Arctic arms race
Global warming may open up the Northwest Passage, says Paul Robinson, and that could provoke an armed stand off between Canada and the US In 1981 a Vancouver couple, worried by the nuclear menace, decided to move somewhere truly remote, somewhere guaranteed to be out of the reach of war. They settled on the Falkland Islands. They weren’t the first Canadians to make such a mistake. In the 1920s a group of Canadian Mennonites, horrified by the introduction of compulsory military service in Canada during the first world war, similarly took themselves off to the most faraway place they could find, the Chaco Boreal in northern Paraguay. Shortly afterwards, Bolivia invaded the Chaco, and war was waged backwards and forwards over the poor Mennonites for two years (a conflict immortalised in Hergé’s Tintin adventure The Broken Ear).
Now I’m expecting to hear that some Canadian family has decided to head north and settle on Queen Elizabeth Island or another frozen, barren outpost along the contested Northwest Passage. For the Arctic is heating up, both climatically and politically. Barely noticed on this side of the Atlantic, an Arctic arms race is under way.
No points for guessing that the principal feuding parties are those ever-friendly neighbours, Canada and the USA. After former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s chief political adviser Francine Ducros was caught on camera calling President George W. Bush a ‘moron’, both she and Chrétien refused to apologise. Chrétien’s successor, the recently defeated Paul Martin, declined to allow the Canadian military to participate in the Bush administration’s beloved (and utterly pointless) National Missile Defence project. Meanwhile, the Americans slapped increased import duties on Canadian softwood lumber and then brazenly ignored Nafta rulings that these were illegal. A row of leylandii along the border seemed to be the next logical step.
This January’s election win by the Canadian Conservative party and new Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered hope for a rapprochement. Harper is from Alberta, the oil-rich, stetson-wearing, rodeoloving part of Canada most in tune with the attitudes of red-state Republicans. He was a supporter of the Iraq war, and denounced the Liberals for their anti-Americanism. The shock was all the greater, therefore, when he used his first press conference after taking power to launch a fierce attack on the US ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, for criticising his plans to upgrade Canadian defences in the far north. ‘I’ve been very clear that we have significant plans for national defence and for defence of our sovereignty,’ he announced frostily. ‘It is the Canadian people we get our mandate from, not the US ambassador.’ Wilkins should have seen it coming. During the recent election campaign, news emerged that an American submarine, the USS Charlotte, had almost certainly passed through Canadian waters without permission on a voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the North Pole. The now ex-PM Mr Martin responded angrily, saying that Canada would take all ‘necessary measures’ to defend its sovereignty. But even that was not enough for the Conservative defence spokesman, retired general Gordon O’Connor, who accused him of lukewarm bluster. America’s act, he said, was ‘an incursion into our territory’. The Liberals had neglected northern defences, he continued, and ‘Paul Martin’s record of failure in standing up for Canada’s Arctic sovereignty is proof that his war of words with the United States is just more phoney election rhetoric’. In 1921 the Canadian director of military operations and intelligence, Colonel James Sutherland ‘Buster’ Brown, devised the ambitious ‘Defence Scheme Number One’ to invade the United States. Mr O’Connor may well be dusting it off right now.
Canada’s north will need reinforcement, however, if Ottawa is serious about putting the ‘Cold’ back into Cold War. It is guarded chiefly by just four Twin Otter aeroplanes and 7,000 Rangers and Junior Rangers, armed with military issue Lee Enfield rifles and baseball caps. Mr Harper, therefore, has announced plans to construct a deep water port for submarines on Baffin Island near Iqaluit (that’s ‘Frobisher’ for readers who still think in terms of ‘British North America’), to build three military icebreakers, to install underwater sensors in Arctic waters to detect foreign submarines and to station unmanned aerial vehicles and more aircraft in Yellowknife to carry out regular surveillance of the northern region.
There’s no doubt Harper has the support of the nation. It’s possible that there might be the odd rabid neocon expat Canadian living in exile south of the border who thinks that Canada should just roll over and open its waters to the Americans, but no names spring to mind. As Rob Huebert of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary has noted, sovereignty over northern waters ‘is a redbutton issue for the Canadian public’.
And it’s not just the Americans who are being told to keep out. In 1973 Denmark suddenly laid claim to Hans Island, a so far uninhabited 1.3 km. sq. piece of Canadian real estate halfway between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. To underline his country’s claim, in 1983 the Danish Minister for Greenland, Tom Høyen, landed on the island and planted a flag, a bottle of cognac and a note saying ‘Welcome to Denmark’. After several more Danish incursions, the Canadians finally responded in July 2005, flying in the defence minister and several soldiers by helicopter, building a traditional inukshuk marker (a human-shaped pile of stones), and hoisting the maple leaf flag. Denmark, not to be outdone, responded by sending a warship; the Canadian navy in its turn dispatched two ships on an unusual excursion to Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of Hudson Bay.
The north is a matter of identity for Canadians. As Canadian icons Bob and Doug McKenzie’s hit single said, ‘Take off to the great white north, it’s a beauty way to go!’ In practice, most Canadians have no desire to do anything of the sort. It’s cold up there and besides, as I can personally testify, there aren’t any Tim Hortons doughnuts once you get as far north as Churchill, let alone on Hans Island. Alert, on Ellesmere Island, may be the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited settlement, but there’s a reason it has a population of only 170 government workers. Still, Canadians like to know that the north is there, and that it’s theirs. It’s part of what being Canadian is all about, and they don’t want any damn foreigners (especially Americans) messing with what doesn’t belong to them.
Second, there are valuable resources in the region, most notably oil. Canada’s border with America in the Beaufort Sea oilfields is another area of dispute between the two countries. Concessions elsewhere in the Arctic might be perceived as weakness which would permit American encroachment there also.
Third, and most seriously, the ice in the Arctic is melting rapidly, shrinking by nearly 10 per cent a decade. At the present rate, by 2050 the Arctic Ocean might be entirely icefree in summer. If you were that nervous Vancouver couple and wanted to live on Queen Elizabeth Island, Hans Island, Ellesmere Island or anywhere else up there, this could only be a good thing. As the title of a University of Toronto seminar once asked, ‘Global Warming. Who cares? It’s cold here’. Already, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the air routes over the Arctic are opening up to commercial traffic, and now global warming offers the possibility that the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will become fully navigable, shortening the journey from Europe to Asia by 9,000 miles. By the end of the 21st century the islands of northern Canada may find themselves on one of the busiest thoroughfares in international commerce.
For Canadians this is a matter of more than emotional concern. Professor Michael Byers, an expert on the subject, comments, ‘An oil spill would cause catastrophic damage to fragile Arctic ecosystems; a cruise ship in distress would require an expensive and possibly dangerous rescue mission. An international shipping route along Canada’s third coast could also facilitate the entry of drugs, guns, illegal immigrants and perhaps even terrorists.’ Unsurprisingly, the Canadian government thinks that it ought to be able to regulate who goes there.
The United States disagrees. The status of the Northwest Passage has long been a point of dispute between Canada and the US, for the Americans deny that Canada owns the waters of the passage (this isn’t the result of some particular anti-Canadian spite; worldwide, the US asserts a principle of mare liberum, and resists all efforts to restrict its rights of navigation). Under the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Canada has the right to designate the Passage as part of its internal waters, and thus the authority to prohibit all foreign shipping from entering it. The US does not want its freedom limited in this way. It also no longer seems to believe in treaties of any sort and so, of course, has not ratified the latest version of the Law of the Sea. It insists that that the Passage is an international strait, and as such is open to all.
Sovereignty depends on exercising actual control. To prove that the Passage is Canadian, Canada needs to show that it knows what is happening there. If every old Tom, Sven and Billy-Bob started sailing through the Passage and Canada failed even to observe them, after a while they would establish a right to transit it, thereby vindicating the American position. This is where Stephen Harper’s defence plans fit in.
The funny thing is that Mr Wilkins and his predecessor as US ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, have for years been making impassioned speeches demanding that Canada increase its defence expenditure. Now, at last, they have got their wish.
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