The Northwest Passage has always carried two stories at once: a legal argument about status, and an operational reality about who moves where, when, and under what rules. What is newly salient now is that the gap between those stories is starting to look less like a technical disagreement and more like a standing vulnerability Ottawa can no longer leave to inertia.
On the legal question, the position is familiar: Canada treats the Northwest Passage as internal waters, while the United States treats it as an international strait. The OpenCanada analysis described that uncertainty as a strategic weakness, pointing to past U.S. transits conducted without Canada’s permission as a recurring friction point. That’s the core problem in plain terms: in a corridor whose navigability is rising, rules that are contested in principle tend to become contested in practice.
At the same time, Northern political oxygen is shifting. OPSA’s May 2025 territorial survey found 85% of respondents in Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut agreeing Canada must actively use its Arctic sovereignty or risk losing it, and 62% favouring a “firm line” approach in Arctic disputes. Whatever Ottawa thinks about polling, those numbers are a constraint of their own: a sovereignty narrative that doesn’t produce observable control will bleed credibility at home first—especially in places closest to the file.
Uncertainty is not neutral in operations
In Ottawa, it’s tempting to treat the Northwest Passage dispute as manageable because it has been managed before—through careful wording, selective enforcement, and alliance pragmatism. The operational issue is that “managed” is not the same as “resilient.” As traffic, attention, and capability change, ambiguity becomes a stress amplifier.
When partners disagree on legal status, three practical questions start to matter more than the abstract debate. First, notification: who is expected to tell whom, with what lead time, and under what conditions? Second, safety and response: who coordinates search-and-rescue, incident command, and spill response when something goes wrong? Third, legitimacy: whose rules are recognized in the moment, including environmental and Indigenous engagement expectations?
If those questions remain fuzzy, Canada’s position is weakened even when no one is “challenging” it. The risk is less about a single dramatic incident than about repeated routine behaviour that normalizes a rival interpretation. Over time, practice becomes precedent in the political sense—even when the legal debate remains unresolved.
The real tension here is protecting Canada’s legal position versus building operational predictability with its closest ally.
What Northern opinion is actually asking for
It would be easy to misread the OPSA survey results as a demand for louder rhetoric. That would be a mistake. In operational domains, “firmness” is usually less about volume and more about repeatable procedure: clear rules, consistent application, and visible capacity to respond. Northerners living with the consequences of thin infrastructure and long response chains tend to notice performance, not messaging.
Seen through that lens, the survey’s 85% and 62% are not a call to pick a fight with Washington. They are a warning about legitimacy: if Ottawa claims the Northwest Passage as internal waters, then it needs governance instruments that make that claim tangible in everyday operations—especially when a vessel transits without prior clearance or when an emergency demands immediate coordination.
This is where Ottawa’s problem becomes solvable. Canada does not need to “win” the legal argument tomorrow to reduce the practical weakness today. It needs a mechanism that increases control in practice while keeping legal positions intact.
A Canada–U.S. Arctic transit protocol: control through procedure
The decision lever is straightforward: negotiate a formal Canada–U.S. Arctic transit protocol for the Northwest Passage. The objective would be to reduce legal and operational ambiguity by setting shared procedures—without forcing either side into an all-or-nothing legal settlement.
A serious protocol would do four things.
1) Define notification and transparency expectations.
Not a public-relations “heads-up,” but a structured process with minimum lead times, information requirements (route, ice class, cargo risk, communications plan), and explicit treatment of government vessels. If the dispute is partly about permission, then procedure is the next-best tool: it makes non-notification visible, traceable, and harder to normalize.
2) Pre-agree incident command for safety and environmental response.
The Arctic penalty for ambiguity shows up fastest in emergency management. A protocol should specify who leads in different scenarios (SAR, grounding, pollution incident), how assets are tasked, and how information is shared. This is not a concession on legal status; it is a way to prevent a legal disagreement from becoming a response failure.
3) Build in Indigenous engagement triggers that are operational, not symbolic.
A workable protocol should not treat Indigenous participation as optional “outreach.” It should set triggers—based on route, timing, risk profile, or proximity—that require defined consultation or notification steps, and clarify how Indigenous governments and organizations plug into incident response and information flow. That makes legitimacy part of the operating model rather than an afterthought.
4) Create compliance consequences that are procedural.
Ottawa does not need punitive escalation ladders that invite a showdown. It needs measurable compliance signals: notification compliance rates, response exercise participation, and joint review of deviations. If a transit occurs outside the agreed protocol, the consequence is an automatic review process and public reporting—turning a one-off “interpretation” dispute into an accountability event.
Why this avoids the legal trap
The risk with any attempt to “settle” the Northwest Passage question is escalation: a forced legal showdown, a domestic political spiral, or an ally-management crisis that pulls focus from the practical work of building capacity. A protocol approach narrows that risk by focusing on operational behaviour while preserving legal positions.
In effect, it says: Canada will continue to assert its internal-waters claim, the U.S. will continue to hold its international-strait view, but both will agree that predictable, safe, transparent transits—under a defined governance framework—are in their shared interest. It is harder to frame that as capitulation, and easier to defend as prudence.
Just as importantly, a protocol makes it easier for Ottawa to demonstrate “firmness” in a way Northerners will recognize: not through confrontation, but through standards that are applied, monitored, and enforced as routine practice.
What to watch
- Whether Ottawa frames the Northwest Passage file as an operational governance issue, not only an international law debate.
- Whether a transit protocol includes explicit notification rules for government vessels, not just commercial shipping.
- Whether Indigenous engagement is written as a trigger-based requirement tied to route and risk, not an optional best practice.
- Whether Canada commits to publish basic compliance metrics (notification rates, deviations, joint exercises) to make “control” observable.
Ottawa will keep talking about Arctic sovereignty. The credibility test is whether that talk produces fewer grey areas and more predictable control where it counts. A Canada–U.S. Arctic transit protocol is not a grand gesture; it is a practical instrument that reduces ambiguity without demanding a legal endgame neither side wants.
The single most important lever is a formal, measurable transit protocol with reporting. If Ottawa doesn’t pull it, the Northwest Passage will remain the kind of vulnerability that grows quietly: not through a single headline incident, but through repeated routine actions that make uncertainty feel normal—and normality, over time, becomes the hardest thing to reverse.
