Canada seeks big undersea claim

Area as large as 3 provinces

OTTAWA Canada is poised to claim ownership of a vast new expanse of undersea territory beyond its Atlantic and Arctic coasts that’s greater in size than Quebec and equal to about 20 per cent of the country’s surface area, Postmedia News has learned.

The huge seabed land grab has been in the works since 1994, when federal scientists first conducted a “desktop study” of Canada’s potential territorial expansion under a new UN treaty allowing nations to extend their offshore jurisdictions well past the current 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometre) limit of “Exclusive Economic Zones” in coastal waters.

But the UN also set strict criteria for converting underwater tracts of “no man’s land” into a nation’s territorial possessions, including exhaustive geological studies proving these distant stretches of seabed are “natural prolongations” of each applicant country’s continental bedrock.

At the time, experts from the Geological Survey of Canada and Canadian Hydrographic Service estimated that as much as 1. 75 million sq. km of sea floor — described as an area “equivalent to the size of the three Prairie provinces” — might eventually be claimed.

Jacob Verhoef, the Halifaxbased Natural Resources Canada geologist directing the effort to redraw the outer boundary of Canada, says the final proposal is proving “pretty close” in size to what federal scientists predicted nearly 20 years ago.

“I can’t give you a number, … But our preliminary outer limit as we are now defining it is pretty close to what we had expected,” Verhoef told Postmedia News.