctic ocean and the arctic ocean
00:00:56.620 for a lot of canadians a lot of people around the world is maybe the most hotly contested ocean on
00:01:01.900 the planet to talk more about it as always thrilled to be joined the always popular i hear so many
00:01:06.380 compliments about you paul micucci i hear thank you paul micucci's a smart guy i don't know about
00:01:12.780 so you know a lot more about the arctic than i do right because of my father yeah yeah your father
00:01:17.820 and i you know i appreciate your uh military background and everything uh is terrific as far
00:01:24.140 is uh geography because you live lived at different places around yes and yeah and you get it i was
00:01:30.220 shocked i think before the show you know you i you came in and we were talking the number of people
00:01:35.740 i had been to the yukon so i'd been in i've been uh actually i've been to all three right note of
00:01:41.500 it as well yeah i've been actually two and i've been to northwest territories and i've been to
00:01:45.660 the yukon oh great um great you know in my field of business you know we we at some point in time
00:01:51.420 we've actually looked at doing business on all three oh wow um i wasn't uh and maybe it was a
00:01:56.460 memory gap i didn't realize the population size it was sparse yeah yeah well i knew it was small
00:02:03.660 but i didn't i didn't realize 160 136 000 across all three yeah um nunavit uh 42 000 northwest
00:02:12.380 territories 45 000 and the yukon 48 000. correct yeah you know now the last one i was up at was
00:02:20.060 the yukon i was in the yukon beautiful frankly um but you know a lot of indigenous i think
00:02:26.540 you know we spent most of our time with the indigenous leaders in the yukon yes um talking
00:02:30.780 about business opportunities uh and it was uh interesting and then we actually went to alaska
00:02:37.020 so we took a plane we were there so we said what the heck we took a plane flew into alaska
00:02:41.900 uh spent a day in alaska which was just uh breathtaking yeah well the thing is with the
00:02:47.820 arctic and most canadians i mean it's been well documented 95 of the population lives within an
00:02:54.060 hour the u.s border yeah and we forget how far north it goes and when my father was in the royal
00:02:59.500 canadian air force he was ground crew and they would go to alert an alert is the most northern
00:03:04.380 outpost on canada it's you could almost walk to the arctic circle it's it's at the north pole
00:03:11.340 and we've had a military outpost there and other locations and once upon a time it was yeah there
00:03:21.140 was the arctic but with the proliferation of nuclear submarines from china from russia and
00:03:26.420 other countries there's a lot of countries that can run through the northwest passions of the
00:03:31.880 arctic shipping lanes uncontested so what canada's done that's a two-step thing step one
00:03:37.640 they built a fleet of arctic offshore patrol ships brand new six of them that can run through four
00:03:43.500 feet or 1.2 meters of ice wow and break it up and especially at this time of year this is when the
00:03:49.900 shipping's busiest and you'll see in the canadian armed forces and all their social media paul
00:03:54.480 showing a lot of the the navy ships and the personnel in all these areas in the arctic
00:03:59.600 because they can get material and personnel and ships and planes throughout the arctic safely
00:04:05.980 because in the dead of winter yeah it's it's not possible sometimes no no well unless you're in a
00:04:12.000 sub a nuclear sub a nuclear sub or the subs that canada's considering buying right which have the
00:04:19.660 capability of operating like a nuclear sub and can spend a long time under the arctic ice cap and
00:04:25.900 that's the big decision for mark carney and for mcginty and for everyone involved in canadian
00:04:31.540 government is what subs they buy because the sooner they get built and sooner on patrol the
00:04:36.520 sooner we can have canadian submarines patrolling our waters because right now it's it's all other
00:04:41.560 countries yeah well it's interesting jim because you know you take a look at the map so we're going
00:04:46.520 to throw up the five uh arctic ocean coastal states right so you look at it and you look at
00:04:53.300 all the people that are in this region right so you have us of course you have russia which when
00:04:58.180 look at this map look at how close we are absolutely uh norway which honestly i didn't
00:05:03.780 really believe you know and denmark of course because greenland um and then of the united
00:05:09.380 states yeah because of the arctic so you know there we are um and alaska i mean and then uh
00:05:16.820 so you look at it and on top of that the number of people who allegedly have laid claim to the area
00:05:23.620 and the precious minerals and every and the and this and that and the resources up there
00:05:28.500 yeah the chinese have a you know they've and it's been rumored we have we weren't able to fact check
00:05:33.940 it you know i know you know and i've heard steve bannon talk about it i've heard other people talk
00:05:39.060 about it you know but uh they say that the chinese have claimed stake to some of it they might have
00:05:45.940 through a mineral resource uh exploration uh company but quite frankly that's just through an
00:05:52.180 investment right in the cold war um in the 1970s b-52 some american bases would come up to see if
00:05:59.780 b trenton in ontario and practice doing bombing runs over the arctic circle to russia because it
00:06:06.180 was the most direct line if things kicked off yeah and they would go over the northwest territories
00:06:12.660 or none of it right over our territory loaded with nuclear weapons and go right into russia 0.78
00:06:17.940 and they practice those bombing runs all the time right and there was nothing the canadian 0.65
00:06:22.420 government could do to stop them because the fact of the matter is we were not pulling our weight
00:06:27.380 as a country we were not buying material the the military is using old outdated equipment
00:06:33.060 so when they said we're gonna do this we were in no position to say no yeah no it's true well
00:06:38.820 and the u.s has been you know listen the u.s has made many attempts to actually secure this area
00:06:44.020 right you know they you know they refer to it you know in meetings as the soft underbelly of north
00:06:49.700 america um because of its location to russia well as crazy as trump sounds that's the whole reason
00:06:55.780 behind greenland yes yeah i mean that's the whole thing behind it i mean he's doing it a very heavy
00:07:02.100 handed you know sort of unintelligent way yes but he's not the first american politician to amuse
00:07:08.500 maybe publicly or privately about the strategic and economic importance of greenland and what it
00:07:13.780 would mean to the usa oh yeah well it's been since you know i was looking before we came in it's been
00:07:18.740 since 1812 the americans have eyed this region yeah right and of course because you know they
00:07:25.380 always thought it was the back door into the nation into north america and you know now
00:07:29.780 technology you know technology which is kind of scary you know because before the show i was
00:07:34.900 listening to some really uh great other podcasting and i i actually did happen on one that talked
00:07:41.540 about uh cyber security in alaska in the arctic and it was very interesting because they talked
00:07:48.900 about um you know issues like sonar location devices blocking um you know and i thought to
00:07:57.380 myself wow that's a really interesting topic but if you think about it jim you know you're in you
00:08:02.020 know sub-zero temperatures for most of the year quite frankly equipment failures can be you know
00:08:07.780 can happen who's better at actually all that technology now or you know they have uh stay
00:08:13.620 the art stuff it's the russians quite frankly they know how to they know how to work in cold weather
00:08:18.740 right so they're good at it you know we're trying but we're limited you know we're limited in
00:08:23.220 resources and you know when i when i looked at it i i looked at the transfer table for how much we
00:08:29.380 spend in this region and this is not militarily this is just to keep this region sort of afloat
00:08:35.620 and we'll throw up the graph on it because you have to fly in everything if if if they if they
00:08:40.180 need bread and milk and butter in the store it has to be flown in from edmonton and winnipeg if
00:08:45.700 their logistic timetable is off people potentially can die so yeah this is how you know tough it is
00:08:52.100 to live here so you know it's about six billion dollars it's really costly so you know and it's
00:08:58.820 It's about, if you look by territory for the Yukon,
00:09:03.300 it's about $34,000 a person per year.
00:09:06.600 So $1.6 billion, it really is.
00:09:09.460 And that's social, health, government transfers.
00:09:12.760 Those are all the things that go into that number.
00:09:14.980 It's about $2 billion for the Northwest Territories
00:09:17.600 because of the expanse of how big it is, quite frankly,
00:09:21.640 which is about $42,000 a person.
00:09:24.140 and then uh nudovic it's roughly 57 000 per person so it's you know we we spend a lot of money for a
00:09:33.020 few people to keep it going um because we as a country we believe it's it's important to our
00:09:42.360 defense and to our to our to our country you're right it's canada right and paul the one thing
00:09:48.600 in the last number last decade or so they've gotten really serious about the canadian army
00:09:53.060 especially the hardcore, the special forces infantry.