The convention, which I have here, is largely now customary international law. Parts of it were already part of customary international law. This was the third attempt by the United Nations to get a worldwide convention, and they succeeded. It's quite remarkable.
The Americans certainly do support all the customary international law aspects of the Law of the Sea, and they are bound by the territorial sea, the economic zone, the right of innocent passage, and the right to navigation in the EEZ. All of those things they comply with, and they certainly expect Canada to comply with them as well. They don't cease to tell us that.
At the same time, there are certain aspects that you get from being a party of the convention, and one of them is dispute settlement. Another is the determination of the outer limits of the continental shelf, particularly in the Arctic. The Americans, we believe, cannot take advantage of that until they become a party, and the reason they haven't been is largely over seabed mining, which is another aspect that is not so consequential.
The Americans uphold all the aspects of the Law of the Sea that are relevant to what we're discussing here today. The dispute over the A-B line—the Alaska boundary and its nature—goes back to that arbitration, as I said, in 1903. Prior to that time, Canada had already said that Dixon Entrance was an internal water of Canada. Interestingly, the Americans didn't object to that until later.
It's important for us to maintain that position, which we've maintained for more than a hundred years now, that the waters in that area are internal to Canada and that we can exercise Canadian law in those waters. That's why the first attempts to legislate a moratorium focused on that area, fishing zone 3, where we could, under our interpretation, say “no traffic of tankers”.
I think the government switched that approach to avoid an argument with the United States. We have control over our ports: access to and from our ports. The Americans can't object to that, so I think that's the basis of the legislation.