O Canada,

We're sure you know it, but there's been a recent increase in tension between you and the United States over the melting Arctic.

The border dispute over the resource-rich Chukchi Sea has been going on for a while; our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently criticized the summit of coastal Arctic nations you hosted for not being inclusive enough; and, well, then there was that Olympic men's hockey gold medal game.

We knew that thing was pretty much over when the U.S. team had to face Sid Crosby and three other guys in four-on-four overtime, but it still smarts.

We digress. We're worried about something that would affect us both, and we hate feeling all this tension.

The same week that you hosted the coastal Arctic summit, our President Obama announced a new policy to increase oil and gas development in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. At least ... we think it's intended to increase development; private industry, Native groups and environmentalists all seem to have big problems with the plan. So we're confused, but we're pretty sure the new policy includes a delay for new lease sales while researchers conduct further environmental studies of the areas involved.

We don't know how long those studies will last, but oil and gas development off Alaska's northern shore seems closer to us every day. Ordinarily, we'd be stoked about that, but after reading a recent article about some of your scientists studying the unique problems posed by Arctic oil spills, we grew very concerned.

The article reminded us of a calculation from the U.S. Minerals Management Service estimating that an oil spill during the lifetime of just one block of Alaska's Arctic leases has a "better than one in five" chance of happening. We're not sure which block, and that's a long time frame, but still, those are pretty short odds given how many blocks could be offered for lease.

We got even more concerned when, in the same article, we read that Canada's going to send oil spill cleanup kits and train people in coastal Arctic communities to operate the equipment, essentially creating a big first line of defense against catastrophe in a vast area with scarce resources to fight a petroleum spill. Then we got terrified when we couldn't remember seeing any similar action from the U.S. government.

We don't know if you've been noticing, but it seems to be taking ages for the U.S. to give its Coast Guard the resources to maintain an effective presence in the Arctic, let alone equip locals to provide quick first response.

In fact, if we didn't know better, we'd think the U.S. government's summertime Arctic spill response strategy is a variation on the Exxon Valdez first response protocol (deploying absorbent wildlife). It has to be more complex than that, though. We can only guess about the U.S. plan for cleaning up a winter spill in broken ice or beneath an ice pack. For all we know, it involves waiting until migratory wildlife arrives in the summer and the open water plan (see above) can be executed.

At any rate, we were wondering if you'd be able to do us a huge favor. Do you know the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper? Your country (the ant) doesn't seem to have firm plans yet to drill in the Arctic Ocean, but you'll soon have a huge stockpile of necessary safety equipment. It'd probably be too much to ask to just give us some of those spill kits (a couple could fall off a barge, maybe), so we were wondering ... if an Arctic spill off Alaska's coast does happen, would you let us borrow some (or most) of those kits, and maybe some folks who know how to use them?