Accessibility Notice

Climate Change, Sovereignty, and the Future of the Inuit

A. Nunavut in Canada’s Foreign Policy

The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement is not only of national importance but of international importance: Nunavut is central to Canadian foreign policy, and will only become more so. NTI has put it this way:

Implementation of comprehensive land claims agreements is commonly “ghettoized” in the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, far from the locus of national and international policy debate between central agencies. This is not surprising, perhaps, in light of the small scale and local nature of many comprehensive land claims agreements. This is not, however, the case with the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement which intersects with Canada’s national and international interests and obligations, and foreign policy objectives.

The centrality of the Agreement and of Nunavut to Canadian foreign policy in the Arctic is determined by the sheer size of Nunavut and the length of its coastline. Nearly forty percent of Canada is above the 60^th parallel; and the geographic centre of Canada is near Baker Lake, in Nunavut, considerably north of the tree line.

The Arctic basin is no longer remote. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by the islands and coastal regions of Russia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia.

Indeed, there is already an international dimension to Canada’s stewardship of the Arctic.

Areas designated by the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement as “Inuit Owned Lands” include areas with significant and proven mineral potential, and zones of high biological productivity. Sometimes referred to as “Arctic oases,” many high productivity wetlands within Inuit-owned land are nationally and continentally important breeding and staging areas for migratory birds managed, in part, under the Migratory Birds Convention with the United States. Some wetlands in Nunavut (Queen Maud Gulf, Polar Bear Pass, Rasmussen Lowlands, and Dewey Soper) have been designated under the 1971 Ramsar Wetlands Convention and others are pending.

Inuit wildlife harvesting rights to the onshore and offshore include species of international importance and concern including large cetaceans such as bowhead whales, and marine mammals including polar bears. Polar bears are managed under the five-nation Polar Bear Convention, to which Canada is a party. Inuit traditional ecological knowledge, as outlined in articles 8j and 1Oc of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which Canada has also ratified, is increasingly important in setting harvest quotas by the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.

Canada appointed its first ambassador for circumpolar affairs in 1990.

In 1996 the Arctic Council was established; its members are Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Norway Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Russia.

In 2001 Canada formally acknowledged the need to develop a "Northern dimension" to Canadian foreign policy.

But now Arctic warming has greatly added to the importance of this Northern dimension.

With Arctic warming, the landscape and seascape may be greatly altered. The Nunavut Settlement Area includes huge offshore waters such as the Northwest Passage and the other passages through the Arctic Islands. Canada asserts full jurisdiction and control over these waters as internal waters. The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union do not accept Canada’s assertion and characterize the waterways instead as international waters. If this contention were to prevail, it would limit Canada’s authority to regulate shipping to combat marine pollution in what we claim to be Canadian waters. It might also give rise to disputes over ownership of oil and gas and mineral resources under the sea.

Canada may find that it is fully engaged in the Arctic, that it is as important a subject for the Department of Foreign Affairs as our Atlantic or Pacific coasts.

Experts disagree on whether the retreat of the ice in the Arctic archipelago represents an impending threat to sovereignty, as other countries and shipping firms challenge Canada’s claim over Arctic waters, or a law enforcement problem (as “rogue” shippers begin to move through the passage without adequate regulation).[96] Either way, though, all agree that the Inuit are key to demonstrating and maintaining Canada’s control over the Arctic. Professor Franklyn Griffiths has written:

We should build a stronger capacity for collective choice in the Canadian Arctic… Inuit know the area best. They are constant in their attachment to it in ways that southerners cannot equal. In partnership with the Federal government, they will insist on an exercise of control which is not remote but sensitive to local conditions, not agitated about a distant place but grounded in that place.[97]

NTI puts it this way:

In short, effective implementation of the [Nunavut Land Claims Agreement] contributes significantly to the objectives of the Government of Canada’s 2001 Northern Dimension Foreign Policy. Some foreign governments characterize Nunavut as the “test” by which Canada is evaluated in terms of its treatment of aboriginal peoples and the key measure of its approach to northern development. Certainly Canada has and continues to trumpet Nunavut as an international model of accommodation between an Indigenous people and a nation state in which they reside.

B. The Changing Physical Environment and Economic Development

Although experts disagree over the rapidity of climate change and the extent to which it can be attributed to human activity,[98] there is no question that global climate change is a reality.

We are accustomed to news of climate change, of the challenge that global warming may represent; nevertheless, for most of us in the temperate zones it is a distant rumble. In the Arctic, however, climate change is not remote. It is already happening.

We are now calling it climate change, but in the Arctic it is the warming that is apparent. It can be seen everywhere: Permafrost is melting, storm surges across extended open water are eroding the banks of coastal communities, the ice goes out earlier and forms again later than it did before, shifting patterns of ice and snowfall impede the migration of caribou as well as the seasonal movements of polar bears and seals.

On November 8, 2004 the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) was made public. It was sponsored by eight Arctic countries and carried out by a team of 300 scientists. The report, 1800 pages long, entitled “Impacts of a Warming Arctic”, included findings that:

• “The Arctic is warming much more rapidly than previously known at nearly twice the rate as the rest of the globe, and increasing greenhouse gases from human activities are calculated to make it warmer still.”
• “In Alaska, Western Canada, and Eastern Russia average winter temperatures have increased as much as 3 to 4 C (4 to 7 F) in the past 50 years, and are projected to rise 4 to 7 (7 to 13 F) over the next 100 years.”
• “Arctic summer sea ice is projected to decline by at least 50 per cent by the end of this century with some models showing near-complete disappearance of summer sea ice. This is very likely to have devastating consequences for some arctic animal species, such as ice-living seals and for local people for whom these animals are a primary food source. At the same time, reduced sea ice extent is likely to increase marine access to some of the region’s resources.”
• “Warming over Greenland is projected to lead to substantial melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, contributing to global level rise at increasing rates. Over the long term, Greenland contains enough melt water to eventually raise sea levels by about 7 meters (about 23 feet).”

Moreover, global warming may be accelerating. NASA’s study of the Arctic ice, released on September 28, 2005 shows that Arctic ice cover has shrunk by 10 per cent in the last four years. The extent of Arctic sea ice in September last year was 20 percent below the long-term average for September, melting an extra 500,000 square miles.

In the summer of 2005 the Arctic pack ice retreated to its smallest size in recorded history, about 5.5 million square kilometres (in 1979 it was 7.5 million square kilometres). Every year, it is said, the polar ice cap is smaller by an area the size of Lake Superior.

Springtime melting in the Arctic has begun much earlier; in 2005 it started 17 days sooner than expected. In Greenland, across Davis Strait, the past two years were the warmest ever recorded in some of the coastal communities.

Ten years ago the people at Cape Dorset could travel in September or October over the ice of Telluk Inlet to Baffin Island. Last year they couldn’t make the journey over the ice until mid-December. In Iqaluit, in December, Inuit were putting to sea in Frobisher Bay in small pleasurecraft; I was told that, even a few years past, they could far more easily have walked across the frozen Bay. Birds such as robins are appearing for the first time. The anecdotes were universal; no one who has more than a few years' experience in the Arctic doubts that change is upon us.

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a presentation to the American Geophysical Union, December 6, 2005, said that:

Earth’s climate has neared, but has not passed a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. This includes not only the loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to rising seas.

The increasing warming of the North has obvious ramifications for economic development. The warming of the Arctic will make Nunavut’s minerals, its oil and gas more accessible. The opening of the Northwest Passage and the other passages through the Arctic Islands will bring navigation and shipping.

The Inuit have in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement safeguarded rights of harvesting, so as to ensure the survival of subsistence (hunting, fishing and trapping) activities, the principal means by which people of the Arctic and sub-Arctic have survived in the past. In our own time they still provides a measure of self- sufficiency. Arctic warming, however, may bring accelerated industrial activity. And it may mean the loss of animal species the Inuit have depended on for centuries. Polar bear, walrus, and other marine mammals and birds may over time be at risk of extinction. The hunting and food sharing culture of Inuit may be under significant threat. I know it is said that with global warming species will flourish in the new climate and replace the species that are gone. But no one can predict such things with any confidence.

Global warming could bring not only physical change but also demographic change to Nunavut - the possibility that an altered landscape, greatly increased navigation, mining on a much larger scale, and access to Arctic oil and gas might bring non-Inuit in numbers. I am not suggesting the agricultural frontier would migrate northward to the Arctic. But the number of permanent residents who are non-Inuit could significantly increase. It will be necessary to secure the place of the Inuit in the economic life of Nunavut as well as in their own public service.

Arctic warming may transform Nunavut. Resources that were locked in the snow and ice inaccessible through the frozen waterways may now be opened up.

The coming decades are likely to be a period of uncertainty and yet at the same time one of opportunity in the North; the Inuit must be ready to take their place – not only in the public service but also in the private sector as miners, drillers, mechanics, mariners, geologists and engineers.

This makes the case for the type of bilingual education program I am recommending, one qualifying the Inuit for post-secondary training and for work in the public sector or the private sector all the more compelling.

C. The Inuit and Arctic Sovereignty

The melting of polar ice has brought the world’s attention to the fact that the Northwest Passage and the other passages through the Arctic Islands may in the quite foreseeable future be navigable for substantial periods of each year. Ownership of the resources and authority over the sea routes – in short, sovereignty over the North – is a topic of increasing discussion.

Effective occupation is one of the keys to sovereignty under international law. The immemorial presence of the Inuit in Canada’s Arctic, as much as British and Canadian voyages through the Arctic Islands, is fundamental to Canada’s claim. For centuries, the Inuit were the sole occupants of the Arctic Islands and most of Canada’s Arctic coastline. They lived on the land and on the ice; they harvested the resources of the land and the sea. We used to think of the early explorers of the Arctic and sub-Arctic as if they were tracing their way across some far-off planet. We thought of them as the first cartographers of the Arctic. In Canada we now know, through Aboriginal mapping projects conducted in recent years, that before Europeans came the Arctic was already mapped by the Inuit—traced all over by their hunting patterns.

Canada was established in 1867. It did not then include the vast territory it encompasses today. It consisted of four provinces extending from Nova Scotia to the head of Lake Superior. It did not include northern Ontario or northern Quebec. Its borders did not reach James Bay or Hudson Bay, let alone the Arctic and the Arctic Islands. At Confederation, therefore, Canada did not include the traditional territory of the Inuit.

The United Kingdom formally transferred Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada in 1870, and then the Arctic Islands in 1880. The Inuit still held Aboriginal title over much of this area. But more importantly, the Inuit used and occupied their traditional territories in ways that Canada could not. Canada’s gradual assertion of control over the Arctic was achieved not through conquest but rather through a remarkable partnership. The joint RCMP and Inuit dogsled patrols and oceanic voyages (such as the famous voyages of the St. Roch[99] in 1940-42 and 1944) helped to secure Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic.

A special reservist unit, the Canadian Rangers, was established in 1947 to provide a permanent Canadian military presence in even the remotest communities.[100] To this day the almost entirely-Inuit Canadian Rangers are the only substantial full-time military presence in Nunavut and they continue the tradition begun by the RCMP/Inuit patrols, but with snowmobiles in place of dog teams. This year, the Inuit Rangers and Canadian Forces will conduct the most ambitious series of patrols yet undertaken: five teams supported by aerial resupply that will traverse disputed waters under the codename Operation Nunalivut (meaning "the land is ours").

Canada’s desire to establish its sovereignty in the High Arctic also led, at least in part, to the 1953 decision of the federal government to resettle some Inuit families farther North.[101] Seven families from the Inukjuak (Port Harrison) area in northern Quebec and three families from Pond Inlet in what is now Nunavut were resettled in communities at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island and at Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. Over the next three years, the number of resettled families rose to seventeen. These Inuit communities remain the most northerly Canadian presence apart from the military personnel who man a remote listening post at CFS Alert on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, about 800 km south of the Pole.

The preamble to the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement recites the considerations that impelled the Parties to in 1993 to enter into the Agreement. One of the considerations is stated in this way:

“AND IN RECOGNITION of the contributions of Inuit to Canada’s history, identity and sovereignty in the Arctic.”[102]

This provision is unique in Canadian relations with Aboriginal peoples: No other comprehensive land claims agreement or historic treaty acknowledges the contribution of an Aboriginal people to Canada’s sovereignty in this way.

In signing the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, the Inuit formally ceded to Canada their Aboriginal title to Nunavut.[103] In Article 2.7.1 the following appears:

2.7.1 In consideration of the rights and benefits provided to Inuit by the Agreement, Inuit hereby:

(a) cede, release and surrender to Her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada, all their aboriginal claims, rights, title and interests, if any, in and to lands and waters anywhere within Canada and adjacent offshore areas within the sovereignty or jurisdiction of Canada; and

(b) agree, on their behalf, and on behalf of their heirs, descendants and successors not to assert any cause of action, action for a declaration, claim or demand of whatever kind or nature which they ever had, now have or may hereafter have against Her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada or any province, the government of any territory or any person based on any aboriginal claims, rights, title or interests in and to lands and waters described in Sub-section (a).

Only with this formal cession was Canada's claim to the Arctic and the Arctic Islands complete, unburdened by Aboriginal title. The signing of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was thus a vital step in strengthening Canada's claim of sovereignty. For Canada to assert sovereignty over the Arctic and the Arctic Islands while the Aboriginal people who have always inhabited them had not yet freely ceded their title would have been more than an embarrassment; it would have impaired Canada’s claim of sovereignty as against other nations.[104]

Today, because the Inuit still use and occupy the Arctic, they continue to contribute to Canada’s “history, identity and sovereignty in the Arctic.”

In years to come Canada, in asserting its claim, will be dependent on international law. The Inuit presence in the Arctic, their use of the sea and the sea ice, is the surest proof of Canada’s claim. As the ice melts and shipping lanes open and resources become accessible, their long-standing occupation of the land and the waterways (every one of Nunavut’s 27 communities is on tidewater) will work to Canada's advantage. Canada must see that the opening of the Arctic works to the advantage of the Inuit.

Footnotes:

• 96 The debate is captured in competing articles by professors Rob Huebert and Franklyn Griffiths: see for instance Rob Heubert, “The Shipping News Part II: How Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty is on Thinning Ice” (2003) 58 International Journal 295; Franklyn Griffiths, “Pathetic Fallacy: That Canada’s Sovereignty is on Thinning Ice”, (2004) 11 Can. Foreign Policy 1. (return to source paragraph)
• 97 Griffiths, Ibid. at p. 14. (return to source paragraph)
• 98 There is substantial agreement that human industrial activity is at least a significant contributing factor. At the Gleneagles summit in Scotland in July, 2005 the G8 leaders subscribed to a document entitled “Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development,” which states: “Climate change is a serious and long term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the globe. We know that increased need and use of energy from fossil fuels, and other human activities, contribute in large part to increases in greenhouse gases associated with the warming of our Earth’s surface.”(return to source paragraph)
• 99 At Vancouver’s Maritime Museum today you can visit the St. Roch and see the quarters provided for Capt. Henry Larsen and his RCMP crew, and the tent on the foredeck occupied by the Panipakoocho family who accompanied Larsen on his 1944 voyage through the Northwest Passage. (return to source paragraph)
• 100 At present, the First Canadian Rangers Patrol Group (1 CRPG) has the majority of its patrols in Nunavut, manned almost entirely by Inuit. 1 CRPG conducts 30 sovereignty patrols to remote areas every year. The Rangers also perform security and search-and-rescue functions in the North, and assist in survival training for Canadian Forces and allied personnel. (return to source paragraph)
• 101 A similar program begun in the 1930s had been more or less abandoned by the end of World War II. There is still debate regarding the true impetus behind the resettlement; it may have been motivated also by what the federal government believed were greater opportunities for sustained wildlife harvesting in Resolute and Grise Fjord. (return to source paragraph)
• 102 This same acknowledgement is repeated in the Partnership Accord signed in 2004 with the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Inuit from all regions of Canada. (return to source paragraph)
• 103 The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was preceded in 1984 by the Inuvialuit Land Claims Agreement, ceding the Aboriginal title of the Inuvialuit in the Western Arctic to Canada. (return to source paragraph)
• 104 To be sure, once sovereignty is asserted by a nation over lands occupied by an Aboriginal people, the courts of that nation must act accordingly, whether Aboriginal title has been surrendered or not. In the international arena, however, in the case of Arctic waters, the issue is not so easily resolved. (return to source paragraph)