CANADA: Race to the Islands

Ever since the Suez crisis of 1956 threatened much of the free world's oil reserves, prospectors have been coming to Canada in droves and pushing out to the unlikeliest corners. Last week Northern Affairs Minister Alvin Hamilton told the House of Commons about the newest "hunting ground: Canada's forbidding Arctic. So far this year, no fewer than ten companies and individuals have applied for the right to explore 60 million acres of coastal waters and arctic island territory north of the Canadian mainland.*

The government will do everything it can to hurry along approval of the applications and speed the prospectors on their way. In the master plan for developing the Arctic, oil may well be a lure that brings roads and towns and facilities of every description. The government itself touched off the race for applications with recently completed geological maps showing formations of an oil-bearing type extending through the Arctic as far as Ellesmere Island, 490 miles from the North Pole. To aid future prospectors for oil as well as other minerals, the Department of Transport plans to open northern airfields (see map) to private flyers, maintain stores of supplies and equipment for them to buy as they need it.

If there is oil in the North, Minister Hamilton sees a vision of atomic-powered submarine tankers loading up from pipelines linking island interiors to the coast, then hauling their cargo under the ice to European markets. Equally visionary was Deputy Minister Gordon Robertson's suggestion to build an ocean pipeline from Ellesmere Island to Europe—a shorter distance, he pointed out, than Interprovincial pipeline spans between Edmonton and Toronto. Said Robertson: "It would be the wildest folly and the grossest arrogance to say that these things will not, in due course, be quite possible. The 'Far North' is far from us, but it is close to the center of the modern world."