I'm going to start with this one, Art, because the navy has labelled me the navy's Arctic expert, and I've been working on the Arctic file for a fair while.
That's a big question that unpacks into two components. One is the soft security, environmental pollution, constabulary nature of risk or threat devolution in the north because of climate change. The other one is the militarization or the use of northern waters by potential adversaries in future conflict scenarios.
On the soft security side of environment, shipping, and regulatory control of Canada's sovereign waters, which are the internal waters of the archipelago, there is no doubt a change in human activity in the north related to climate change, which is causing a whole series of consequences, whether it's human security, the use of the Arctic waters for shipping, or the opening of Arctic waters for potentially more oil or resource exploitation.
Into that domain, a government at a previous point made the commitment to build the Arctic and offshore patrol ship. The first ship, Harry DeWolf, is a major construction achievement in the Irving Shipbuilding yard. It is a very large ship, far bigger than probably most Canadians could imagine, which is well under way. Building has started on the second ship. That ship is not a warship, it's not a combatant. It has a gun, it's armed, but it is an enabling ship to a whole bunch of other capacities of the federal government. Whether it's support to the coast guard, support to Fisheries and Oceans, support to the territories in resource protection, whether it's support to a pollution initiative with Transport Canada and with the coast guard leading, or whether it's related to search and rescue, we can contribute as we do in southern waters fully now as we build these six Arctic offshore patrol ships.
I'm going to say one thing about these ships. On the more military domain, in terms of the point about potential aggressors in the north, it's a hard place to go—really hard. It only becomes marginally easier, even in a global warming scenario, during a few weeks, maybe three months at the most in a far right global warming scenario, because eventually—