Yes, absolutely. I think we do ourselves and the United States a disservice by postponing diplomatic engagement on this issue.
Postponing diplomatic engagement was a viable option 20 years ago, before the ice started to melt. But during the last two summers the Northwest Passage has been wide open. There are European cruise ships sailing through on a regular basis, without any ice-strengthening capability. I mean, they go through just as regular cruise ships. So we need serious search and rescue there. We need to have very good charts to guide people. We need excellent weather tracking and reporting skills. We need to have a policing function there. These are all things every country would want us to have. And by providing those capabilities, by providing a safe Northwest Passage, we strengthen our claim to actually have jurisdiction, to have sovereignty there.
But our big impediment in doing all that is the fact that historically the United States has opposed our legal position, has argued that any ship from any country has an unrestricted right of access to the Northwest Passage. And that simply does not make sense, either for us or for the United States. The only thing worse for the United States is actually to say, okay, Canada, you can have sovereignty over the Northwest Passage--and then see us do absolutely nothing to protect either our interests or theirs.
So we have to step up to the plate with some serious investments, including things like search and rescue. And in conjunction with that, we have to negotiate with the United States to make them realize that as partners in the defence of North America, it makes sense for the coastal state on both sides of the Northwest Passage to take on that particular responsibility: Canadian sovereignty, through investments and through diplomatic engagement.
And I not only believe this, but I've tested it with Paul Cellucci. We had a day and a half of pretty hard-nosed negotiations with the very best teams of non-governmental experts we could find. We didn't solve the underlying sovereignty dispute, but we came up with nine concrete recommendations that would, if implemented, take us nine-tenths of the way there.