A poor record on Lancaster Sound

No matter how often he waves his arms up and down and regurgitates Discovery Channel clichés like “Serengeti of the Arctic,” John Baird, the federal environment minister, still cannot conceal the extent to which his government has so far bungled the creation of a national protected area in Lancaster Sound.

This means that Baird’s over-promoted announcement on Dec. 6 of proposed boundaries for the park — a small step in the process — does nothing to reassure anyone that his government is capable of getting the job done.

Many readers will recall the furor that erupted earlier this year, when Natural Resources Canada proposed the use of a German scientific vessel, the RV Polarstern, for a lengthy research project in Baffin Bay that relied heavily on seismic explosions produced by an air gun towed behind the ship. As part of this scheme, the Polarstern would have spent a couple of days in Lancaster Sound.

Fearing a return to those days in the 1960s and 1970s when oil and gas firms blasted the ocean with dynamite for months at a time to detect undersea oil and gas reserves, people in the affected communities reacted with unrestrained rage.

Objectively, the Polarstern’s two-day voyage into Lancaster Sound likely posed little threat to marine life.

But no one at Natural Resources Canada or Parks Canada was capable, at any time, of explaining that. At the same time, no one in the federal government seemed capable of explaining why, in December 2009, they proposed Lancaster Sound as a national marine conservation area after they had already agreed to pay German scientists to do seismic tests in the same place. Since seismic testing is usually done to identify oil and gas deposits, the confusion they created was inevitable.

At the heart of this fiasco is the federal government’s inability to do what scores of mineral exploration companies do every year as matter of course. And that’s to provide timely, plain language information about its activities, the kind of skill that elementary school children are supposed to learn in classroom show-and-tell sessions.

As for Baird’s confirmation that no oil and gas exploration, including seismic testing, will occur in Lancaster Sound, some people said they’re pleased.

But Baird’s commitment is meaningless.

The oil and gas industry, for at least a decade and a half, has displayed little or no interest in eastern Nunavut. No oil and gas leases have been awarded to any company for exploration work in eastern Nunavut’s offshore.

This is why the Government of Nunavut sponsored an oil and gas workshop in Iqaluit this past October, but it’s unlikely that that these promotional efforts will stimulate any interest soon.

As for seismic testing, no one in Canada has the capacity to do the kind of work that the Polarstern was contracted for anyway. Since the vessel was booked for other projects many years in advance, lawyers for the Qikiqtani Inuit Association knew that even a temporary injunction would kill that project, and any other seismic testing proposal, for good. They were right.

Meanwhile, the QIA and others, still await the formation of a steering committee to guide negotiations on the conservation area’s creation. The federal government included $5 million in its 2007 budget to pay for this. Why the delay? The absence, after three years, of this steering committee, provides further evidence of Ottawa’s incompetence on the file.

For the future, most of the hard work hasn’t even started. This includes the most important piece of work: an Inuit impact and benefits agreement between the federal government and QIA, which will likely include large amounts of cash and guarantees of Inuit participation in the management of the park.

Based on Ottawa’s performance to date, this mandatory legal requirement is unlikely to be met soon. JB