The name of the community that we met in last week is Haparanda. You'd be interested to know that apparently in the 1800s, Thomas Cook, of Thomas Cook travel agencies, said that to honestly become a true globetrotter one has to visit three places on earth: Samarkand, Timbuktu, and Haparanda.
We were quite skeptical looking around Haparanda, which was a town with no one in the streets. It used to be a port. It's at the top of the gulf where Sweden joins Finland. There used to be a lot more timber-related exports and imports, imports of other products, fish, the whole thing, and that is now dying off. The town is still alive because an Ikea has been built, and it's where all the Russians come across Finland to buy their Ikea products. I'm not sure that putting Ikeas into all northern communities in Canada would have the same success, but you can see that innovation is being used to try to come up with ways to keep a community alive.
While there may be roads to this town of Haparanda, and we don't have roads to a lot of Canadian northern communities, the issues of economic and social sustainability are themes that are very common throughout the circumpolar region, and we find we do have much to talk about when we get together to discuss those issues.