Those are outstanding questions, sir, and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to clarify on the international cooperation.
You're absolutely right, we need both. They cannot be separated. In fact, if there has been a critique with Canadian policy in the long term, it's that we've had a bit of a tendency to say we do either one or the other. The reality is that to do it efficiently in the Arctic, you need to do both.
Furthermore, even on the issue of the military, I would argue that the correct orientation would be security. The reason is that many of the enforcement capabilities we're going to need for such typical law and order issues—such as fishing regulations and environmental protection—can only be handled with the full, if not complete, participation of the navy and the air force. In other words, there's a bit of a terminology issue in terms of saying military versus security, because you're going to need the RCMP on board for enforcement but a lot of it's going to have to come from the military.
On your point about the interaction between international cooperation and military, I would draw your attention to this, in regard to Norway. As soon as Norway made its claim, as soon as Norway had its claim accepted by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the Russians resumed surface naval operations in the disputed zone for the first time since 1989. The Ustinov and another ship were deployed to each of the disputed zones that the Norwegians and the Russians have.
The Russians and the Norwegians, on the international cooperation side, have an agreement that they would be disagreeing on their continental shelf. So it gets back to this Russian dual policy. On the one hand they're saying yes, let's go cooperatively, but they're also sending very clear signals from a military position that frankly, in my view, escalate the situation and suggest why the two have to be completely hand in hand. You have to have the strength to back up the international cooperation. That is unfortunately the viewpoint of both the Americans and the Russians, and we are basically stuck in the middle.
Turning to the point on NATO, the challenge we have with NATO is that from a political perspective it is our NATO allies that create the biggest problem in terms of the Northwest Passage. The Russian position on the northern sea route is almost a carbon copy of our position on the Northwest Passage. We've never made common cause with them. In other words, we've never gone to the UN and said that we have identical positions and that we will back the Russians if they will back us. There was a whole host of good reasons not to do that, but the reality is that our positions are very similar.
So we've got this complexity when it comes to the Arctic that the countries that have been showing the greatest military issues to us, of course, are the Russians with their overflights and with their sailing into the disputed zones. But by the same token, from a diplomatic perspective, it is the European Union and the Americans, in very recent documentation, that have said clearly that the Northwest Passage is an international strait and therefore Canada does not have complete control over international shipping.
So we are indeed headed into a complicated time, but the answer is that we've got to have the capability backed by good diplomacy. We need both. It's complicated, but I can't see us doing one without the other.