I'll come back to my very first point, which is that the Arctic is a very large place and so most of the Arctic will fall unquestionably, indisputably, into one or another country's sovereign jurisdiction. Russia will get a large amount of seabed on the Russian side of the ocean; Canada will get a large amount of seabed on our side of the ocean. The actual potential overlaps only amount to about 5% or 10% of the whole. So we're not talking about the whole Arctic in potential dispute; we're talking about some overlaps.
A lot of this will be resolved by the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf by looking at the science to determine whether the seabed is a natural prolongation of one country's continental shelf as opposed to another country's continental shelf. There will be potentially some remaining disputes, and those will be ultimately left to diplomatic negotiation. We have a dispute and we will have a dispute with Denmark and the Lincoln Sea over a couple of hundred kilometres of seabed. Let's sort that out now so it doesn't cause problems in the future. And it's the same thing in the Beaufort Sea, with the Americans, in terms of the dispute there.
Then in terms of the Russians, in terms of that area in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, it's a good thing for us to be talking, as Alan Kessel, the senior lawyer at DFAIT, was talking with the Russians about filing a joint set of claims, so we actually sort that out between ourselves, split any difference, and resolve it diplomatically rather than throwing it off to some third body like the UN commission.
The fact of the matter is that oil and gas exploitation in the very middle of the Arctic Ocean isn't going to happen for 100 years. It is so far north, it is so inhospitable. It is in total darkness for several months each year, and the North Pole itself is in 4,000 metres of water. There's some symbolic value attached to this, but in terms of practical value, resolving the issue with the Russians now would be a very sensible thing.