France-Canada to revive Atlantic battle for seafloor
St-Pierre-Miquelon given exclusive rights to ring of sea in 1992
Randy Boswell
CanWest News Service
Thursday, November 17, 2005
France is poised to assert rights over thousands of square kilometres of Atlantic Ocean seabed, including possible oil and gas riches, south of the French islands of St-Pierre-Miquelon and beyond the jurisdiction of Canada's 320-kilometre limit.
The proposed area of French control would require a globally unprecedented "leapfrog" over Canadian waters and set up a struggle between the French islands, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia over a planned 240-kilometre expansion of off-shore economic zones under new provisions of the UN convention governing the Law of the Sea.
"France could put a lock on that area," says Ron Macnab, a retired federal oceanographer who co-authored a report for the government of St-Pierre-Miquelon outlining France's possible grab for the unclaimed portion of the continental shelf.
While stressing his "neutral" role in helping France draft its position on the matter, Macnab said he hopes Canada will respond with a counterclaim for the potentially lucrative stretch of seabed.
"It becomes a legal, political and diplomatic issue as to whether France can leapfrog Canadian waters," he says, urging swift action by Canada to finalize its own claims in the region. "It's not only about oil. There are other resources out there that we might not know about. In 50 years from now, people might be very grateful that those steps were taken."
France's case for what it calls a "discontinuous juridical continental shelf" is set out in a document presented to the Advisory Board of the Law of the Sea, an international panel of ocean scientists and legal scholars that interprets the rules and rights in play as coastal nations vie for control of off-shore territory.
The paper's lead author is Marc Plantegenest, the top administrative official in St-Pierre-Miquelon. Macnab, an ABLOS director, and Michael Iosipescu, a Halifax expert in maritime law, co-wrote the study outlining the "hypothetical limits" of a new French-controlled zone on the outer edge of the continental shelf.
Describing the economic hardships faced by St-Pierre-Miquelon since the collapse of its fishing industry, and casting the island cluster as a good candidate for testing the rights of all coastal states enclosed by other countries' territorial waters, the paper argues that the French possession and similar "shelf-locked states" could invoke aspects of the Law of the Sea to create "an extended continental shelf" and thus "claim their share of the common heritage of mankind."
Admittedly, the authors state, the concept "raises questions concerning the projection of sovereign rights that would, in effect, leapfrog over zones where other states exercised exclusive jurisdiction and concerning the sharing of jurisdiction in extended continental shelves where neighbouring states had competing interests."
But if international bodies endorse the proposal, Canada could once again be forced to bargain with France over control of seabed resources off the East Coast.
In 1992, after years of acrimonious debate and negotiation between Canada and France, an international tribunal awarded St-Pierre-Miquelon exclusive rights over a 38-kilometre-wide ring surrounding the islands and a 288-kilometre-long, 16.8-kilometre-wide corridor of water, known as the "baguette" for its elongated shape, reaching south to the edge of Canada's 320-kilometre limit. The baguette was far smaller than the zone initially claimed by France but significantly larger than what Canada argued the islands deserved.
Now, under new provisions of the Law of the Sea and the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, trillions of dollars in potential oil and gas revenues are at stake in Canada and around the world as countries race to establish extended seafloor boundaries that could reach as far as 240 kilometres farther out to sea than current 320-kilometre limits.