I think you're raising a number of important issues. Certainly, in terms of the timeline, I think partly it's.... I'll tie this back to the issue of rhetoric. We have to be careful not to get ahead of ourselves in political grandstanding vis-à-vis the Americans or the Russians. We haven't yet even submitted our claims, so really, a lot of the bluster is about potentially losing something that we haven't even claimed yet. To me, this seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
I'm a bit concerned. Let's wait and see. When the Russians submitted their data and it wasn't as rigorous as the commissioners wanted, the United Nations sent it back and said, “Come on, give us better data”. So I think a lot of the alarmism surrounding this 2013 deadline is sometimes overplayed.
You asked important questions about submarines. On some of the références or comments about the need for subsurface acoustic rays, or whatever the modern technology is, at choke points, I think it is important, but I still think it always comes back to the same common denominator: we have allies who are submarine-capable and who are gathering data. As for whether we have some sort of arrangement that goes back to the 1960s with them to share that information on an agree-to-disagree basis, I can't know, and I wouldn't want to know, because it would prejudice that agreement.
If we don't have some sort of arrangement with the Americans, rather than thinking that we need to gather all this intelligence ourselves, this, to me, seems a good pretext to sit down and say, “Look, we understand that for geostrategic reasons you're not going to acknowledge that these waters, this Northwest Passage, are internal straits.” It has little to do with the Arctic, and it has everything to do with the Strait of Hormuz and other strategic straits around the world.
We acknowledge that as Canadians we're confident in our sovereignty. We can sit down and negotiate as equals and figure out ways of sharing information under the auspices of NORAD, thanks to its expansion into the maritime domain. I think there are opportunities here for creative diplomacy on the part of Canada when we get out of this need to grandstand over Arctic sovereignty issues and sit down and do the diplomatic work that's needed to come up with lasting resolutions.