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Arctic Yearbook 2015
participation in a number of industry- and academia-based conferences and forums, and the
networking opportunities provided therein. These events included the Arctic Shipping Forums held
in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Helsinki, the MASS conference held in St. John’s, and the Canadian
Marine Advisory Committee - Prairie and Northern Region Meeting in Iqaluit.3 In addition, formal
and informal interviews were conducted to collect expert knowledge of the groups involved, as well
as to better understand the interests of the stakeholders and their interactions.
Once the stakeholders, their inputs, and their roles were identified the data needed to be analyzed.
Based on the information gathered during interviews and from the mandates provided on the official
websites of stakeholders, we determined three criteria for our evaluation: a) the scale at which a
stakeholder operates, b) their interests, and c) their interactions. Scale refers to the geographic level at
which the stakeholder focuses: international (including circumpolar), national (Canada-wide), local
(limited to a specific region in the Canadian Arctic), or any combination of the three. These three
scales reflect the governance regimes: international conventions, national legislation, and local
regulations.
Figure 2. A screenshot of the tool for understanding the legal aspects relevant to shipping in the Arctic. The tool is
available at http://passages.ie.dal.ca/Legal_Aspects_Tool.html. The user needs to enable the scripts into the browser used
to run the tool.
The categories of interest were derived from the working groups of the Arctic Council. We decided
to mirror the approach of this intergovernmental organization because of the Council’s influential role
Maritime Activities in the Canadian Arctic