OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper begins his fifth summer sojourn to the Arctic today, with plans to visit all three northern territories over five days.

The trip comes just days after the government announced a new policy towards the region, with a heavy emphasis on diplomacy to settle existing boundary disputes.

Among other stops, Harper will check in with soldiers taking part in Operation Nanook, the military's annual exercise in the region.

The prime minister will also meet with Inuit leaders a week after a formal apology for Canada's Inuit relocation policies decades ago was issued.

That Harper didn't make the apology himself, and left it instead to new Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan, has some observers scratching their heads.

Harper travelled to Churchill, Man., today, and will go on Resolute Bay, Nunavut and Whitehorse.

The new Arctic policy also commits the Conservative government, which has long underlined the importance of military prowess in the Far North, to a more "strategic engagement on Arctic issues.”

It is change in tone and comes ahead of what are expected to be tough negotiations among Arctic nations once competing scientific claims over boundaries are laid before the United Nations in 2013.

Countries whose borders spill on to the vast but quickly thawing region have been mapping the ocean floor for almost a decade, an exercise that will culminate in a formal submission to the world body.

Canada and the U.S. disagree over the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea. There is also an unsettled argument with Denmark over Hans Island, a barren outcrop between Greenland and Ellesmere Island.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon refused to speculate last week on what Canada would do if it didn't like the way the boundaries were drawn under UN supervision.

At stake is the possibility of untold billions of dollars' worth of resources, including oil and natural gas. Some Arctic experts predict competition will be so intense as the ice cap melts, it could lead countries into a new Cold War.

The Conservatives, early in their tenure, responded with a plan to construct three heavily-armed, naval icebreakers, a deep-water port and an Arctic warfare training centre. The port and combat centre are in the planning stages, while the icebreaker proposal has morphed into a plan to build six "ice-capable” patrol ships.

Late last week, the government posted a $150,000 tender seeking bids "to develop a real-time, immersive, interactive, three-dimensional synthetic environment for the Canadian North.”

"Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) an agency of the Department of National Defence (DND) requires services related to developing state-of-the-art in modeling Arctic phenomena for scenarios,” says the tender.

However, both the federal government and the Canadian military have stressed they don't see the Arctic becoming a battleground. The bigger concern is the impact of greater commercial shipping in sea lanes once clogged with ice.

Studies done for National Defence, and released under access to information, noted that several countries, including Canada, are already constructing ice-capable merchant ships, but that the economic viability of using the Northwest Passage to ship goods between continents remains in doubt.

The reports predicted that it will be 2060 before Arctic passages are free of ice in the summer. But the date isn't firm and scientists say it could be early in the 22nd century before that happens.

By Murray Brewster

The Canadian Press