about: “The North: use it, or loose it in 2010”

Mr. Streicker, your vision for the North needs work

You correctly point out “use it or loose it” (Star, 8 Jan. 2010), and further that reference to the traditional and ongoing presence of Inuit, First Nations and other Canadians provides more legitimacy than Harper sending gunboats. 
You say our land is not in dispute but some of our water is.
To say "none of Canada’s land is in dispute" and not to transcend this discussion of shorelines is missing the point.
Despite some disagreement Harper says the same thing and no, the statement is not helpful to hold up the integrity of Canada’s territory. Canada consists of land, air and water, rivers, lakes, saltwater zones, wetlands, ice or fluid, winter or summer. Catharine McClellan said it best “Part of the Land Part of the Water”.
It's not semantics John, it's a reflection of who we are below the illusions of old and new empire projections. You missed the defining issue that water joins land together, an indigenous experience inseparably connected to Canadian territories which is as different to European legalities as Canadian Constitutional Conventionality as a whole.
Water bodies are engrained in our evolution as the highways and communication lines of the country, as much focus of the land as arteries are to a living organism. 
One has to take this Northern, this Canadian reality to the international stage more than superficially. Not the Dutch or Russian or Denish tradition of ‘owning land and firing cannon balls over water’ (inspired by J.R. Saul on the law of the sea legacy), which is clearly an understanding of water as fence. One navigates along fences, a view that legitimizes foreign icebreakers, submarines and other vessels to go where they please without asking already. The shoreline discussion doesn't work in Canada or for Canada and it's not a credible or effective direction for us to take. 
However Harper’s and your’s sentimental views lack not just knowledge and effectiveness, but also a genuine will to stop a comeback of colonialism in Canada. Harper pursues the wrongheadedness aggressively and you do it with quiet adherence. Of course one cannot treat Indigenous Canadians as second class citizens by way of class justice, treaty erosion and a race profiled drug prohibition war and hold up credibly the Indigenous Canadian narrative against foreign interests in the Canadian arctic; both at the same time, no way.