Foreign ships in North underline sovereignty issues for Canada
11 September, 2009 by admin
A historic voyage this week by two German cargo ships across the Northern Sea Route above Russia highlights the challenges — and potential missed opportunities — confronting Canada in the Arctic, says a leading expert on polar issues.
UBC professor Michael Byers, whose book Who Owns the Arctic? is being launched this month, says the transit of the German vessels in the company of Russian icebreakers — widely reported Friday as a landmark commercial passage from East Asia to Western Europe via Arctic waters — underscores Canada's current inability in the Northwest Passage to match Russia's readiness to exploit economic opportunities and assert sovereignty in the melting polar realm.
"The Russians have enough icebreaking capacity to escort convoys of commercial vessels through the Arctic. And with those kinds of time and fuel-savings on offer, they could make a lot of money doing so," Byers told Canwest News Service. "It also helps their sovereignty claim over the Northern Sea Route to be providing such a service, since ships relying on Russian icebreakers are self-evidently asking permission to sail through."
By contrast, he says, Canada's icebreaking fleet is so limited and overtaxed that the director of the Canadian Coast Guard's northern operations recently acknowledged the Arctic region lacks icebreaking capacity because the ships are only on loan from southern ports and must return there each winter to keep clear the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and elsewhere.
This country's icebreaker shortage was also exposed earlier this summer when Parks Canada had to postpone a planned second season of searching for the lost ships of the 19th-century Franklin Expedition. The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier, which was supposed to have been used for the high-profile archeological project, had been reassigned to other duties and wasn't available for the scheduled August search.
While the Conservative government has promised to build a large, heavy-duty icebreaker named for former prime minister John Diefenbaker, and has announced plans for a fleet of six ice-reinforced patrol vessels, the projects have been delayed and will take years to complete in any case.
Byers admits that major spending on Arctic ships is a tough sell during recessionary times, but argues that Canada would benefit in the long run from an expedited construction program — and points to Russia's unmatched transportation capacity in the Arctic as proof.
The German ships now passing along Russia's northern coast, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, began their voyage in south Korea in July and are en route to Rotterdam, Netherlands, with some 3,500 tonnes of construction equipment.
The ships' passage through Arctic waters off Russia was described Friday in the New York Times as "the first true commercial transit of the entire Northeast Passage from Asia to the West."
Byers called the trip a wake-up call for Canada.
"Sadly, Canada does not have surplus icebreaking capacity and our ships are growing old," Byers said in an e-mail message. "Which means that we may be missing financial and sovereignty-strengthening opportunities, and risking the possibility that foreign (i.e., probably Russian) icebreakers might one day lead convoys through our waters, with or without our consent."
The legal status of the three sea routes through Canada's Arctic islands, known collectively as the Northwest Passage, remains unresolved. While Canada claims the routes are part of this country's internal waters, the U.S. and most other countries consider the passage an international strait under no one country's jurisdiction.
In 2007 and 2008, warming Arctic temperatures and unprecedented retreats of northern sea ice have created the best conditions in recorded history for navigating the Northwest Passage.
Ship traffic in the Arctic also set records.
But despite another severe, overall retreat of ice this summer in the Arctic Ocean, shipping was treacherous in the southern route of the Northwest Passage and impossible in the northern route because of localized ice jams.
Experts said the poor sailing was partly the result of weakened, multi-year ice-breaking free of its traditional moorings and drifting into dead ends in Canada's Arctic archipelago.
Source: Vancouver Sun - Canwest News Service
