'We no longer have the luxury of operating the Canadian Coast Guard on a shoestring.'

Canada's Coast Guard has the expertise to protect Canadian interests in the Arctic but lacks money and political support, the Senate's fisheries committee heard last week.

Rob Huebert, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, told the committee the Coast Guard has more experience operating in Arctic waters than the Navy, but lacks the political support that the military enjoys.

That means the Coast Guard gets short-changed in the allocation of government funding.

"The Coast Guard has been a political orphan," Huebert said.

The Coast Guard will benefit from a new $720 million polar class icebreaker announced in last month's federal budget, but that's to replace the aging Louis St. Laurent.

Four other medium-sized icebreakers must also be replaced in the coming years, Huebert said, but lacking a "political champion" the Coast Guard always seems to be first in line for budget cuts.

"We no longer have the luxury of operating the Canadian Coast Guard on a shoestring budget," he said.

Last summer, the federal government announced plans for eight armed Arctic patrol ships, capable of navigating metre-thick first year ice. But those ships will go to the Navy, prompting concerns from Nova Scotia Liberal Senator James Cowan that the Navy and Coast Guard are locked in a turf war.

Huebert replied that Canada needs both the Coast Guard's icebreaking expertise and the Navy's patrol ships. And he said the two organizations work well together, citing last year's joint exercise in the Hudson Strait where a Navy boarding team conducted a practice raid, mounted from a Coast Guard icebreaker, on a rogue vessel.

Military sources say a similar exercise, this year involving a simulated cruise ship grounding off Pangnirtung, is in the works for this summer.

Climate change is causing sea ice to retreat, potentially opening the polar regions to shipping traffic in the future. Meanwhile, skyrocketing oil prices may see oil companies salivating over the prospect of exploiting the Arctic Ocean's potentially massive oil reserves.

"We're going to have a much busier Arctic," Huebert told senators.

"The Arctic is not going to ignore us… Short of a major meltdown we are not going to see a decrease in oil and gas prices."

Huebert said Russia is rapidly opening up its own Arctic waters to oil development and Norway is close on its heels.

And surprising players are trying to get in on the Arctic bonanza: the Chinese have been sending research vessels to the Arctic and South Korea has recently developed double-hulled oil tankers that will be able to traverse first-year sea ice.

In response, Inuit leaders have called upon the government to train Inuit to work in an environmental monitoring system in the Arctic. The prospect of a remote oil spill in the Arctic archipelago has long been considered a nightmare scenario.

Huebert said southern Canadians need a more sophisticated understanding of Arctic sovereignty: that it's not just some vague national idea, but a means of protecting Canadian economic and environmental interests.

"We don't want sovereignty just so we feel good about it," he said. "Quite frankly, it's not worth the tax dollars."

And the European Union is watching the scramble.

A document prepared for the Council of Europe, a body comprised of all 27 EU heads of state, warned at a meeting in Brussels last week that territorial disputes may "challenge Europe's ability to effectively secure its trade and resource interests in the region and may put pressure on its relations with key partners."

Huebert also noted that Canada has some form of border dispute with each of its three Arctic neighbours: the United States, Russia and Demark.

All four countries have been busy bolstering their polar presence and mapping undersea landmasses to back their territorial claims.

But instead of sabre-rattling, all have pledged to resolve border disputes through diplomacy. And all except the United States are submitting undersea claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The Canadian, American and Danish coast guards plan a combined exercise off the coast of Greenland in September.