Canada's North, South agree on Arctic: study

Country clashes with other Arctic nations on sovereignty
CBC News

The Arctic is highly important and deserving of a dominant place in the country's foreign policy, a new poll suggests. (Canadian Press)  People in Canada's North and South agree that the Arctic is highly important and deserving of a dominant place in the country's foreign policy, a new poll suggests.There is a "surprising level of consensus within Canada on these issues," says a report released Tuesday by the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, an independent philanthropic group based in Toronto.

ARCTIC POLL

"There's very few things [in Canada] that we can say that we have a general common agreement upon," said Neil Desai, a director of programs and communication with the Munk School, located at the University of Toronto. "I jokingly say that you have hockey, beer and now the Arctic."The report is based on an EKOS Research Associates poll that included phone interviews with close to 2,800 Canadians, including 744 residents of the territories.Responses in both the North and South suggest that the Arctic is a cornerstone of national identity, that it is the country's foremost foreign policy priority, that environmental issues are the North's primary concern, and that the region is under-resourced.

"Southern public opinion is largely consistent with northern public opinion," the report says. "The main area of difference ... is that sovereignty and security issues are relatively more prominent for the South and the infrastructure and the environment are relatively more important for the North."When asked unprompted a plurality of respondents — 33 per cent in the North and 39 per cent in the South — said the environment was the Arctic's most important issue.However, community infrastructure was the second most chosen top priority in the North at nine per cent, while in the South sovereignty was the next most popular answer at 19 per cent.

A majority of Canadians in both the North (59 per cent) and the South (56 per cent) believe military security should be a top priority, even if it means pulling military resources away from other parts of the world.The researchers also surveyed the seven other member nations of the Arctic Council: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.While internally Canadians may see eye to eye on Arctic issues, the Canadian public is the least open of these countries to negotiation and compromise, says the report.

Canadians are overwhelmingly convinced that the Northwest Passage is a sovereign Canadian waterway, the report suggests, but none of the other countries share this view.That hardline attitude includes Canada's ongoing dispute over the Beaufort Sea."The majority of Canadians stated that they want their government to assert its sovereignty over the Beaufort Sea as opposed to negotiating a deal with the Americans," Desai said. "Interestingly enough, the Americans polled said they would prefer to negotiate a deal with their best friend and neighbour, Canada."

Timo Koivurova, a research professor and director of the Northern Institute for Environmental and Minority Law at the University of Lapland in Finland, said one of the biggest surprises for her was that the respondents had a "fairly realistic view" of the Arctic."The media seems to tell us that there is [a] scrabble for resources or that the cold war never left the Arctic, but in the end I think most of the researchers nowadays admit that there is no race for resources, there is no Cold War there, and the interviews were very realistic as to what is actually happening," he said.

He said the biggest threat to the Arctic is the environment and the results reflected that. In total, the study included a total of 9,083 respondents. The margin of error ranged from plus or minus 3.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, in the territories, to plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, in the provinces.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2011/01/24/canada-north-south-arctic-poll.html#ixzz1C3df4EUw