Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you to the witnesses.
You touched on it earlier, the use of the Northwest Passage as a transportation route. The Minister of Transportation five years ago thought it was a great thing that was going to be here very soon and this year she has said—and the words in the press were that she threw cold water on the idea—that there would not be a Northwest Passage any time soon. But with the ice pack melting and with global warming, it is coming.
What is it that the Canadian government will have to do in terms of its military—the Rangers, the military itself, and perhaps the coast guard—to properly create, maintain, monitor, and defend a seasonal but permanent Northwest Passage? We already have a fair amount of traffic from the Port of Churchill that transports something like a half million tonnes of grain every year. There's a proposal to move oil out of the Port of Churchill. There is some serious concern that we haven't mapped enough up in the north to really know what we're doing. What is it that, as a country, we should be doing to properly prepare ourselves for what is coming?