The big story about the Arctic this week was the planting of titanium Russian flag by submarine on the seabed at the North Pole to further their claim on the region. While the flag planting itself was mostly a stunt, it is only a small part of what the Russians are doing to stake their claim to the region. Their big operations involve sub-sea scanning to determine the extent of the Russian continental mass. If they can prove it extends far enough, their claim to the area, and the resources that come with it, will be strengthened.
Canada, in the meantime, is conducting a small “Sovereignty Exercise” in the eastern Arctic on the southern part of Baffin Island. Not that these exercises don’t serve a purpose, but they are only one small part of what is required to assert Canadian sovereignty over the North.
Harper, for whatever reason, has focused almost entirely on military presence as the means for asserting Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. His biggest announcements have centered over the construction of little patrol boats for the Navy. The boats, if they are ever built, will only be of very limited use until the end of the century when there’s no ice left in the Arctic. In the meantime, the Coast Guard’s icebreakers, whose responsibility it is to patrol the coasts and, more critically, support commerce by opening up the sea lanes in summer, and who can better move through the heavier ice that covers the Arctic for most of the year, are rusting out with little or no attention to their replacement.
Russia has several nuclear-powered icebreakers capable of punching through much heavier ice than the best Canadian vessels. In fact, most of our Arctic competitors have better ice-breaking capability than we do. More and better icebreakers, and not limited use naval boats, are what is required to properly patrol Arctic waters.
Canada is also failing to do the kind of scientific research required to get a clear picture of what the under-ice landscape looks like, and what it says about our claims. We are working on a deadline to prove the extent of the continental shelf and submit a claim to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Russia will be finalizing its data and submitting its claim by the end of this year. Denmark, with whom we have a pleasant little grandstanding dispute over a small rock between Elsmere and Greenland, considers that dispute low priority and is more focused on the North Pole claim. What Canada's priority is in the region isn't entirely clear.
In addition to the scientific work, there are the diplomatic maneuvers necessary to claim the Northwest Passage as internal Canadian waters, something that appears easy enough to do if anyone would actually make the efforts needed to satisfy the conditions required. The major condition I see Canada needing is the ability to monitor and patrol the area.
Oh, and the monitoring and patrols should be year round, meaning limited summer patrols by “ice resistant” vessels won’t do the job.
But even more important than sending out a few patrols; on land, air, or sea, is having a permanent presence in the Arctic and sustainable economic activities in the region. If patrols were all that is required to make an area your sovereign territory, Iraq and Afghanistan would belong to the US and NATO, respectively. It is the people living in an area that determine who has control over it, and in the Arctic, Canadians are pretty thin on the ground.
One of the major reasons that the islands in the Arctic archipelago are still considered Canadian territory is because of the presence of several small communities placed on them. The discussion these days tends to ignore these communities, which, given how many of them came to be, causes understandable resentment from their residents. A not inconsiderable number of Inuit lives were sacrificed so that Canada could maintain its claim on this region. We would be wise to remember that.
Nunavut has 30,000 people living in 26 communities scattered across the territory. It crosses four time zones and the north-south distance between its furthest points is the same as that between Winnipeg and Mexico City. None of these communities have a deep-sea port, or even rudimentary wharves.
The cost of living is very high, and economic opportunities are all but non-existent. While there are rich mineral resources by southern standards, the lack of infrastructure means that any company wanting to open a mine also has to build a docking facility, road system, and airstrip just to reach it. That very quickly puts most projects out of the profitable category, even with recent increases in commodity prices.
Attempts to create a fisheries industry run into the same hurdle. Where to offload the catch? Where to dock for rest and refueling? You either head south for Newfoundland or head over to Nuuk, Greenland, which has all the docking facilities that Canada's northern communities could wish for.
Even something as simple as tourism suffers from the lack of infrastructure. Cruise ships that ply the Arctic sail right past the communities because there is no way for them to put in for a stop. Air travel costs are prohibitive, and accommodations in many communities remain rather primitive as a result.
The days when the government could displace people and force them into remote locations are long past. If the people living in these communities decide to pack up and leave, and more and more of them are doing just that, there is very little the Canadian government can do about it. Without any future prospects for employment or other opportunities for people, the communities will disappear.
If the government is truly serious about maintaining and exploiting Canada’s claims to the Arctic, then it is going to have to start investing massively in the North, and most of that investment is going to have to be in infrastructure that will stimulate economic activity, not in questionable toy purchases for the Navy. The Canadian government has ever been long on promises for the Arctic, and ever short on any real action. That had better change.
Because if the Arctic communities cease to be viable, Canada will not only lose its claim to the waterways and undersea resources, but quite possibly to the islands themselves, regardless how many soldiers it sends on the occasional walkabouts. “Use it or lose it” indeed.
Cross-posted to BlogsCanada: E-Group
