If I could jump in, this is something that keeps me up at night in terms of our ability to enforce our sovereignty.

Russia is the only other country that has made similar claims regarding control of a similar waterway, in terms of what they have done for the northern sea route. However, the Russians clearly have gone beyond Canada in their claim. The northern sea route exceeds what Canada has basically claimed as a similar right of control within the Northwest Passage. Once again, the difference between Canada and Russia is that Russia has a very vigorous enforcement capability. The Russians will say no to ships that they think do not meet their standards, or for political reasons.

I'll point out that in 2017, the Chinese asked for consent to send the Chinese ship Xue Long through the Northwest Passage. Given the animosities that were developing between China and Canada at the time and the fact that we say we want these waters to be internal because we want to have control for the protection of Canadian security and interests, I'm left a bit curious as to why we ultimately gave that consent. I say “consent”, because in my understanding that's what we gave, as opposed to permission.

The question is, do we have the political will to actually enforce it? I've been following this for a very long time. We've been saying we're going to build a large icebreaker since September 1985, when it was announced by Joe Clark. We're still waiting to build it.

If we say we're going to build two right now.... Once again, I think it illustrates that in terms of the Russian capability to enforce having countries follow their rules within the northern sea route and the Northeast Passage, we would be well advised to take a page from their book.

I believe that even though the Europeans have not accepted our straight baselines—they say we cannot draw it that way—I would add that each of the European countries has an Arctic strategy that says they want to see freedom of navigation in the newly emerging waterways of the Arctic. They don't name the Northwest Passage, but you can detect that's what they are talking about. The means by which we deter them from any action that would threaten us would be to have enforcement capability.

That is a problem we continue to have. I'd say we can trace it all the way back to the Joe Clark statement about Arctic sovereignty on September 10, 1985.