Norway, Russia strike deal on Arctic boundary

RANDY BOSWELL
CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

An unexpected landmark agreement this week between Norway and Russia on where to draw an offshore boundary in the oil-rich Barents Sea heralds a new era of circumpolar peace, says a leading Canadian expert on Arctic affairs.

But University of British Columbia professor Michael Byers, author of the Donner Prize-nominated book Who Owns the Arctic?, says the surprise Norwegian-Russian deal puts more pressure on Canada, the U.S. and Denmark to resolve their outstanding Arctic territorial disputes at a time when the region’s economic opportunities and environmental challenges are coming into sharper focus.

“The fact that Moscow has surrendered its claim to half the area is hugely significant. It provides concrete evidence of Russia’s willingness to co-operate in the Arctic — even with much weaker states,” Byers told Canwest News Service.

“It also raises the question of why (Canada’s) two remaining Arctic sovereignty disputes of any significance — the Beaufort Sea and Northwest Passage — have not yet been resolved,” he added. “We’ve become the laggards of Arctic diplomacy, with still messy boundaries in an increasingly neat neighbourhood.”

The Barents Sea agreement, subject to final polishing, ends a dispute over a 175,000-sq.-km section of the Arctic Ocean that has been a source of friction between Norway and Russia for 40 years. The solution divides the area roughly in half.

“This is a historic day,” Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said in a statement issued Tuesday. “We have reached a breakthrough in the most important outstanding issue between Norway and the Russian Federation.”

The two countries share a 200-km land border and a vast maritime frontier.

The deal was struck just a month after Norway’s foreign minister raised eyebrows in Ottawa — just hours ahead of an Arctic Summit hosted by the Canadian government — by painting Russia as politically volatile neighbour that stoked uncertainty in relations among all five Arctic coastal states.

At a March 29 press briefing, Jonas Gahr Store highlighted the challenge of negotiating the Arctic’s future with Russia, which he described as “not yet a stable, reliable, predictable state.”

Store did stress that his country’s strategy is to build a trusting, co-operative relationship with its eastern neighbour on Arctic issues.

And he credited Moscow with acting, so far, in a “civilized way” to work out undersea territorial claims and confront other issues — new shipping rules, oil exploration and polar security — common to the five countries with Arctic Ocean coastlines.

Canada and the other polar coastal states first pledged to avoid territorial conflict in the region during a 2008 summit in Greenland, a meeting prompted by the international uproar following a Russian submersible’s planting of a flag on the North Pole seabed.

Canada’s Conservative government recently announced it was making the resolution of Arctic territorial disputes a key priority.

Canwest News Service revealed last month that talks had begun between Canada and the U.S. related to a decades-old boundary dispute in the Beaufort Sea.

Both countries lay claim to Lake Ontario-sized area in the southern Beaufort with major oil and gas potential. The disagreement stems from conflicting interpretations about how the maritime boundary should be drawn north of the Yukon-Alaska land border.

Canada and the U.S. have “agreed to disagree” for decades over navigation authority in the Northwest Passage, the shipping route through Canada’s Arctic islands that this country deems “internal waters” and the U.S. considers an “international strait.”

But Byers and other experts have recently urged the two countries to begin serious negotiations to clarify the legal status of the passage at a time when melting ice has stoked international interest in Arctic shipping and resource development, but has also heightened environmental concerns.