Thank you very much. Mr. Chair.
I speak French but, today, I will stick to English.
I agree with almost everything my friend and colleague has just said, which enables me to stand on his broad shoulders and venture into a couple of specific areas.
First of all, I'd just like to explain to the committee members where I'm coming from in general. I regard the Arctic as an area of broad political agreement within Canada, so partisan views are not particularly important here. I certainly come to this issue on the basis of academic expertise. Among other things, I am a principal investigator with ArcticNet, which is a federally funded consortium of Arctic scientists from 27 Canadian universities and eight federal departments. I think it's also relevant that I advised former Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon on his Arctic foreign policy statement two years ago and was very pleased with that document. So I'm here to give my best advice to this committee in the hope that all parties can work together to come up with the right answers here.
It's highly appropriate that this committee is considering this issue because many of the challenges concerning the Arctic are quintessential foreign policy challenges. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by continents, and of course across that ocean you have the former Cold War divide between Russia and NATO. You have some very significant challenges coming up with melting sea ice, shipping, potential threats from non-state actors. There's a dynamic here that is really very much a foreign policy dynamic. Just to give you one example, the Russian military has most of its strategic nuclear deterrents based on the Kola Peninsula, which happens to be north of the Arctic Council. The moment you start talking about the Arctic, you're talking about the relationship between Russia and the United States; you're talking about Mr. Obama's effort at a reset of that relationship. We can't divorce these issues from that larger geopolitical dynamic, and one needs to recognize that there are forces at work—including Mr. Obama's major diplomatic push—that should affect Canada's approach as well.
The other thing to say is that there's a general recognition that there's little prospect of military conflict between nation-states despite that Cold War history. Thanks to WikiLeaks, for instance, and a cable from Ambassador David Jacobson to Hillary Clinton in January 2010, we know that the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, told the Secretary General of NATO that there was no role for the alliance in the Arctic because, and I quote, “relations with Russia are good”.
So behind closed doors, certainly, there's a very strong recognition that this is not a sphere where there's any likelihood of military conflict. In the Arctic, if not elsewhere, Russia has embraced and is implementing a policy of international cooperation. That is something that is quite significant. It was in that spirit that Foreign Minister Cannon crafted the foreign policy statement that committed Canada to resolving, through negotiations, its Arctic boundary disputes, and we are now in active discussions on the Beaufort Sea boundary with the United States, in active discussions on the link and sea boundary dispute with Denmark. Our scientists and our diplomats are talking with the Danes and the Russians about possible disputes—not yet disputes—in the central Arctic Ocean once submissions are made by those three countries to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
So, generally, it's a pretty positive scene: international cooperation, recognition of this by the Canadian government, and now, with our upcoming chairmanship of the Arctic Council, an opportunity to lead that cooperation further, to build on the government's Arctic foreign policy statement from two years ago. The challenges are enormous, obviously, and so too are the opportunities.
Speaking of challenges, it needs to be emphasized that the Arctic is on the very front lines of global climate change.
In the western Canadian Arctic, we have already seen a five-degree Celsius increase in average annual temperature. That is phenomenal, and it has all kinds of consequences. The Arctic Council has played a lead role in the past on this issue. In 2004, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was the definitive study of climate change in the Arctic—its causes, mostly man-made, and its various consequences, some of them quite severe for indigenous peoples, ecosystems, and adaptive challenges.
There are things that Canada and other Arctic countries can and should do with regard to this challenge. There is the global issue of reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. One cannot divorce that from Arctic foreign policy. There are also specific Arctic causes of climate change. I would mention black carbon and Arctic haze, which are short-lived climate forcers. There's an opportunity at the Arctic Council to move on those issues—to partner with the United States and Russia in reducing black carbon emissions from diesel generators and diesel trucks to deal with the challenge of Arctic haze. These things are accelerating and exacerbating the larger climate changes resulting from other greenhouse gases.
The other issue that arises in terms of adaptation is shipping. We have seen a record-breaking melt of Arctic sea ice this past summer. I remember six or seven years ago, when I was warning that we might see seasonally ice-free waters through the Northwest Passage, I was assured by very many people, including a number of distinguished scientists, that my concerns were overblown and that we wouldn't actually see any significant melt-out of the Arctic Ocean ice pack until at least 2050, and probably not until 2100. The leading scientists are now predicting that we could see a total late-summer melt of Arctic sea ice as early as 2015 to 2020. That is truly astounding—not only for what it says about the pace of climate change, but also for the consequences. We could be seeing hundreds if not thousands of international ship movements through the Northwest Passage within the next couple of decades. We need to get on top of that.
In the Q and A, if people are interested, I would like to talk about the possibilities for diplomacy with the United States and Russia regarding the Northwest Passage issue and its link with the northern sea route. I would also appreciate a chance to talk about the U.S. concerns about precedents. An important article has just been published by Frédéric Lasserre at Laval University and Suzanne Lalonde at the University of Montreal, suggesting that there are only two straits significantly affected by a potential Northwest Passage precedent—one is between the island of Hainan and mainland China; the other is the northern sea route. In practical terms, no one is going to challenge either China or Russia over their claims.
Another adaptation issue is oil and gas development. There is a lot of excitement about Arctic oil and gas. There is not enough appreciation of the challenges and the risks. Shell just spent $4 billion failing to drill wells north of Alaska. Cairn Energy just wrote off $1.4 billion drilling dry wells just west of Greenland. Part of the cause for these high numbers is that the remoteness, the challenges of ice, and the short drilling season pose real limitations. Then there's the fact that oil dissipates and disperses very slowly in cold water. Your security measures have to be ramped up several times over as compared with other regions. I would like to talk about that in Q and A. I would like to talk about what the Arctic Council is doing on this. There is going to be a new treaty on oil spill preparation and response. We need a new treaty. Canada could lead on a new treaty on oil spill prevention.
I would love to have a question about fisheries management and protection in the central Arctic Ocean. The United States has been making a real push for the creation of a regional fisheries organization for the central Arctic Ocean. Canada knows all about regional fisheries protection because of our experience with Spain off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland back in the 1990s. The United States is looking for leadership here. I believe Canada could step up to the plate and help the Americans protect the Arctic Ocean fisheries to the benefit of everyone.
Thank you very much. Merci beaucoup.