Fisheries committee  I didn't quite get the translation, but I'm assuming you're asking us to elaborate on the same question. In that case, the people who need to be at the table are the indigenous people and the Inuit who have traditionally hunted in this land as well. They actually understand a whole-of-ecosystem approach to managing those ecosystems and doing so effectively.

Fisheries committee  The number one thing, generally, is that there needs to be more funding for northern science. There needs to be more money going out the door and flowing through communities where they can direct it. It doesn't have to come to organizations like ours, but it needs to go to the communities so they can decide what to do with it.

Fisheries committee  If I could add on to that very quickly—

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the question. It's always been a serious problem. We've very rarely had any federal government funding. That's why we work together to create networks of universities, territorial governments, provincial governments and federal departments when we can. It's to create good research programs.

Fisheries committee  What we do differently is nearshore work and work in uncharted waters. You might have heard of us because we were the organization that helped find the Franklin expedition. You need that kind of small Mars-rover type of ship. The big icebreakers can't get into these areas. They can't get into the ecologically sensitive areas where lake water or river water meets the ocean, where Inuit and northern indigenous people actually hunt and fish and are going after seals.

Fisheries committee  Absolutely, it's a lack of focus on the Arctic. Great Slave Lake is ecologically one of the most important places in this country. It's the canary in the coal mine, and it's extremely productive in terms of animals. That's where you go to find out how fresh water is flowing into the Arctic.

Fisheries committee  I don't think there's any question that DFO is working very hard. We work very closely with DFO scientists in most of the work we do. The problem is a lack of funding. They don't have the funding to do the work which needs to get done, plain and simple. There needs to be more money put into it.

Fisheries committee  Thank you. Jackie's sentiment is similar across the regions where we work. However, there is a much larger problem that needs addressing. Scientific and environmental knowledge gaps have become endemic in the Arctic. There is a dangerous lack of waterway and flood-plain mapping, a poor understanding of beluga health in the Beaufort Sea, a shortage of studies on ice freeze and breakup in Great Slave Lake, and a broad lack of research into microplastics contamination and invasive fish species, to name just a small fraction of issues facing Arctic marine science.