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As the recession of the Arctic icepack has drifted northward, more and more of the waters of what could become the Northwest Passage are becoming navigable during the summer. The long-range implication of this is the potential opening of the passage for shipping, with increased energy prospecting and research traffic in the intervening years. Thus, ships' ability to move through and near surface ice will become increasingly relevant in Canada's Arctic North.

Meaningful shifts in geography are rare. Geography shifted when the New World was discovered and when the planet was demonstrated to be circumnavigable by sea. Such a shift is slowly taking place in the Canadian North; Arctic icepack recession has raised the prospect of an opening of the Northwest Passage. Such a development could herald the most important shift in maritime shipping since the opening of the Panama Canal nearly a century ago.

With this shift comes the demand to operate more heavily in and around ice. Two states — Canada and the United States — would be the most interested in an opened Northwest Passage. While there are certainly other interested parties, it is Ottawa’s waters that the route transits, and Washington — in accordance with longstanding U.S. beliefs in freedom of navigation and in the Western Hemisphere as the U.S. backyard — will be the principal advocate for the passage’s designation as an international waterway. Indeed, U.S. vessels have occasionally navigated the waters in the summer as a demonstration of freedom of the seas and a physical exercise of the U.S. government’s avowed position that these are already freely navigable waters. For now, Ottawa is well positioned to shape the international debate on the issue, since it is already party to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which Washington has yet to ratify (and is not likely to ratify in 2008).

Reliable maritime shipping will wait until the passage is consistently and reliably navigable for at least a significant portion of the year, if not year round. Such a development is a decade or two away, but much will be decided in the interim. (Meanwhile, Russian ice-hardened oil tankers now being built in South Korea for operations in Russia’s North could ultimately speed reliable navigable access through the waterway on the Canadian side.)

A look at the icebreaker fleets of the U.S. and Canadian coast guards leaves little question about who has the capacity to meaningfully operate there.