This is mostly visible in the Coast Guard. For now, the Canadian Coast Guard is the dominant federal maritime presence in the Arctic.
They provide vital icebreaking services to ensure that northern resupply vessels and commercial shipping can actually get to those northern communities and supply them with the necessary food, fuel and matériel that's required to sustain them for the rest of the year before the next summer's shipping season. That's the first and most commonly appreciated role of the Coast Guard icebreakers.
Secondly, and this is the one that doesn't happen too often anymore, sometimes the Coast Guard itself carries supplies on its own ships and delivers these supplies to certain communities like the Eureka science and weather station where the sea ice is too heavy for commercial shipping. They take that stuff right along to the shore and ensure these communities get those very vital supplies.
Those are the two major things. Then, of course, there are fundamental basic services that you expect to see in southern Canada, like search and rescue services, aids to navigation and the maintenance of those things, so mariners can use the water safely around them.
Of course, in the coming years as more and more of the Navy's Arctic and offshore patrol ships come online, there is going to be a much greater naval militarized presence up in the North. In some cases, as far as I know, there isn't a really solidified plan for how we plan on using them, but I imagine there will be some way to make use of these Navy vessels to help the Coast Guard with some of the missions they have up there that are not pure icebreaking. I think there will be a gradual convergence of the civilian missions that the Coast Guard carries out and the general naval sovereignty presence that is up there. The two will combine together very well.
This is something we see over in Greenland. The Danes don't have a coast guard; they have a navy. They use their patrol ships, which are smaller and a little bit less capable than ours, for a lot of the same missions to support and enable civilian uses of the seas.
This includes breaking open ports to allow fishermen to go out into the ocean and assess their resources there.