Thank you, and welcome to the north.
I think we all know that research in technology, or technological innovation and development, are major drivers of any nation and any regional competitiveness. In fact, it's a driver of human history. It has assisted people in developing marketable and competitive products, which is often the way people look at it, but it also helps us provide better services, it helps us protect our environment, and it also helps us better understand ourselves, our past, the landscape we live on, and where our future may lie.
Historically in Canada research and development investment has been increasing over the years. The latest figures I've seen are about $24.5 billion invested in 2004-05. Yet the north represents a good half of the Canadian landscape the way we define it. It also represents about half of the diversity in terms of Canada's landscape, and the federal investment in northern science and technology, according to the last figures that were available, which are about three years old now, was about $133 million.
The international polar year is the longest established program of coordinated international research. It goes back 125 years. It was the first year of anything. It was a recognition that the north was a hard place to get to, it was a hard place to do research in. And you could stand there in your little ship, if it didn't sink, and hope that, by gosh, you could see what was happening here, but you didn't understand what was going on and what was driving it over the horizon. That was the birthplace of the international polar year. There have been three of them since.
To give you an example of how that has helped Canada, in 1932, in the middle of the Depression, the University of Saskatchewan sent four expeditions north to look at the aurora. Why the aurora? People were starting to realize the aurora was interfering with Canadian radio. They didn't know why. They didn't know how. But these four expeditions went north. That levered into the next polar year in 1957-58, the international geophysical year, a major push by a large number of countries. Churchill became a major rocket base to study the upper atmospheric phenomena. In reality there were over 2,000 rockets blasted by both Canada and the United States. Those same people became the leaders, those four graduate students of the University of Saskatchewan.
The University of Saskatchewan and Saskatoon are now a hub of space-related research because of that. They're very proud of it. There's an estimated billion dollars worth of activity that goes on annually around space, space monitoring, and earth observation out of that area.
In 2007-08 it's actually a two-year international polar year, and some of us know it's already ongoing. It involves over 60 countries, over 60,000 scientists. It involves youth, it involves aboriginal organizations, it involves non-government organizations, academics, and what have you. Canada is the largest northern polar nation in terms of land in the polar region. It's a major player.
I passed around a chart, and I didn't have enough of the pretty coloured ones for you, but the green on this chart represents Canadian involvement in this polar year. Each one of those grids is a major program, maybe 100 studies. I think it gives an indication of just how involved we are. What we need for the future is to build on the legacy, the momentum, of this polar year. We need to look at academic institutions in the north. We're the only northern country without a northern university. We need to look at research stations and platforms. They've deteriorated over the last fifty years, for the most part. There are some good examples of progress made in Quebec, for instance, but elsewhere they're in bad shape. We need to look at technical innovation. We can market that technical innovation. There's a program that you've had a little handout on, something that's going on in the Yukon in terms of a centre to test technological innovation and make those moves forward in the Yukon, but there are other initiatives going on elsewhere across the north. We also have to build on Antarctica.
Thank you very much.