20070416-105430-3536.jpgAccord­ing to a Wash­ing­ton Post head­line, “Cana­dian mil­it­ary rein­forces Arc­tic claim.” Appar­ently this is of more interest to the US than to Cana­dians. Although the CBC did men­tion the trek in the wider con­text of beefed up pres­ence as man­dated by the Tor­ies on, the foray of the 24 mem­ber team did not make it to the top of the heap in the Cana­dian media. Inter­est­ing. Pos­sibly we just take it for gran­ted that our troops will stake out our claim and con­duct routine excur­sions to demon­strate this fact. How­ever, it cer­tainly is of note that this made it into Amer­ican head­lines. Does this sug­gest the con­tinu­ing atten­tion of Wash­ing­ton and their con­cur­rent attempts to under­mine Cana­dian sov­er­eignty in the arc­tic? I would sug­gest the lat­ter. The Wash­ing­ton Times art­icle does rein­force the Amer­ican view that Canada does not have arc­tic sov­er­eignty and goes to length to stress than most other coun­tries do not recog­nize our sov­er­eignty in this area either.
The lar­ger domestic ques­tion is whether Harper’s mes­sage is play­ing in Canada. Do Cana­dians worry about arc­tic sov­er­eignty? Why doesn’t this ini­ti­at­ive make it into the Cana­dian media?