The Canadian Initiative part 1: Pressure from below

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of this study, the Canadian government created a committee to develop a long-term strategy to deal with the issue of Arctic pollution, also known as the Northern Contaminants Programme (Huebert, 1998).

Through its undertaking of the Northern Contaminants Programme and the research into Arctic environmental issues that it entailed, Canada came to the 1991 AEPS negotiations as one of the most experienced in Arctic research of the eight states. This prior experience put Canadian representatives in a key position when it came time to design the structure of the new AEPS regime (Fenge, 2013). A Canadian official, Garth Bangay, was “chiefly responsible” for the drafting of the Rovaniemi Declaration and the accompanying strategy (Huebert, 1998). As such, the Declaration contained many of the concerns that were identified in Canada’s Northern Contaminants Programme and AEPS

“strongly reflects Canadian thinking” (Huebert, 1998). While AEPS was a step forward in Arctic cooperation, it was a regime with a somewhat narrow scope. It was solely focused on environmental issues and intentionally excluded other areas of potential cooperation such as sustainable development. There were movements taking place within Canada for a more comprehensive regional organization.

5.2 The Canadian Initiative part 1: Pressure from below

At the same time as the Finnish scientists were formulating AEPS, there were parallel developments underway within Canadian civil society. Although the official proposal for an international council in the Arctic would ultimately come from the Canadian government in 1991, the origins of the council were not in the government, but rather in Canadian universities and think tanks.

The Gordon Foundation

On the heels of Gorbachev’s 1987 speech, representatives from the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, a Toronto-based public policy think tank focused on arms control and disarmament, met with George Ignatieff (a well-known Canadian diplomat), John Polanyi (a Nobel Prize winning physicist) and Anatol Rapoport (a world-renowned mathematician) to discuss new initiatives to reduce tensions in the Arctic and open it up to cooperation (Axworthy, 2013). The Foundation created the Arctic Security Project (which was operational from 1988 until the Arctic Council was formed in 1996) whose

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objective was to “encourage the development of a Canadian security and demilitarization policy for the Arctic which is successfully integrated with related social, scientific, environmental, developmental, legal and other Canadian Arctic policy goals, and which complements and supports international circumpolar cooperation” (Axworthy, 2013).

The Gordon Foundation, through its Arctic Security Project, funded several projects for the Canadian organization Science for Peace, including a conference to discuss Arctic cooperation, which took place in October 1988, a year after Gorbachev’s Murmansk speech. Held in Toronto, 70 academics and scientists from the Soviet Union, Canada, the United States and Europe participated in what was the first step in bringing the academic and scientific community together (Science for Peace, 1988). Franklyn Griffiths, a senior policy advisor to Canadian Minister of External Affairs Joe Clark from 1987 to 1988 and key member of the Gordon Foundation, chaired the conference. Since any Arctic organization would govern Arctic indigenous people and their traditional homeland, Canadian academics involved with the conference insisted that Arctic indigenous peoples be included in any future Arctic regime (Axworthy, 2013). This focus on including aboriginal peoples’ participation in the Council would become a Canadian priority in the subsequent negotiations.

Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament

Building on the momentum of the Science for Peace conference, the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament (CCACD) held meetings through the summer of 1989 regarding Arctic arms control and released a report entitled “Security Cooperation in the Arctic: A Canadian Response to Murmansk”. The report called for the traditional perspective of East-West in the Arctic to be replaced with a perspective of the Arctic as a circumpolar issue as well as the establishment of an ongoing multilateral conference on Arctic security that would advise on science, the environment, economic development, cultural preservation and indigenous peoples (Lamb, 2010). Shortly after, the Canadian Institute for International Affairs (CIIA) released a report calling for the creation of an Arctic Basin Council and took the idea to several international conferences (Axworthy, 2013).

Advocates found an opportunity in the fall of 1989 when Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was to visit Leningrad. John Lamb, head of the CCACD, encouraged

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Mulroney to include a reference to an Arctic Council on his upcoming trip (Lamb, 2010).

Prime Minister Mulroney took to the idea and during his speech in Leningrad told his Soviet audience, “And why not a council of Arctic countries eventually coming into existence to coordinate and promote cooperation among them?” (Graham, 1997). To keep pressure on both state actors, the CCACD then organized a Soviet Union-Canada Conference on the Arctic in October 1989 and another one in Moscow and Leningrad in 1991 (Axworthy, 2013). Representatives from the Gordon Foundation also briefed Russian officials on their ideas for an Arctic Council prior to Boris Yeltsin’s trip to Canada in 1992, and they also held meetings with representatives from the State Department in Washington (Axworthy, 2013).

Griffiths and Kuptana report

After the initial overtures were made to the Arctic governments, the following discussions in Canada revolved around the specifics of what this formal body would look like. In 1990, Franklyn Griffiths and Rosemarie Kuptana, the vice-president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, co-chaired a panel in 1990 to propose the finer details of what this international body would look like. In May 1991 they published a report entitled “To Establish an International Arctic Council” that detailed the structure of such a council, which even included a draft declaration (Griffiths & Kuptana, 1991a). The report suggested that the Canadian government take the idea of a formal council to the AEPS ministerial meeting in Finland in June 1991 to seek the consent of the other Arctic states.

It also included calls for greater indigenous participation in Arctic affairs. Griffiths and Kuptana took to Canada’s national newspaper, writing an op-ed in the Globe and Mail after their report was published:

The Arctic, its people and their environment require an institution built on a vision equal to the problems the region faces [...] certainly an Arctic Council should not consist of the eight Arctic States alone. It must also allow for the direct and meaningful participation of northerners, especially aboriginal peoples. It must have an open agenda, a broad mandate to be determined through consensus, but with nothing proscripted from the outset (Griffiths &

Kuptana, 1991b).

The committee took its report to Ottawa and presented it to the Prime Minister’s office, and it encouraged the Mulroney government to enter formal negotiations with the other

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Arctic states (Axworthy, 2010). The Griffiths and Kuptana report, as well as the reports of John Lamb at the CCACD and the CIIA, collectively put pressure on the government to approach the other Arctic states to establish a formal organization in the Arctic. Of the many reports written between 1988 and 1993, they all had four points in common. They proposed that the Arctic Council be focused on:

• Expanding contact between the peoples of the Circumpolar North;

• Improving environmental protection for the ecosystem of the Arctic;

• Reducing the military footprint in the region; and

• Securing broad recognition of the economic, political, and social rights of aboriginal people in the region (Nord, 2006).

These four recommendations by various civil society actors were largely present in the Canadian government’s official proposal to the other Arctic states.