22 Northern Public Affairs, September 2013 IN CONVERSATION Professor John English Ice and Water: Politics, Peoples, and the Arctic Council. It will be published Jerald Sabin: Your new book, Ice and Water, comes out in October. In the book, you argue that Canada s relationship to the Arctic Council under Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shifted considerably since the 1990s. Can you take us back to the beginning of the Council and to how it emerged? John English: The Arctic Council starts with the last President Mikhail] Gorbachev with giving the initiative for the Arctic Council by talking in October ing up the Arctic more widely, and about contact where this was treated skeptically not suprisingly, idea and proposed an Arctic environmental organi- That was the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), a precursor to the Arctic Council. What was Canada s position on this Arctic zone of peace and the Finnish proposal? The Canadians were thrown off course by the end White Paper was a very hard lined and included apropos the Arctic nuclear submarines, which would be in the North to watch the other Soviet The Canadians were surprised by the Finnish because the Finns wanted every possible opportunity to bring the Soviet Union out of what it had tal agency nothing about security, nothing about social concerns, and nothing about the human ele- The Canadians had been very active in the done in the Department of Indian and Northern Canada had been doing a lot of international work a sink that attracted pollutants from the rest of the world, so the AEPS was timely from the Canadian 1 How did the AEPS transform into the Arctic Council as we know it today? Canada, a group of people took up this challenge to ering of Arctic nations had been proposed as early as the 1970s by Maxwell Cohen a Canadian lawyer of great eminence and our most prominent the Canadian Institute of International Affairs that tawa s Faculty of Law, Donat Pharand had proposed an Arctic treaty similar to the Antarctic treaty dating Conferences took place here in Toronto, funded mainly by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation a foundation which has been long active in Montagu, who is a Gordon daughter, was especially - recognized right from the very start that it would be impossible to have this group of Toronto academics and Tom Axworthy a former aide to [Prime
to have more of a Northern focus and Northern became especially prominent in the early meetings the Canadian meeting in Yellowknife in the lead up to the signing of the AEPS, Mary intervened and said that she was not going to sit at the side but that she would sit at the table with the state representa- the Swedish Foreign Minister and said that [Indige- time to answer her, as he consulted other delega- [the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation s] Arc- the concept developed of permanent participants by The AEPS was signed in 1991. Was Canada something more? The Canadian government, after Mulroney made this pledge for an Arctic Council, tried to develop it was uncertain, but Canada did want an organization and wanted it to go beyond the narrow environ- The Arctic was different from Antarctica, which were clear sovereign states and clear cases of sov- moving forward pretty quickly, but then it slowed was the United States, who just did not like the Arc- - like the idea, in this post-cold War era, of setting up new international organizations as it was just too the third reason was the position of our Indigenous - doubt about whether we should have non-governmental bodies or individuals at tables where states - How was this inertia overcome? talked about a new Northern foreign policy and had one of their pledges that they had made before the instructions for her were to create the Arctic Coun- - - the United Nations a security beyond the bound- was something picked up especially by Lloyd Axworthy when he became Minister of Foreign Affairs tastrophes of the time, whether it Somalia, Rwanda, So, in 1996 when Axworthy came, [Prime Minister Jean] Chrétien met [President Bill] Clinton and The United States was not interested, and proba- the Norwegians had organized a European barrens council, which was very active and fairly success- AEPS had been created too, and the Americans said by this point had built up momentum, appointed a Circumpolar Ambassador with an Arctic Council mandate, and beyond that, there was strong support Northern Public Affairs, September 2013
How did Indigenous peoples propel the creation of the Arctic Council? - - This is an organization that would never have happened if the Inuit Circumpolar Council had not - others have taken it over, and probably pushing the direction, but Indigenous peoples are still there and The Arctic Council was eventually established government continued to support the work of the Council throughout that time, appointing Jack An- government, and they promptly axed the position Canada s foreign policy under Prime Minister Stephen Harper affect the Arctic Council and the work it was doing? One gets the sense that when they came into Prime Minister Harper had given a speech in 2005 that Arctic sovereignty was our principal concern and we must defend it and rank it high in our de- he attacked the American Ambassador about some musings the Ambassador had on the Northwest Pas- said that it didn t really give us very much, which was quite an insult to Mary Simon and Jack Anawak I think the Conservatives saw it as a Liberal ini- ernment itself had been less active in the Council game then, but a change came with 9/11 and so they were told to call the Arctic Council the Mul- - Well, you could say that the Conservative Party has had a long relationship with the North, predating even Diefenbaker s Northern Vision. There has been a close relationship between the Conservative Party, the North, and political and economic development. So, why wasn t the Arctic Council embraced? Was it just its Liberal origins or its international outlook? I think that was it, it was what surrounded the Arc- change was controversial with the Bush Administration and, quite frankly, controversial with the Harp- that mixture of things, it is not surprising that the Where the Harper government did show inter- for the Canadian Forces and incidents such as the dox is that in the Arctic Council, Canada and Russia are now often on the same side, such as vetoing the participation of the EU because of its stance on fur have Arctic sea passages, and the other states don t necessarily recognize their national rights in those So, why have the Conservatives embraced its history? the Arctic s prominence in international politics had become so much more obvious and so much more Arctic coastal nations of which Canada is one made a declaration saying that we don t need together, we will work together, and we will settle When the Arctic Council was being formed, the Finns looked around and asked how many international agreements have the Arctic as a prominent - Northern Public Affairs, September 2013 25
tic states? There was only one and it dealt with polar clause like in the United Nations of Law of the Sea it s collaboration were much greater because there were came to Ottawa and she blasted the Canadian gov- This was a great irony because it was her husband s At Kiruna, non-arctic states like China, India, and Japan were made permanent observers. How has the Council changed in the past few years? The Scandinavians have Chaired the Arctic Council recently, and as they always manage to do, they made it a very effective organization that started to of the veteran delegates from the Arctic Athabaskan Professor John English
Council said the Council really started to change things getting done, such as search and rescue agree- The meetings used to be very small and now spondent! You know, it is only the Canadian news- US Secretary of State never attended the ministe- formed, the only foreign minister who was there was At Kiruna every country, bar Iceland because includes [John] Kerry and [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov, and the Scandinavian foreign Prime Minister of Sweden and one of the great international diplomats of our time in the former Yu- get all his phone calls answered if he calls any capi- suddenly moved into the major league because the be surprised if in the next two or three years it depends on external circumstances to see leaders Before Kiruna, the outstanding issue was what - had a sense that if you admit observers of the size and weight of China, it will affect the operations of permanent participants, there was that sense, but there was a recognition that, as the Arctic becomes have a Chinese voice vetoed or absent would be ister moved Leona Aglukkaq from Health to the Environment. What do you make of that? I think it is interesting that she was moved to Envi- emphasized what one could call domestic matters for example, talked almost exclusively about climate er mentioned climate change once, he mentioned Having said that, a lot of what the Arctic Coun- representatives at the Council are representatives of Aglukkaq was in health meant that her domestic responsibilities were pretty far from an Arctic perspec- oil companies are saying that it s being affected In Environment she ll have a more direct relation- Why should Northerners be keeping their eyes on the Arctic Council? They should be keeping their eyes on the Council a huge impact on the way the Arctic was perceived ordination has a direct impact on individuals in the I was impressed by the buzz at the side of the the meetings were brief and low-level affairs among people come there, including business people trying to sell things, and it is clearly a place where some- to affect how people live on the ground in Nunavut, the only organization I can think of which has a sig- Axworthy said in 1996 when it was founded, this will John English is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo and a former MP. He is the author of the acclaimed prises Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott and the award-winning Just Watch Footnotes by Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the So- Northern Public Affairs, September 2013 27
SWEDEN Photo credit: Fredrik Broman/imagebank.sweden.se