Proposed Arctic fleet won't meet Canada's needs.
by Michael Byers
[Editor’s note: Women across Canada have responded angrily to the news that the new $50 bill no longer features the Famous Five women (Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, Louise Crummy McKinley, Henrietta Muir Edwards and Irene Parlby) who won recognition that women are indeed “persons” under Canadian law. Instead, the bill has a picture of an icebreaker. Now Professor Michael Byers says that image has a certain irony of its own.]
A rugged little ship adorns the back of the new $50 bill that the Bank of Canada began circulating Monday. But, in an ironic twist of fate, the red and white CCGS Amundsen no longer sails the Arctic seas. The 98-metre icebreaker was built in 1979 and originally named the CCGS Sir John Franklin. With 18,000 horsepower and a thick double hull, she could push steadily through one metre-thick sea ice and ram her way through much thicker ice ridges.
In 2003, the ship was retrofitted for scientific research with high-tech laboratories, a dynamic positioning system, a multi-beam sonar for seabed mapping and a moon pool for accessing the ocean through the bottom of the hull. In recognition that science is international, she was renamed after the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who, in 1906, became the first explorer to sail through the Northwest Passage.
Today, however, the Amundsen is tied to a wharf in Trois-Rivières, with cracks in four of her six engines — cracks symptomatic of decades of underfunding for Canada's Coast Guard icebreaker fleet…
About Michael Byers
Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He leads a project on the law and politics of the Arctic Ocean for ArcticNet, a consortium of scientists from 27 Canadian universities and five federal departments.
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