Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
If it's not already obvious, I should say for the benefit of the committee that we are hearing from two of the most distinguished public servants that Newfoundland has ever had. I think your opinions deserve a lot of weight, and I hope our committee will give that weight to these comments when we make our report.
My question may be rhetorical, but perhaps you might want to comment on it.
We've had a lot of talk about Arctic sovereignty of late. I don't think there's much doubt about our sovereignty in the Arctic, but it's still fun for the government to talk about it. Suppose we had a Canadian delegation go off to discuss Arctic sovereignty in general with other countries and they came back with a convention or a rule that they'd agreed to that would give an opportunity for the Northwest Passage to be administered by an international group--with the consent of Canada, of course--in terms of pollution, passage, and other rights of control over access to that passage. What do you think the reaction would be in Canada over something like that? Is that in any way comparable to what we're dealing with here?