WHEN Russia made a big show of placing a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, Canada’s then foreign minister Peter MacKay huffed that “this isn’t the 15th century” and countries couldn’t just go around the world planting flags and claiming territory. Yet in a move worthy of a medieval monarch, John Baird, the current foreign minister, announced on December 9th that the North Pole was Canadian. The government has instructed its scientists to provide the data to prove a claim described by Mr Baird as big and bold. (The prime minister’s parliamentary secretary went further still, asserting in the House of Commons that Santa Claus was Canadian.) Mr Baird's announcement came shortly after Canada had submitted an official claim for the extended continental shelf off its coasts to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. That submission only covered the waters off its Atlantic coast, however, and Mr Baird says a new Arctic submission requires further research. (There is no extended continental shelf to claim in the Pacific.)

If the Arctic claim came as a surprise to the scientists who had done the work, they were not allowed to say so. At a so-called technical briefing on December 9th, all of the tricky questions—how much more data is needed? Isn’t the North Pole clearly in waters that will eventually be claimed by Denmark?—received roughly the same answer from Hugh Adsett, the deputy legal adviser for the foreign-affairs department. He used a variation on Mr Baird’s theme that Canada wanted to put in the biggest and boldest claim possible for what is the country’s last frontier.

Jacob Verhoef, the lead scientist for the mapping, was allowed to talk about the research that had already been done. There was a lot of it. To map the continental shelf off Canada’s east and Arctic coasts, they used boats, icebreakers, airplanes and autonomous underwater vehicles to gather data. Joint survey missions were conducted with both the Americans and the Danes (whose claim to the Arctic rests on Danish control of Greenland). The oil and gas industry was also tapped for information.

For the Atlantic alone, Canada submitted 732 co-ordinates for latitude and longitude to delineate a 1.2m sq km area where the continental shelf extends beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit that all countries can claim as their own. Mr Verhoef says scientists have already collected 15,000km of seismic data, 38,000km of bathymetric data and 58,000km of remote sensing data in the Arctic.

The UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf is not an arbitration body. It merely verifies the scientific data and leaves it to the governments involved to negotiate a solution. In staking its claim to the North Pole, Canada will create yet more overlaps to be sorted out with neighbouring countries. Canada and Denmark (which has until November 2014 to complete its submission) will probably end up wrangling over certain areas in the Labrador Sea and the Arctic. Canada and the United States, which is not party to the relevant UN convention but has agreed to abide by its rules, have overlapping claims in the waters off Nova Scotia and Maine, and in the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic. There is likely to be an acrimonious dispute with France over the waters in the Northwestern Atlantic surrounding the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, a dispute which Canada maintains was resolved through arbitration in 1992.

What are the Canadians up to? It is often assumed that polar continental-shelf claims are all about resources, but research done by the US Geological Survey and others indicate that almost all of the areas with the most potential for oil-and-gas development lie well within the 200-nautical-mile limit of the coastal states. Mr Verhoef says little is known about what lies beyond that limit, including at the top of the world.

Perhaps the best explanation is political. Because of a backlog of claims, Canada does not expect its case to be reviewed for at least four years, which puts it well beyond the next general election expected in October 2015. That means there is little political downside for Stephen Harper and his Conservative government to lay claim to Santa Claus and his elves now, rather than seeming to relinquish Canada’s Arctic rights altogether.