[Newsbot]

Title: Canada, U.S. flip-flop positions in Beaufort Sea boundary dispute
Category: World
Posted By: Hyack
Date: 2010-03-08 19:57:27
Canadian

[Canadian_Mind]

Anyone with a map could have figured that out. Kinda disturbing really that our politicians don't look far enough ahead to see that. in the same light, we should also have control of the arctic on what is currently regarded as the Russian side of the North Pole

[Canadianiam]

This is all PR, nothing new except the position being taken in the press. Now it appears that the US is going to accept our position and is trying to justify it to the American reader. So that is a good thing.

A bad thing is ".....NDP leader Jack Layton called "the largest encroachment on Canadian territory in our history"

Uh, no. Canadians are just unaware of their history. The problem is we can’t teach history in schools as it would piss people off.

Hell we didn’t even celebrate the most important year in Canadian history and some would say world history, 1759.

So it can be understood that Jack was unaware that in the past we have lost much more land and ocean than the US was claiming or could get in this dispute and faced the loss of more many times (hint: 54 40).

Jack also appears to be unaware of the claims being made against Canada by a certain "Nation" that would take very very much more land ocean and resources than what is at stake in this minor Arctic border dispute.

[Canadian_Mind]

Well, it is beginning to sound like our position is disadvantageous to us in the bigger scheme of things. If we push for mid-lines drawn here, as we did with Greenland back in the 70s, it would give us a better position to continue this trend with the Americans (thus getting far more north of Alaska than what we would currently get), and through constancy push the same position with the Russians (who want to do the same thing with the Danes and Norwegians).

We'd end up with a much bigger slice of pie... Pretty much everyone would have a bigger slice of pie except for the Americans and Norwegians.





And even if we didn't go with drawing borders at the halfway mark, and instead based borders on the continental shelfs, the lines would be the same between us and Alaska, but if we can prove Lomonosov Ridge to be an underwater extension of Ellesmere Island, we'd get even more territory from the Russians and the Danes than we would by just drawing lines in the middle.