CANADA ALL OVER THE MAP.
Poor cartography contradicts position of government
It’s a mistake seen in the maps issued by Elections Canada, the National Research Council and the Canadian Armed Forces. It’s even in the official Atlas of Canada and on hundreds of relief maps hung up in schoolrooms across the country.
For nearly 100 years, the government of Canada has been printing official maps incorrectly. pretending that it owns a U.K.sized chunk of international waters.
“There’s no such thing as having a border hundreds of miles from your territorial lands,” said Heather Exner-Pirot, managing editor of the peer-reviewed Arctic Yearbook.
The mistake claims the Canadian border extends all the way to the North Pole.
In reality, the only recognized pieces of the Arctic Ocean controlled by Canada are its territorial waters and its exclusive economic zone, which ends 200 nautical miles offshore. Everything else is international waters.
Weirder still, Canada doesn’t officially lay claim to the swath of ocean.
“The Canadian maps not only contradict international consensus, they contradict our own official government position,” said Michael Byers, a legal scholar and expert on Canada Arctic sovereignty.
In 2003, Canada ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which officially limited its claims to the 200-nautical-mile mark.
In 2006, then-prime minister Stephen Harper gave a speech in Iqaluit, stressing in minute detail that Canada’s Arctic border doesn’t come anywhere near the North Pole.
“All along the border, our jurisdiction extends outward 200 miles into the surrounding sea, just as it does along our Atlantic and Pacific coastlines,” he said. “No more. And no less.”
The incorrect Canadian maps are all based on the old-fashioned “sector theory” of claiming the Arctic. Back when the Arctic Ocean was largely inaccessible, polar nations were generally content with dividing it up like the slices of a pizza with the North Pole at its centre.
The U.S.S.R., for instance, claimed in 1926 it held jurisdiction over anything “in the Arctic north of the coast of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics up to the North Pole.”
Although expansionist Canadian politicians have enthusiastically touted some version of the sector theory, it has never become official policy.
The closest Canada came was in 1907, when senator Pascal Poirier implored Canada to make a “formal declaration of possession of the lands and islands situated in the north of the Dominion, and extending to the North Pole.”
As the legal scholar Ivan Head noted in 1960, Poirier’s theory of claiming territory based on arbitrary map lines was ridiculed at the time.
“How, it was argued, can a state claim sovereignty over areas about which it knows absolutely nothing?” he wrote.
The “sector theory” version of Canada adds about 200,000 square kilometres more ocean than is actually controlled by Canada.
It also means Canada is printing the world’s most inaccurate national maps, pushing aside the People’s Republic of China, which is usually No. 1 in this category.
Legally, it’s as if Ottawa decided to draw a line between Halifax, St. John’s and the wreck of the Titanic, arbitrarily claiming that all the waters in between belonged to Canada.
Nevertheless, the sector theory still finds its way into some aspect of Canadian Arctic policy. The Arctic Council hands out search-andrescue responsibilities based on a sector-theory parcelling. Thus, the Canadian Armed Forces are responsible for finding lost mariners all the way up to the North Pole.
In 2013, a preliminary Canadian claim to the Arctic was widely mocked for, among other things, its poor cartography.
In a submission to the United Nations, Canada asserted that the North Pole was Canadian soil, but failed to provide any maps or research to back the claim.
At an announcement in December 2013, then-foreign affairs minister John Baird did not deny published reports that Canadian scientists had, in fact, completed a North Pole-free claim package.
However, went the reports, Harper spiked it at the last minute with the insistence that scientists find some way to include the pole.
This process appears to be well underway.
As Global Affairs told the National Post this week, “preliminary scientific data show that the outer limits of Canada’s continental shelf will include the North Pole.”