Have you spent the past decade believing that Canada is nothing more than our friendly, innocuous neighbor to the north? Good—that's what they wanted you to think. In reality, Canada has given the past 10 years of its life and $200 million dollars in taxpayer money to file the ultimate claim: over 1 million square miles of Arctic seafloor that, yes, includes the North Pole.
Canadian imperialists scientists have been working both in labs and on ice camps off the northern shores of Ellesmere Island in an effort to map the Arctic seafloor, part of which it will be laying claim to (under the awesomely named Convention on the Law of the Sea) come Friday at the latest. The decade-long study necessitated the use of both helicopters and airplanes as well as unmanned, remote-controlled submarines that spent days at a time under the black waters' icy surface.
According to CBC News, "countries are allowed to claim additional sea floor if they can show their continental shelf extends beyond the economic zone." And as Rob Huebert, an arctic expert at the University of Calgary, told CBC News, an undersea mountain range called the Lomonosov Ridge would indeed give Canada geologic justification for a claim that stretches past the North Pole. But just because Canada has reason to make the claim doesn't mean it necessarily will; in the end, it's all up to whether or not Canadian officials think Santa's workshop is worth the trouble:
Maybe it's simply not worth it. Maybe we said, 'You know what, for the sake of international peace and stability, it's not important. We'll only do our science up to that and that will be the basis of our claim.' [But] it means we didn't go as far as we could.
Of course, it could still take another five years to confirm the science on Canada's claim and another 15 after that to even come to a final decision. Though while it appears Canada will not attempt any major overlap with Russian or US territory (keeping conflicts with those countries to a minimum) there has yet to be any word from the diabetic slaveowner with the most to lose—a one Mr. Nicholas "Santa" Claus. Let the war on Christmas commence. [CBC News]