I think the vast majority of the economic opportunity as it relates to marine protected areas in the north is related to ongoing monitoring and research. There are the typical guardian-type jobs, park warden jobs that would come with this, which, of course, should be filled by Inuit.
I'm not under any illusion that creating vast marine protected areas in the Canadian Arctic is going to result in a flock of southerners coming up there and it being buried in tourists. That's not where the economic opportunity is. If there is any of that, it's incremental; that's gravy.
The real bread and butter of economic development as it relates to this is trying to understand what's going on in the north: to get the information that we don't have, to understand what's going on in the ocean with the ice and in the atmosphere. Inuit would collect the data and work with southern scientists, who will eventually become northern scientists over time. This is about capacity-building in part, and it will take time.
Imagination is required, and it's not just about park wardens and somebody saying there's going to be a pile of tourists and somebody's going to open up a restaurant, and blah, blah, blah. That's BS on one end, and there's probably a pile of it on the other end too.
What we know we need to know is what is happening with the northern environment in the face of climate change, and who better to do this type of work than Inuit who reside in the communities? That's where imagination can create jobs and protected areas can create jobs. You don't need southerners to fly up to do that.