Arctic sovereignty seems to be the zombie—the dead issue that refuses to stay dead—of Canadian public affairs. You think it’s settled, killed and buried, and then every decade or so it rises from the grave and totters into view again. In one decade the issue is the DEW Line, then it’s the American oil tanker Manhattan, steaming brazenly through the Northwest Passage, then the Polar Sea doing the same thing. In August 2007, a Russian submarine planted a flag at the North Pole. Or perhaps it was under the North Pole, as the UK Daily Telegraph1 reported, raising an image of a striped pole floating in the ocean, with the devious Russians diving underneath it. Perhaps the flag did land on the pole, though good luck with that, since the pole is a point with no size at all, so the Russians likely missed it. However it was, they are up there, and the zombie has come to life once more.
And the Russians aren’t the only ones who make us nervous. The United States, one of the countries that does not agree that the Northwest Passage lies within Canada’s internal waters, is running cruise ships in the Arctic, and somewhere in the boardrooms of America plans are being drawn up for more northern voyages by oil tankers. We’ve even had issues with Denmark, usually the most inoffensive of countries, over an island in the High Arctic that very few Canadians had ever heard of a few years ago. Everyone knows that the main reason for all this activity and concern is global warming. Recent satellite images have shown that the ice is melting faster than even the most pessimistic doomsters predicted, and that quite soon the Northwest Passage will be open for navigation for much of the year. A hundred and fifty years ago, the passage was difficult or impossible to get through, a death trap for many, including the Franklin expedition. It was conquered early in the twentieth century by Roald Amundsen, but he had to spend two winters in the North to get through. When the passage was locked fast in ice for ten or eleven months of the year, no one much cared who owned it or the waters around it, or who went through it, and under what authority. Even today, no state disputes that Canada owns the waters, but the U.S. contends that a strait runs through them. When these waters become freely navigable, pessimists suggest, Canada may face new challenges to its control over this part of the country.
The Canadian High Arctic is very much in the news, front and centre, in a heady and ominous mixture of money, science, and politics. The United States disagrees that the Northwest Passage is Canadian internal waters, believing instead that it is an international strait. The Russians, on the other hand, have no problem with our assertion that the Passage is internal waters, but their claims to a huge area of the polar seabed may compete with Canada’s. Continental shelves, of which the Grand Banks off Newfoundland is a good example, belong to the country to which they are attached. But you have to prove that the shelf is continuously attached. That is basically what those Russian submarines are doing at the North Pole—trying to establish as big a limit as possible for that country’s continental shelf. No one knows how much oil and gas lies under the ocean, but with Russia’s return to the international stage funded by petroleum dollars, exclusive jurisdiction to exploit the Arctic seabed is of more than simply scientific importance.
Speaking of science, the Arctic is also at the centre of the global warming controversy. It has been reported that the summer Arctic sea ice, measured at its summer minimum, was smaller in September 2007 than at any time since satellites began measuring it in 1979. On the sixteenth of that month it was measured at 4.13 million square kilometres (1.59 million square miles); the previous low, two years earlier, was 5.32. The difference, 1.19 square kilometres, or 436,000 square miles, is the size of Texas and California combined. It’s a fifth smaller than it was in 1979. The effects of this change are political, economic, social, and environmental, a potent brew that one stirs and tastes at one’s peril. We will taste it in later chapters, but for now will note only the dramatic effect of a possible opening of the Northwest Passage—not the one that Amundsen took a century ago, twisting around the Boothia Peninsula and across the shallow waters off the Arctic mainland, but the broad passage leading west from Lancaster Strait. Cruise ships, warships, oil tankers, all steaming through what Canada considers its internal waters, perhaps six months of the year, perhaps ten. What is Canada doing about this? What can we do?
It’s hard to believe how recent this situation is. Twenty years ago, global warming was only a theory proposed by a few scientists, and most of the public had never heard of it. Now it is Holy Writ, at least among the political left, and schoolchildren run campaigns to Save the Planet.
What a difference two decades make! Claims now circulate that one-quarter of the undiscovered reserves of oil and gas lie in the North. Into the increasingly ice-free waters race government scientists, capitalists, and the military, as the industrial world seeks the additional supplies of oil and gas necessary to maintain western styles of living. Indigenous leaders, whose claims and accomplishments grabbed headlines a few years back, have been reduced to bit players—and there is an unstated recognition in government and development circles that one of the key attractions of the High Arctic is that there are virtually no indigenous people living there, and thus no one to consult before development takes place. For developers now used to adapting to the realities of indigenous autonomy and expectations for local control, the prospect of working in a largely indigenous-free zone is a dream come true.
The issues that dominate this debate in northern Canada are not new; it’s just that energy needs and global warming have now made them urgent. Given the parent-child military relationship between Canada and the United States and Canada’s historic unwillingness to take a strong public stand against its prime ally, the question of the Northwest Passage seemed merely theoretical. The Russians have traditionally pushed against the boundaries, maintaining floating scientific stations on the Arctic ice, to the alarm of several generations of North American military leaders. During the Cold War, from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s, the boundary testing caused both irritation and concern, but the massive American military presence in Alaska stared down any substantial Russian intrusions. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the apparent chaos within the new Russian Federation appeared to remove Russia from the Arctic equation. If they could not control terrorists in the southwest, they hardly seemed capable of or interested in expanding their sovereignty claims in the northeast. With the emergence of a stronger Russia, this seems likely to change. Although Russia repeatedly stated that the submarine at the North Pole was part of its scientific research and that they were not laying claim to anything, the planting of a flag was clearly provocative. North Americans are not off base feeling insecure about the real intentions of their neighbour across the melting ice cap.
The uncertainty begins with ice. For decades, the government of Canada has argued that the frozen waters of the High Arctic constitute a formal part of national territory in the North. The Inuit certainly see it this way, for winter living typically involved many weeks spent on the ice; for northern indigenous peoples, the standard European division between water and land made no sense at all. But Arctic ice is more than a thin, seasonal covering over northern seas and waterways. For hundreds of years, it has been a thick, almost impenetrable barrier to any regular or reliable use of Arctic waters. Climatic circumstances—warm summer weather, favourable winds, and quirks of nature—could occasionally permit ships to make headway through the Arctic islands. Some explorers were lucky and got through, while others were unlucky, and died, but on the whole the region was impenetrable.
Now the ice is receding. Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was the first to popularize images of the retreating polar ice cap, drawing on scattered bits of Arctic science that pointed to disturbing trends in the regional climate. More scientific investigations followed, predicting a time in the near future when the polar seas would be open for navigation and when massive environmental changes would hit the Arctic. Increasingly dramatic images from the North showed more and more open water in the Arctic. The ice cap seemed to be melting like an ice cube on a Toronto sidewalk in August. Scientists became increasingly alarmed, as did northern indigenous leaders and environmental activists. The North seemed to be proving that all the worst fears of Gore, David Suzuki, and other doomsayers were coming true. Only the small number of people directly affected and the complexity of the scientific debate about the meaning and extent of global warming prevented wide-scale panic.
One person’s crisis is another’s opportunity, however. The receding ice cap seemed a boon to shipping companies and resource developers. The same open water that signalled ecological meltdown created possible new shipping lanes through formerly ice-locked passageways. Asian companies, in particular, salivated at the prospect of the time-saving opportunities that accompanied a secure Arctic route to Europe and the eastern United States—a Great Circle route for ships to match the long-use air lanes that have accelerated intercontinental travel in earlier decades. Resource exploration in the region had also been stalled for years because of the dangers and challenges of working in High Arctic waters. The ice sheets that look so serene and placid on maps and aerial photographs are actually twisting and crushing masses of ice, many metres thick, with the power to snap oil rigs and smash drilling platforms. The costs of exploring and developing resources in the North seemed so astronomical that few companies and governments were prepared to venture into the region. That scenario looked to be melting away as well. With the possibility of large stretches of open water, and with ready access to the Arctic seabed, huge fields lay open for oil and gas exploration.
The High Arctic may well be the last true empty space on the planet. Even the upper reaches of the Amazon basin and the most remote corners of the Sahara Desert exist within well-defined national boundaries. Antarctica, which belongs to no one nation, has worked under a collaboratively managed and supervised jurisdiction for decades. While some countries, mostly in Africa, have trouble defending and enforcing their national borders, and while there are still disputed borders—Kashmir is a good example—the world’s boundaries seem generally stable. The exception is the Arctic, where tiny islands, the shape of the continental shelf, and longitudinal projections have suddenly become the stuff of international politics. There may be a lot at stake, if there truly are large deposits of oil and gas in the North. On the other hand it may turn out to be, as in the past, much ado about a lot of ice and cold water. The Russians, though, are deadly serious—and the West continues to misunderstand and underestimate both that nation and its leadership. The Americans are intractably stubborn on both military issues and questions of international straits, and—if we believe journalists and academics—the pesky Danes and others (including the Russians and Chinese) cast covetous looks at Canadian areas of interest.
That there is still a void speaks volumes about Canada’s approach to and neglect of the High Arctic. For reasons that will become clear in subsequent chapters, Canadians have never strayed far, either physically or spiritually, from the Canada–U.S. boundary. We are northern nation in fantasy and imagery only. Our galleries are full of Inuit sculptures and Group of Seven paintings and our libraries are stocked with books by authors from Rudy Wiebe to Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler extolling the mysteries and haunting beauty of the Arctic and northern regions generally. But for every canoe-paddling celebrity, like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who routinely ventured north, there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who rarely venture out of southern cities—a trip to Muskoka or the Laurentians being a northern adventure, and a vacation in Algonquin Park providing the complete frontier experience. Canada has never embraced the North beyond symbolism and mythology. Now, “purveyors of polar peril” suggest that the country is paying for its neglect and lack of interest in the High Arctic and the North in general. Some observers, to be sure, would argue that Canada has not been neglectful in terms of “sovereignty,” given that we have successfully controlled navigation in the Northwest Passage and everyone—even the U.S.—respects our laws. Either way, though, it is clear that Canada certainly faces public embarrassment over its lack of Arctic capabilities and presence.
In the chapters that follow, we lay out the history of Canada’s relationship with the North and its episodic and tentative approach to sovereignty in the region. Although Canada managed to expand and entrench its sovereignty in a cautious and reactive manner through the twentieth century, we write with a fair degree of frustration for our northern predicament is, as Yogi Berra once said, “déjà vu all over again.” Canadians have been down the current path of panic and sweeping promises many times in the past, and there are familiar echoes in the latest Canadian response to northern challenges. But this is not simply a replay of nineteenth- or twentieth-century contests. There is much more at play—oil, gas, northern passageways, and a painful illustration of how ill prepared we are for Arctic disputes in the twenty-first. The issues are global, in the form of the climate change debate; local, through indigenous claims and self-government initiatives; and circumpolar, in terms of military issues and competition for northern resources. If Canada faces a twenty-first-century challenge to its northern future, it is entering the battle with twentieth-century perspectives and nineteenth-century credibility. Global warming and the race for resources have opened an Arctic front. Canada’s northern flank is ill defended. Moreover, our country is distressingly complacent about the North, its role in the country, and its place on the world scene. Rousing Canadians from the southern perspective that defines and directs this country will not be easy, but there is potentially a great deal at stake, not the least being our self-respect as a nation and our belief in the sustainability of Canada as a northern country.