What I meant to say, and I'm sorry if I was unclear, is that setting up the Arctic Council as though it should be generating instruments, legally binding instruments bought into by all the member states to the Arctic Council, the Arctic eight, and as though the primary role of the Arctic Council as it moves forward is to generate these binding treaty-type instruments, in my mind, is the wrong direction.
A lot of these matters are dealt with. You mentioned shipping. That is going to be dealt with by the International Maritime Organization. As you said, that's a global issue. A mandatory polar code is not going to be negotiated under the auspices of the Arctic Council. It's got to be done globally, because there are shipping interests from all around the world, from Singapore to the Netherlands, that are going to have a say and have competency in those issues.
To set up the Arctic Council so that its primary role is to generate legally binding instruments deviates from the original intent of the Arctic Council and actually ties Canada's hands. In a lot of these issue areas we want to have flexibility at the state level to be able to deal with issues, particularly when you're talking about land and distinguishing from waters.
We don't necessarily want the world coming and telling us what these should be. In some cases, we're going to want common global standards that apply to Canadian waters as everywhere else. In other cases, we're going to want that flexibility. My concern is that if you take something like the Arctic Council, which has worked and has been so innovative because it's not trying to emulate other international organizations, because it's not one, and try to convert it into that, and then to suggest that it should be coming up with legally binding instruments to deal with a lot of these issues that, as you properly said, are truly international issues—