Canada readies Arctic claim
Bid for huge offshore area now in critical phase
Canada’s bid to add an offshore area the size of the Prairies to its sovereign territory has reached a critical new phase, Postmedia News has learned.
A 20-year federal scientific mission aimed at gathering and analyzing undersea geological data along Canada’s Atlantic and Arctic continental shelves has essentially come to an end, giving way to the legal and diplomatic components of the highpriority project ahead of a December deadline to submit the country’s claims to the UN.
Led for years by Halifax-based Natural Resources Canada geoscientist Jacob Verhoef, the offshore mapping effort has now been wound up and prime responsibility for completing the submission handed to international law experts with the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development.
The proposed extensions to Canada’s territory could open access to significant offshore oil and gas deposits and other seabed resources — a potential economic windfall for the nation, but one that’s also likely to generate opposition from environmentalists, close scrutiny by aboriginal groups and power struggles among the federal, provincial and territorial governments.
There’s also a chance Canada’s claims could overlap near the North Pole and elsewhere with those of three other Arctic nations — Russia, Denmark (Greenland) and the U.S. (Alaska) — and lead to jurisdictional conflicts, high-stakes negotiations and arbitration rulings.
Officials in DFATD’s legal bureau are now “holding the pen” on the project, the ministry confirmed with Postmedia News.
“The focus of the team at this point is completing the drafting and dealing with the challenges of producing a technical document that is thousands of pages in length,” said DFATD spokesperson Amanda Reid, adding that the federal government expects to submit the massive claim to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf by Dec. 6 — exactly a decade after Canada ratified the international accord in December 2003 and started the clock ticking on a 10-year deadline to complete its bid for offshore territorial extensions.
“Filing the submission is a significant milestone in the process but not the end,” Reid stated in an email response to questions from Postmedia News.
“After filing, Canada must wait for the commission to consider its submission, engage with the commission, receive its recommendations and take the necessary domestic measures (e.g. regulations) to enact the co-ordinates of the outer limits and file them with the UN.”
She also noted that while Foreign Affairs is now steering the initiative, “collaboration between the three main departments involved” — DFATD, NRCan and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans — “continues to be strong and cooperation with the continental shelf teams of our neighbours (U.S., Russia, Denmark) is continuing.”
Norway, the only other country with an Arctic Ocean coastline, was already granted its offshore claims in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans in 2009 under provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, adding an undersea expanse of territory equal to 60 per cent of its above-water land mass.
And in 2008, the UN agency granted Australia control of a seabed area equal to one-third of that country’s huge land mass — about 2.5 million square kilometres, or the combined areas of Ontario and Quebec — off its Indian, Pacific and Southern ocean coasts.
As early as the mid-1990s, Canadian government geologists and oceanographers were predicting this country’s continental shelf claims could amount to 1.75 million square kilometres — about equal to the combined area of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, or almost 20 per cent of Canada’s 9.9-million-square-kilometre land mass.