Canada and Denmark have agreed on a process aimed at ending the dispute over Hans Island, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said Monday.
Pettigrew said officials from both sides will meet over the coming months to pore over old maps and documents with an eye to ending the fight over the rocky outcrop in the Arctic that both countries claim as their own.
"As friendly countries, of course, it is our shared objective that we resolve this issue -- that we put this issue behind us," Pettigrew said.
"We now have a process -- a process in which the officials will be working together, gathering all of the relative information and trying to find a way forward to do this."
However, he said that Canada is not willing to give up its sovereignty over the island, which is only as big as a few city blocks.
"It remains our firmly held position, of course, that Canadian sovereignty needs to be clear over Hans Island," Pettigrew said.
Pettigrew made the comments from New York, at the 60th anniversary summit of the United Nations. He met with Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller on the sidelines of the summit.
The island, which sits uninhabited between Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland, has been an irritant between the two countries for decades.
Pettigrew again insisted again today that the quarrel between the two countries is not about the surrounding waters, since boundaries were agreed upon in 1973.
However, there has been widespread speculation that claims to the island by both countries have to do in part with the effect that global warming could play in opening up the Northwest Passage, creating a major shipping route between Asia and Europe.
Melting ice could also make it easier to look for undersea resources, such as oil and gas.
Tensions over the island were sparked this summer, when Defence Minister Bill Graham made an unannounced stop to the island during a trip to the Arctic in July.
The Danish government denounced the move as an "occupation" and rushed to plant flags on the island. It later called off that plan.
However, previous flag plantings by the Danes have been the focus of protests by Canada in 1984, 1988 and 2004.
The Danes already control Greenland, and they say Hans Island is part of that ancestral territory. But Canada claims the island was discovered by the British and ceded to Canada.
