Thank you.
I really do appreciate the question, because I think part of what we're doing here today, and what this committee is doing, which we are so appreciative of, is actually raising the consciousness of Canadians, and not only of Canadians but of those who are listening to and reading Hansard on these discussions, because we are not alone in this. People do look at the words that are used in our committees and in Parliament and by our government, especially the five Arctic literal states. I'm not excluding Sweden, Finland, and Iceland; I'm just saying that the ones around the Arctic Ocean share very much the same concerns you have as to how we raise the consciousness amongst our populations as to what is real and what is a myth, and how we dispel fears that are unfounded by providing them with accurate information.
I think governments—of whatever stripe, of whichever country—have a duty to explain that in the clearest possible terms. I think we appreciated being able to do it today. In my statement, I've tried to reduce to the essentials the real issues out there, to reduce the myth that we really are dealing with an area under siege, under attack, and under exploitation without any kind of control.
The reason I explained the difference between the Arctic and the Antarctic is because in the Antarctic, of course, you have land that is, in legal terms, terra nullius: land that was not owned by anyone is now really a disputed area. What was thought at the time—and we actually participate in the Antarctic Treaty, not as a full member but as an interested observer, because it does deal with things we care about—was to say, look, we don't have the clarity that we have in the Arctic where we all own our land. We have land that we are designating ourselves by putting up shacks or flags and just saying, this belongs to us. You name the number of explorers who have gone out there and done that.
So they said to themselves...and this is really tremendous, because post-World War II we decided that we shouldn't be fighting over things that we can really resolve around a table. They said, you know what? There are some key issues. One is, how do we protect the environment? And how do we not bump into each other? How do we look towards resolving problems in a negotiated way? They dealt with that through the Antarctic Treaty. Transpose yourself to the Arctic and you'll find a completely 180-degree perception. We're all sovereign states. We're around a sea. We developed, over 40 years, the Law of the Sea convention, which we did in order to deal with those gaps.
I think the message to Canadians and the message that we as the Arctic states are trying to get out there is to say that we've actually been working on this, and to say, you may have discovered this recently, but hello, we have been dealing with this for 40 or 50 years, and guess what? We've come up with a really decent system. Is it 100% implemented? No. Most of us would hope that we could implement more parts of it. We would hope that the Americans would sign on as soon as possible, in which case it would be full parties, but I must say—