As the world watches the spreading oil-spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, plans to drill in Greenland's iceberg-choked ocean are raising concerns about possible accidents poisoning adjacent Canadian waters.
"It seemed to me that (Environment Minister Jim Prentice) was taken by surprise by this," federal NDP Arctic critic Dennis Bevington said Friday after question period in Ottawa. "There's no real plan for dealing with oil spills in the Arctic -- no real ability, no real plan."
Pending final approvals, Scottish oil company Cairn Energy plans to drill four wells this summer in offshore leases west of Greenland's Disko Island -- right next to the international boundary with Canada.
The company's previous offshore experience has been in the Indian Ocean, but spokesman David Nisbet said Cairn would take all possible precautions in its first venture into the Arctic.
Two drill ships would be in the area, leaving one available to bore a relief well to help staunch any blowouts.
Nisbet also said the company would draw on Canadian experience in dealing with icebergs in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador, where powerful tugboats are able to shift the floating, frozen mountains away from rigs.
"We're using some of the very best available contractors," he said. "We'll have nine vessels in this area."
Nisbet added that the waters where Cairn would drill are only about one-third as deep as the well now staining the Louisiana coast.
The Davis Strait is known as "iceberg alley," through which massive mountains of snow and ice that break off Greenland's glaciers float on their way to the North Atlantic. But Nisbet downplayed the risk. He said a survey last summer found a total of 12 icebergs in both of Cairn's leases, which cover thousands of square kilometres.
"We're conscious of our responsibility."
Still, the stakes are high. Experts agree there's no good way to clean oil from waters that are more than 30 per cent covered by ice. Once oil gets under that ice, there's little chance of removing or even tracking it.
The Davis Strait has a valuable shrimp fishery for both Canada and Greenland, as well as an emerging turbot fishery. It's also home to a newly recovered population of bowhead whales, which migrate to an area of Lancaster Sound being considered for a Canadian marine conservation area.
During question period, Prentice said Canada had been informed of the plans by Greenland's Home Rule government.
"We have an excellent relationship," he said. "We have discussed these very issues with that government and Canadians can be assured that the environment will be protected."
But Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Catherine Loubier said officials from Canada and Greenland don't know if a 1983 agreement with Denmark on the marine environment still applies, now that Greenland has jurisdiction over its own natural resources.
"Greenlandic officials are currently looking into whether the agreement applies to their jurisdiction," she said in an email. "Discussions are ongoing."
Canada and Denmark also signed an agreement in 1991 on marine shipping pollution, but that may not apply to oil rigs, said international law expert Michael Byers.
"It's important that Canada ask Denmark to expand the agreement to include all drilling before any takes place," he said.
"The agreement is inadequate in another respect -- it deals with the mitigation rather than prevention of a spill. Canada and Denmark should immediately negotiate an oil-spill-prevention treaty."
Offshore oil drilling enjoys wide popular support in Greenland, where it is seen as the eventual financial backstop for full independence from Denmark. That support makes the regulatory process suspect, said Truls Gulowsen of Greenpeace Nordic.
"They have no history of enforcement," he said. "It's extremely non-precautionary, what they're doing."
Bevington said Canada should do more to ensure that its environmental interests are protected.
"This issue is not going away. This is clearly an opportunity to get something done. It's unfortunate that we lurch from catastrophe to catastrophe to get things done."
