France looks beyond 'the baguette'
New offshore claim
St. Pierre, Miquelon seek valuable sea oil
RANDY BOSWELL CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

OTTAWA
France is poised to assert rights over thousands of square kilometres of Atlantic Ocean seabed including possi ble oil and gas riches south of the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon and beyond the ju risdiction of Canada's current 322-kilometre (200-mile ) 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 offshore ec0nomic 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 and 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, where "strong hydrocarbon prospects" abound.

"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 ftom 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 playas coastal nations vie for control of offshore territory.

Describing the economic hardships faced by St. Pierre and 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 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."

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 in
ternational tribunal awarded St. Pierre and Miquelon exclusive rights over a 39-kilometre-wide ring surrounding the islands and a 290-kilometre-long, 17kilometre-wide corridor of water - known as the "baguette" for its elongated shape - reaching south to the edge of Canada's 200-mile limit. The baguette was far smaller than the zone initially claimed by France, but significantly larger than what Canada argued the islands deserved.

Now, trillions of dollars in potential oil and gas revenues are at stake as countries race to establish extended seafloor boundaries that could reach up to 240 I kilometres farther out to sea.