OTTAWA -- Canada is preparing to claim an area of the Arctic Ocean seabed equivalent in size to the Prairie provinces as part of Ottawa's aggressive effort to defend Canadian interests in the North, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn said yesterday.
Mr. Lunn is scheduled to attend an Arctic Council meeting today in Greenland with four other countries that have significant - and in some cases, competing - claims to territorial jurisdiction beyond the traditional 200-nautical-mile limit. "We will be reaffirming our commitment about defending and protecting our sovereignty in the Arctic," Mr. Lunn said in an interview yesterday. "It's a priority for our government. The Prime Minister has said: 'Use it or lose it.' And we're not going to lose it."
Denmark is host of the Greenland meeting, which will also have representatives from Russia, Norway and the United States. All five countries are preparing claims to the subsea continental shelf under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, although the Americans have yet to ratify the treaty.
The participants will discuss how to proceed with economic and social development in the North, and how to give northerners more control, Mr. Lunn said. In doing so, they are attempting to prevent an unbridled resource rush in which countries stake competing claims and ignore social and environmental problems in their haste to exploit what some believe is the planet's last great, untapped source of energy and mineral resources.
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