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![Canada's "resource-rich" backyard may be part of our national lore, but that doesn't mean it's ours. By <a href="http://sharpformen.com/author/richard-vanderford/">Richard Vanderford</a><div id='nr_fo_top_of_post'></div><p><strong>Canada’s “resource-rich¨ backyard may be part of our national lore, but that doesn’t mean it’s ours. </strong>Writer-at-large Richard Vanderford delves into the international race to control the Arctic.</p>
<p>Since the English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher plied the northern waters in a sixteenth century search for a passage to China, ice has defended the Arctic. Frobisher’s nineteenth century follower, Sir John Franklin, led over 100 men to their deaths in the same search. Some dropped dead mid-stride as they tried to walk south. Others died aboard their useless, icebound ships. Bones analyzed more than a century later by Canadian researchers tell of a hostile land. The doomed sailors, in a vain attempt to forestall their deaths, “disarticulated” their comrades – that is, sawed off limbs then ate the flesh. Ribs and collarbones showed straight, clean cuts, signs they were stripped clean by metal blades. Bones were smashed open and the marrow sucked out. The Toronto Globe of the day reported that the expedition had foolishly tried to storm “winter’s citadel.”</p>
<p>The walls of winter’s citadel, though, are cracking – literally. Arctic warming is occurring at a rate roughly twice that of regions to the south. Michael Byers, a UBC international law professor and an expert on the Arctic, recalls a trip to Bellot Strait in Nunavut, a channel that’s historically ice-covered and impenetrable to shipping. There were about 40 leading scientists, and 40 experienced crew on a Coastguard icebreaker. And no ice.</p>
<p>“Everyone on that ship was terrified,” says Byers. “Literally terrified. The captain could not believe there was no ice. He sent out a helicopter to find ice.”</p>
<p>Inuvik’s Duane Smith, a prominent Inuit leader, has seen the Northwest Territories’ earth give way and swallow a house, after the permafrost supporting it melted. Coastline is being eroded by an awakened sea. Inuit have been forced to move their buildings inland, says Smith, or in some cases, relocate entire villages. Ice is retreating and has become unreliable and treacherous for travel. “Spring right now is coming earlier,” says Smith. “Fall comes later.”</p>
<p>Smith’s and Byers’ observations are not unique. Benoit Beauchamp, Executive Director of Calgary’s Arctic Institute of North America, was struck by a Northwest Passage clear of ice last summer. “The North is really in the eye of a perfect storm of issues that have never been seen before,” says Beauchamp “I’ve had summers up there where the Passage is all solid ice and barely melts,” he says. “In 2007, it was all open. You could take an eighteenth century wooden ship through it. This is as dramatic a visual simile of change as you’ll ever see in your life.”</p>
<p>Before what Beauchamp calls the “perfect storm,” Canada’s Arctic had mostly symbolic significance to Canadians south of 60. It rounded out maps and lent some legitimacy to the myth of Canada as the Great White North. Get used to thinking about the North in a new way. The rate of warming there has surprised even pessimistic scientists and the Northwest Passage could become a shipping superhighway in the near future. The Arctic is also estimated to contain as much as a quarter of the world’s oil and circumpolar nations are eager to get their hands greasy. Canada, Russia, Denmark and the United States all have scientists mapping the ocean floor to help stake claims to undersea mineral deposits. But as the world wakes up to the Arctic and the potential bonanza it holds, it remains a place Canadians don’t fully understand.</p>
<p>“[Geologists] probably know more about the geography of Venus or Mars than we do about the polar continental shelf,” says Beauchamp. His colleague Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary agrees. “I don’t know how to describe it. When you’re up there,” he says, “it’s like another planet.”</p>
<p>Our misapprehension of the North may start with a poor knowledge of the geography, but it doesn’t end there. For one, we underestimate the Arctic’s wealth. Most know of the diamond mines that have given Yellowknife its unusual real-estate prices – a four-bedroom house can go for $500,000 in what’s still a frontier town, where residents can drive ski-doos down the street. Less widely known, however, are the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that have been predicted to lie in undersea deposits. Arctic oil reserves are already being developed by energy giants like Exxon Mobil, which has already agreed to invest $585 million to recover oil from the Beaufort Sea and Mackenzie Delta.</p>
<p>Wealth breeds conflict. A March 2008 report commissioned by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum whose membership includes Canada, Russia, the United States and Denmark, envisions several worst-case scenarios. In one, countries make a feverish dash to increase their military presence in the Arctic. Governments ignore oil spills, instead directing their fleets to stare each other down in a redux of cold war brinkmanship. In this imagined scenario, a “Great Arctic War” is narrowly avoided by backroom diplomacy. This vision from a multi-national group whose goal is Arctic cooperation.</p>
<p>We’re all used to oil wars, but it’s still a little early to make protest placards reading “No Blood for Arctic Oil.” There’s been no armed conflict in the region; however, last year, Russia laid claim to the seabed beneath the North Pole by using a deep-water submarine to plant a small flag. They’re also laying a claim in the conventional way, with an application for the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, a body tasked with sorting out claims to the ocean seafloor far offshore. This March, Las Vegas-based Arctic Oil & Gas fired off a flurry of press releases indicating their intent to claim and tap the ocean floor with the help of the oil majors. Experts doubt that they have a legal basis for the claim, but the company is right about one thing: in an era of $100 per barrel oil that could double in price in five years, the Arctic Ocean is a potential mineral rush. Like the Clampetts, Canadians are sitting on a mess of bubbling crude, set to erupt through our backyard at any moment.</p>
<p>Unlike the Clampetts, there’s no firm guarantee that the “yard” is ours. For one thing, it’s not even land – it’s seabed. In recent years, government officials from Canada and Denmark have played “who can plant the most flags” for press photographers on disputed Hans Island. But those stunts detract from the larger issue: control of the waters. Hans Island, at just over a single square kilometre, is about one-third the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park and a lot uglier. The Canadian government is currently mapping the seabed to claim sovereign rights over the offshore resources spread over 1.7 million square kilometres, says Jacob Verhoef, a director at the Geological Survey of Canada. That’s an area bigger than Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba combined.</p>
<p>If there’s one thing that can be said for certain about the issues surrounding Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, it’s that much is uncertain. It’s all complicated.</p>
<p>One of Canada’s foremost experts is UBC’s Michael Byers. When speaking to reporters about international law and sovereignty issues, he often halts and pauses to think. At times he comes across like a teacher at a grade four sex-ed class. It’s clear he knows what he’s talking about, but he also knows his audience won’t quite grasp the nuances. He has to frame his explanations with care.</p>
<p>“It’s a complex puzzle,” says UBC’s Michael Byers. “Why wouldn’t it be, given that the North is more than 40 percent of the second-largest country on Earth?” Canada, as Byers points out, is about as tall as it is wide. Multiple areas separated by hundreds of kilometres are contested in different ways. The two main disputes centre on the Northwest Passage and on areas further than two hundred miles offshore.</p>
<p>Sovereignty isn’t exercised over the ocean in the same way it’s exercised over land. In far offshore areas connected by continental shelf, a country can control economic development but has little say in who moves in and out and what they choose to do there. Other nations are free to use the water for navigation, explains Martin Pratt, a researcher at Britain’s Durham University.</p>
<p>The Northwest Passage, which is often scrutinized by media, is entirely different. It is without a doubt Canadian, say most (Canadian) experts. At issue is whether it’s considered an international strait, or internal waters. In the former case, it’s a watery freightway open to ships from all nations, for free. If the Passage is indeed internal waters, Canada can act as doorman and decide who uses the passage. If you’re wondering why Canada would be pressing a case for control of the waterway, take a moment to think about your house’s washroom. Now think about the last truckstop bathroom you visited. More users means more pollution, something Canada would like the power to limit. So far, the United States has pushed for the waterway to be considered international – they want freedom of movement for their navy in similar straits around the world. Canada contends that the Northwest Passage is different because it’s been ice-covered until now. Senior officials with the U.S. State Department say they don’t intend to budge.</p>
<p>As for the regions even farther north? Even though the North Pole has a Canadian postal code (H0H 0H0), that doesn’t mean it’s ours. Canadian scientists are mapping the seafloor to submit a claim with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. In the eastern Arctic, teams of scientists fly in helicopters, throw up villages of Quonest huts and drop dynamite through holes in the ice every 10 kilometres. By measuring the waves caused by the explosions, they map the seafloor. In the west, specially equipped icebreakers follow each other with heavy equipment aboard. It is difficult, expensive work that, because of weather, can only be done in two six-week windows each year. Though the exercises of the armed forces’ Arctic rangers get more press, these scientists are just as important to expanding our claim over Arctic resources. It’s a symbiotic relationship: scientists draw the maps and the Canadian Forces show we mean business.</p>
<p>But isn’t the North unassailably Canadian? For the Canadian raised on an elementary school diet of snowshoeing, making igloos from sugar cubes and watching NFB videos of musk oxen trammeling through the tundra, the notion that the Far North might not be ours can come as a shock. Sure, we’ve never been there and might never go there, but it’s still nice to know that if “southern” living really gets us down, we’ll always be able to pop in on Santa Claus without bringing our passports. And deep-water ports and naval icebreakers are going to keep it safe for us, right? Sovereignty rhetoric has a long history. Even John A. MacDonald was known to belt out a sovereignty sermon. “Were we so faint hearted as to not take possession of [the Arctic], the Americans would be only too glad of the opportunity [to] hoist the American flag.”</p>
<p>Governments and media tend to play up the confrontation and downplay the diplomacy behind it. It’s sexier that way, says Stephane Roussel, a political scientist at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQàM). Plus, he points out, Arctic issues tend to get emphasized in the slow news months of the summer. Here’s a standard political recipe: Take one vaguely threatening incident, like the Russian submarine’s flag-planting, or an American tanker heading through the Northwest Passage without permission. Add hyperbolic media reaction. Mix with government plans to assert sovereignty and cook for a year or so. Problem is, this recipe makes nothing. Through successive Liberal and Conservative governments, big talk about Arctic sovereignty, like the current Harper government’s plan for a new deep-water port and naval icebreakers, often fizzles out once the perceived crisis has passed.</p>
<p>That’s not entirely bad. Many experts agree that a crisis-based approach to sovereignty and jingoism won’t carry the day. The armed forces, Roussel points out, often have a single-minded approach that can ignore reality. They have, for example, been focused on keeping drug smugglers from shipping drugs to southern cities through the North. The idea of drug cartels moving cargo through the North is ridiculous, says Roussel and shows the shortcomings of a mindset that sees the Arctic only as a place to be “defended” from outsiders and foreigners.</p>
<p>As much as the daily papers play up confrontations between Canada and its polar neighbours, we’ve never been a go-it-alone nation there. Negotiation over the Arctic is something Canadians are going to have to get used to. It’s really always been international, says Whitney Lackenbauer, fellow at the Canadian International Council, a research think-tank. Governments on all sides of the pole talk tough when it comes to sovereignty, but most disputes are handled quietly through diplomatic channels. It’s been this way for decades. Canadians and Americans have “agreed-to-disagree” on sticky ownership issues and crafted bilateral agreements to share the resources. While our right to the web of islands is well recognized, says Lackenbauer, other countries question our authority over the water between them. Canadians have never been willing to expend the resources necessary to assert full control in the Arctic, says Lackenbauer, so we’ve always relied on cooperation there.</p>
<p>Besides, it’s just too cold to have protracted battles in the North. Though warming, it’s far from balmy. Temperatures in Yellowknife fell to near -50° C this winter, causing the engines of school buses to seize up and break while they were running. Our northern mapping crews regularly collaborate with the Danes and the Americans, in part because the world’s combined fleet of suitable Arctic-capable icebreakers is only about a dozen ships strong, says Verhoef. Though Canadian and Danish forces have talked tough about tiny Hans Island for years, our scientists and theirs share data to try to arrive at joint interpretations of the seabed floor. The government is even in talks with the Russians to improve cooperation, says Verhoef.</p>
<p>Frigates make for photo-ops, but they aren’t the end of our Arctic solution. UQàM’s Roussel says we need to recognize how sentiment drives our thinking towards the North and try to move past it. “We have to take care of the environment, of the people who are living there. We have to make sure law and order are respected. It’s more a matter of governance than sovereignty,” he says. Then he laughs. “But that’s not very sexy,” he says. “If I were running for office, I probably wouldn’t be elected.”</p>
<p>Space travel is still out of reach for all but a handful of people, but for Canadians seeking that otherworldly experience, there’s always the North. Take the Pole. Darkness shrouds it half the year. Cold air nurtures a drifting landscape of pack ice above 13,000 feet of water. 840 kilometres of ocean separate it from the nearest human settlement – Alert, Nunavut.</p>
<p><strong> Important number: 76</strong></p>
<p>Look for Article 76 to appear in the news more as 2013 approaches. That’s the ten-year anniversary of Canada’s ratifying the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the due date for claims to resources beneath the ocean floor. Canada already has economic control of a zone 200 nautical miles offshore. Areas beyond 200 nautical miles offshore need to be mapped and shown to connect to the continental shelf before Canada can claim them under Article 76 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea. Canada is seeking to control the resources in these areas – namely oil and gas – but also wants to prevent other countries from polluting the waters with dirty resource extraction methods. Russia, Denmark and Canada are all mapping the seabed to determine who owns what. Countries have 10 years after they’ve ratified the convention to submit their claim to the UN (Russia ratified the treaty earlier and has only until 2009 to file its claim). If there’s an overlap or dispute over the interpretation of data, the UN cannot force a resolution – the countries involved must negotiate a boundary. At least that’s the principle: how it pans out in practice is anybody’s guess.</p>
<div id='nr_fo_bot_of_post'></div> <span id="pty_trigger"></span> Who Owns the North?](http://sharpformen.com/wp-content/gallery/who-owns-the-north-gallery/who-owns-the-north-gallery00121-03_3.jpg)