Foreign Affairs committee  You bet, and thanks for the opportunity to present. There are three parts to the presentation that I want to provide today. One is just putting some context around the north and Canada's northern or Arctic foreign policy. Second, I want to identify two particular areas that I think would be worthwhile for the Canadian government to focus on.

Foreign Affairs committee  Tremendous. Thanks very kindly.

Foreign Affairs committee  To me, these are very much two sides of the one coin. Even if you look at what the Arctic Council has worked on—and there has been a heavy emphasis on environmental issues, and rightly so—their work has also been in the context of oil and gas guidelines and so on. That's a reality in terms of resource development in the north, whether it's between Norway and Russia or for everything from fisheries to oil and gas off Greenland and in our own Arctic region.

Foreign Affairs committee  In those particular instances it absolutely is correct. But things such as oil and gas recommendations—

Foreign Affairs committee  It has to be with northerners, and you have to have the capacity for northerners to shape how the north should develop. Let me come back to the previous member. In terms of capacity, everything from high school completion to vocational training is critically important, and university is part of it, of course.

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, there are a couple of things. One is capacity. You take, for example, in terms of an Inuit education strategy, they're already speaking.... I was just at a conference a couple of weeks ago, chaired by Mary Simon, about an Inuit education strategy. If we look at our northerners, that's the kind of investment that in this case is capacity building but also in governance, another area.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you kindly.