Foreign Affairs Committee on Dec. 6th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We'll get started. We are dealing with Canada's Arctic foreign policy.

I want to thank Anja Jeffrey, director of the Centre for the North, from the Conference Board of Canada, for being here today. Thank you very much.

We had also hoped to have Greg Poelzer, who is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, but he is a little under the weather this morning. We'll see if we can get him again at some point.

Nevertheless, we want to thank you, Ms. Jeffrey, for being here today to contribute to our study on the Arctic. We will start with your opening statement, which will be for approximately 10 minutes or so. If you go over a little bit, that's all right because you're the only witness. Then we will go back and forth with questions from the opposition and the government.

Ms. Jeffrey, we'll turn the floor over to you.

[Anja Jeffrey, Director, Centre for the North, Conference Board of Canada]

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Just a few words about me. My name is Anja Jeffrey. I'm a Danish national, but I live in Canada now. My background is in foreign policy. I was a career diplomat with the Danish foreign service for 17 years. I've had two overseas postings, one in the United States in the 1990s, and from 2003 to 2007, as the deputy ambassador to Canada. I lived in Ottawa for four years as a career diplomat, getting to know the country, its policies and politics, and its various regions very well, to the extent that we fell in love with the country and decided to come and live here permanently. In 2009, we immigrated, and I've been living in Canada with my husband and my children since then.

My background is varied. I have a bachelor's in business administration and a master's in international relations. Since I came to work in Canada, I have been primarily preoccupied with circumpolar issues and with the north, both from an economic and a social perspective. When I returned to Denmark in 2007, I became the director for our Arctic resources management committee, or management unit, and one of my files was seals, negotiating the EU seal ban—not that we were promoting the ban; we were negotiating on behalf of Greenland, and were trying to the best of our ability to work against the ban.

In 2009, when I came, I started to work for the Canadian government, and in 2011 I landed the job I have now as the director of the Centre for the North at the Conference Board of Canada. I will tell you a little about the centre.

I have a 10-minute statement, which is written down, so it can be circulated afterwards and picked up, if need be. I'll read that and make those linkages between domestic and foreign policy that I think are extremely important. I would be very open to answering your questions afterwards.

First, a little about my centre. The Centre for the North brings aboriginal leaders, businesses, governments, academia, and communities together, providing a balanced matrix of dialogue in Canada on northern issues. We at the centre deliver cutting-edge research, based on three foundational themes of thriving communities, economic development, and sovereignty and security in Canada's north. Our research is north-centric. It focuses on northern needs and wants. We have published reports on innovative pathways to education in the north, on labour force capacity issues, and on understanding the impacts of major resource projects.

Biannually, we issue an economic forecast for the territories. On Monday we are releasing a report on sustainable options for housing in the north, a highly sensitive issue and one where smart projects are now leading the way to better housing solutions both on and off reserve. Our work fills important information and data gaps in Canada. We provide accurate, in-depth, and consistent information to people across Canada about the northern potential and where it's going.

My testimony to the committee today will focus on the human dimension of Arctic foreign policy. Why is that? All our research consistently points to the fact that resilient and thriving northern communities are the key to unlocking the tremendous economic potential of the north and to moving the northern agenda forward. The centre's research report, “Getting it Right: Assessing and Building Resilience in Canada's North”, confirms that rather than being too concerned about Arctic sovereignty and national security issues, northerners want to live in secure, prosperous, and self-reliant communities. There is an obvious causal link: resilient communities equal an economically sustainable Arctic region, equal a robust Arctic foreign policy based on the inherent strength of northerners.

Resilience refers to the capacity of a community to anticipate risk, limit impact, and recover rapidly in the face of change. By today's standards, many northern communities, particularly aboriginal ones, are not resilient. Rapid socio-economic changes brought on by mine openings or closures—the boom and bust cycle—remoteness and infrastructure gaps, and a lack of economic diversity make building community resilience a daunting task for northerners.

Without question, one of the most acute risks facing northerners is climate change and its related consequences. For example, climate change is severely affecting the northern housing stock. Houses are deteriorating at a much faster rate than those in the south and are far more expensive to operate. Add overcrowding and you have a ticking time bomb on your hands. In Nunavut, 25% of homes have six or more people living in them; in northern Manitoba, that number is 20%.

Our comprehensive report on housing in the north recommends integration of technology and innovation in northern housing designs to offset climatic factors and reduce operating and maintenance costs.

We believe that strong policy measures are needed to drive and foster northern resilience. Rather than trying to bolster resilience from the top down, policy makers must instead formulate strategies that enable locally driven resilience-building measures. One way of doing that is to work with communities to first identify their specific risks and strengths, and their capacity to respond, and then to craft recovery and implementation plans that work on the ground. This is a way of empowering people to take action and break the cycle.

Building off our report on resilience, we are developing a pilot project in collaboration with an aboriginal community in the Northwest Territories to address social emergencies and natural disasters that may impact their community in the future.

To sum up, in terms of foreign policy impacts, it's important to stress that a healthy and resilient north is a north that can effectively drive Canadian sovereignty and security. Asserting Canadian sovereignty, outside military operations or the Rangers, requires that we continue to maintain populations in even the most remote areas. If people move away because of lack of economic opportunities or dismal social conditions, we cannot ensure consistent monitoring of our sovereign territory. So we need to invest in people and their communities. In essence, promoting Canada's northern strategy abroad starts at home, with a good understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by northerners and adequate measures to address them.

I have brought copies of the report that I'm referencing in my presentation, “Getting it Right: Assessing and Building Resilience in Canada's North”. It's also available from our website, centreforthenorth.ca.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We'll start with the opposition, Mr. Dewar, for seven minutes, please.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you to our witness. We're also thankful that you decided to choose Canada in which to settle. I'm obviously very fortunate, because you actually live in Ottawa Centre.

The challenges we face as a country when it comes to the Arctic writ large.... Many have talked at this committee about the importance of understanding what the issues really are. In fact, we've heard many times that it's not really about the notion of sovereignty/security, as is often understood in diplomatic terms—that is, we're under threat or we have to invest in military infrastructure because somehow we're under threat from a perceived enemy. It's about the notion of security and sovereignty investing in people, particularly in this area of the world. As you know better than I do, if you don't do that, then you don't have a claim, in the large sense.

I'm really interested in your own experience, your background. Can you tell us a little bit about the Danish model in terms of governance, how you set things up?

I have two very specific questions.

First, in terms of the Danish model, when it looks at foreign affairs and this balance between people and the north, what department really leads? And give us a guesstimate of how many people are actually involved. That's the first question.

Second, you're engaged at the Conference Board and in your centre with people of the north. Who actually are you working with specifically? What organizations? And who's at the table?

[Anja Jeffrey]

May I address the last question first?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Please do.

[Anja Jeffrey]

The Centre for the North was established in 2009. It's a five-year initiative. That's the mandate of the centre. The Conference Board of Canada is a not-for-profit, independent institution. Everything the Conference Board of Canada does needs to be funded. It has no endowments, and it has no government funding.

When we do big initiatives such as this one—we also have a centre for food and we have other centres—we basically put together a group of investors, because the research needs to be funded. When it comes to Canada's north, who are the main stakeholders? That's the first question you need to ask yourself. We have what I would consider around our table, around our centre, the only balanced matrix of dialogue in Canada on northern issues.

So what does that mean? We have the federal government represented, so of course we have CanNor and AANDC; we have the Privy Council Office, HRSDC, Health Canada, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and PHAC. We have all the provincial and territorial governments that have northern jurisdictions. So of course it wouldn't be P.E.I. It wouldn't be Nova Scotia. But it would be Labrador or Quebec. It would be Ontario. You can carry on from there.

We have industry at the table, so we have mining companies. We have GE Canada. We have Cisco. We have people from private industry and a lot of the banks investing in this initiative through corporate social responsibility measures. We have academia at the table—Greg Poelzer, who is unfortunately not able to be here today, is a very close friend of mine. He and I are writing a report at the moment with Ken Coates and researchers that he has at his disposal on the role of the public sector in northern governance. We are able to do that only because we formed those partnerships with academia. We have people who are experts in the field, and we have those types of networks do the research. I might fund it, but they go out and they do it.

We have aboriginal organizations, for obvious reasons, at the table. I just had the Assembly of First Nations join, so I have all three national aboriginal organizations at the table. We have the Métis National Council, ITK, and the Assembly of First Nations. On top of that, we have a number of the regional first nations organizations at the table. In Saskatchewan, we have the Prince Albert Grand Council, etc.

We have not-for-profits, including the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Having this body of 50 members come together really creates an interesting dialogue on northern issues in Canada. I would like to have more members at the table, but I'm always looking for a good fit. Not everybody pays. First Air is a member of the centre, and they will give me free tickets, so I can go wherever they fly—to Nunavut very often. There are other in-kind contributors as well as cash contributors. So I have about $1 million a year to pay my staff and do the research I do.

To me, it's extremely important that the Conference Board of Canada, as a convener in this space—as neither government nor industry nor anything else—can actually come forward, in a balanced way, and, based of course on data that we collect, put the types of things out there that nobody else is able to put out there.

Is that carrying over into my next question?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

No.

[Anja Jeffrey]

All right. The next question is about the governance model of Denmark and Greenland, which is very different from that of Canada, of course. Denmark is effectively the Kingdom of Denmark, so it consists of Denmark, the Faeroe Islands, and Greenland. Greenland has self-government, as you know. It was voted for in 2009. It's all embedded in an act, ratified and passed by both parliaments. It lays out very clear rules, engagements, and conditions for Greenlandic sovereignty, so to speak. There's a formula in there as to how much of the money from resource development Greenland can keep and how much the block grant will be sort of clawed back as they get richer and richer.

In the wake of the act, all the discussion about them not being an equal partner, never getting to sit at the table, and never getting to do this has all died. They are actually now the masters of their own destiny. They can decide what they want. Foreign policy is not a jurisdiction of Greenland. It's negotiated through Copenhagen. But in the Arctic Council, you will see that the senior Arctic official from Copenhagen sits side by side with the senior Arctic official from Greenland. There will be two government representatives at the table. So it's not handled through the permanent participants, the PPs; it's actually handled in a government-to-government conversation.

I know that's not feasible in Canada because there is a different structure, but that's the way it works for us. So there is autonomy for Greenland, but in very close cooperation with Denmark.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Ms. Jeffrey, thank you very much for that great overview. It was very helpful.

I'm going to turn over to Ms. Brown, for seven minutes, please.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks very much for being here and sharing your expertise with the committee. I found your opening remarks very informative.

I'm very interested in the peoples of the north, and I really think that what Canada does in our leadership on the Arctic Council is going to set a tone for what other countries do. I know that other circumpolar countries are having their own deliberations, debates, arguments, as it were, with their northern peoples. I think we're very fortunate, moving into the council, to have a representative from the north who is going to be the chair. She brings with her a northern perspective, a northern experience, and a northern understanding of the peoples of the north.

You used the phrase “resilient communities” and you talked specifically.... I'm very interested in seeing your report on smart projects, housing construction, and getting it right, because we face significant challenges in the north with establishing what are resilient communities. I'm interested to know what your report suggests we can do.

When I was putting myself through my degree, I worked for an engineering company, and they had three branches of engineering. They were civil engineers, but they also had an interest in a housing business, so I did design work for houses. But I gathered an understanding of what it takes for us in Canada to do the construction necessary to build, even in southern Ontario, resilient communities, where we have to dig to a depth of six feet to put down a roadbed so that we can ensure that it's not going to be disturbed by the frost.

We have much deeper frost in the north, so the chances of building proper water and sanitation for resilient communities that are going to provide proper health opportunities, potable water, and removal of sewage are even more of a challenge there. Did you address those things in the report? Is that something you touched on, and could you share with the committee some of the discoveries you made and what your recommendations are for building resilient communities for our north?

[Anja Jeffrey]

The report on housing contains four innovative case studies. One of them is in Iqaluit, where they're now building houses above code, and one of them is on reserve, where the Holmes Group has worked very closely with the band and council to build housing that goes above code.

A lot of the issues that we see in the north today are due to the fact that the construction that was put up never met minimum code requirements. For some reason, it was decided that wasn't necessary in the north, so what you see today is abysmal housing and you see housing crises, especially on reserve.

The report contains these four case studies because we want to point to the fact that there actually are initiatives out there right now that are trying to address these challenges, and we can move forward as a nation in a very positive manner if we just pay attention to the glass half full instead of the glass half empty all the time.

Yes, Attawapiskat is a reality, and there are quite a few Attawapiskats around the country. But there are private sector initiatives, some of them in cooperation with the public sector, that are really trying to address the challenges and go in and build for the future.

Now, I come back to codes and standards because it is extremely important. My first job in Canada was actually with the Standards Council of Canada, and I negotiated with AANDC and with Environment Canada some money under the adaptation program for the standards development system to address the codes and standards issues in the north. Then I left the Standards Council and somebody else took over. There's actually a working group right now, with representatives from the territories, as well as from Nunavik, that is looking very hard at permafrost issues, looking very hard at some of the other issues related to the built infrastructure. They are going to come up with new standards that can be embedded or incorporated by reference into regulation and into code.

That is the first step. If there are not specific requirements out there as to how things should be built, how they should be inspected, it will not happen. Unfortunately, it has to be mandatory and not voluntary, and there needs to be a lot bigger emphasis from the side of the Canadian government—yes, I'm going to say it—on getting this right. If you've ever gone into some of these communities, if you've been on reserve—and I've been on reserve a gazillion times—it is not good. It does not look right. Off reserve, it's the same thing. You just have to say to yourself that it cannot only be because of climatic conditions; something must have happened in the process that persuaded people to slap up boxes that would not last more than three to five years and then would start to deteriorate really rapidly. That's the reality today.

But in the report there are examples of how this is being addressed. This is what I really want to get out there, and that is that innovation is going to pave the way for a much better housing future in the north and for these resilient communities. If people are not happy, if people are not self-reliant, they're not going to be able to take advantage of economic opportunities, they're not going to be able to be contributors to the national economy, and they're going to move away from the communities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You have thirty seconds.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Are you discussing with the northern territories their building codes? The National Building Code is really a basis to start with, and then the provinces put in their own building codes. We expect to have central heating in our homes, but unless you put a vapour barrier in, the proper construction, your house isn't going to last more than five years. You need that kind of instruction in the provincial or territorial building code to ensure that construction that is being put up is going to be lasting and will provide those sustainable communities that they need to live in.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move over to Mr. Eyking.

Sir, you have seven minutes.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you for coming.

A recent article in The Economist was all about global warming. They mentioned, of course, some of the reasons why. It's the exposure from water to sunlight and all these pollutants that go north from the southern countries. Of course, they mentioned Greenland. The temperature in Greenland has almost doubled. When you look at the whole world, It's gone up just over half a degree, but Greenland's temperature has gone up almost a degree and a half. Being from Denmark, of course, you're well aware that Greenland is the largest island in the world and has the largest volume of fresh water, so we would assume that it is an area that will be mostly affected.

Because of all that, the Danish government must have been very proactive in trying to deal with the changes that were happening, or trying to mitigate the changes that were going to happen from Greenland's perspective. What's your history? How do you reflect on the Danish government's model and how they dealt with it? What were they pushing as policies?

[Anja Jeffrey]

Prior to the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit—that was when Copenhagen hosted the COP/MOP—the then minister of the environment, who's now an EU commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, took a number of delegations from around the world up to Ilulissat, Greenland.

Ilulissat is where the Jakobshavn Glacier comes out and calves into the ocean. Satellite photos and other things consistently show that this glacier is moving a lot faster than it used to in the past. Showing people Greenland, and showing them what is actually happening, and coupling that with scientific information—obviously Ilulissat and the glacier are now a UNESCO heritage site as well—was really powerful in giving people an understanding of what climate change-provoking measures in the south do to the north.

That was the Danish government's strategy in terms of educating and making sure the northern perspective was at least pulled into the conversation. That's what we could do at the time, and I understand from the minister that she had a lot of productive conversations with delegations. There's nothing like seeing things first-hand to give you perspective on what's actually happening. That's the way the Danish government approached it.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

That region was kind of a canary in the coal mine. It really showed the drastic changes, that climate change was happening.

[Anja Jeffrey]

Well, there are scientific data out there that will show that the glacier moves a lot faster, and that the glacier is melting underneath, so it's pushing it out into the ocean, and that too has an effect on the ocean itself and fish stocks and these sorts of things. That's the way it happened.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Good.

You've alluded to the fact that the Conference Board is non-political and it's not funded by the federal government. In a way, that's good because you're not shy with your views and you don't feel intimidated when you express your views. You can put the cards on the table without getting any repercussions, and I think that's good.

So looking at that and at some of the future policies—you alluded to the housing problems that are out there and how this government has to adapt to them, because of the changes, and you mentioned innovation. Could you expand on that innovation you're talking about? You talked about housing, but what are the other innovative ways we can use to deal with the changes, whether for transporting goods up there or for mining? What are the things we have to be ahead of the curve on in dealing with the changes that are going to happen—the challenges in the Arctic, but also the opportunities?

[Anja Jeffrey]

The window for building anything in the Arctic is short, as we know. One of the case studies we have in the report—and that's the one that pertains to Nunavut—demonstrates that you can actually, in the factories in the south, create the types of panels and other units that you can then ship to the north and put together. It's called a KOTT design. It has the right type of vapour barrier. It has the highest insulating effect. It will not deteriorate.

So instead of doing it on the ground, you actually make sure that things are done properly from the beginning, and in cooperation with northerners, the company that's involved in this—and the Government of Nunavut has been involved as well—has come up with this particular design. Things are manufactured relatively cheaply in the south and then shipped up in that window of opportunity that you have with the sealift and put together, and not only in Iqaluit but also in other communities in Nunavut. My researcher was up there and talked to the general contractor, and these houses are very easy to put together, really durable, very energy-efficient, and the people who have moved into the first homes seem to actually be warm instead of cold.

We'll see, but these houses are supposed to last a lot longer than the current building stock.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

What about some of the other innovative ways we have to deal with the changes? I'm kind of leaning towards our research council here in Ottawa. It has been noted by many witnesses before you that most of the departments we have here in Ottawa have to deal with this Arctic opportunity and challenge. Everybody has to work together on it.

More sea routes and more activity up there—is your Conference Board dealing with that and how we should be monitoring vessels more, monitoring the types of vessels, being ready for that challenge, that activity?

[Anja Jeffrey]

In a certain sense, we're working on a project right now on the economic impact of developments in northern marine waters. We're going to do that project a little differently. We're working with an advisory.... We're going to come up with a report. Then we're going to have a hearing in Ottawa. Afterwards, we're going to publish a report that can then be taken into the regions.

What we do at the Centre for the North...we are not prescriptive and we're not advocacy. What I tend to do is lay the foundation for informed decision-making. What I see is a huge information and data gap in Canada around some of these issues. There is a lack of understanding as to how you pull the information together.

Laying that foundation for informed decision-making, whether it's for governments or for industry, is really my role in this, which is very different from being in government, where I used to be. My responsibility in this space is to do applied research that is really solid and to look into the issues very, very carefully.

I've spoken to my investors as to what they want with this initiative, because I can keep building this library with the money I have and churn out reports left, right, and centre, or I can take everything I have and create a more strategic approach.

Can I have one minute...?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Yes, just wrap up quickly. We are just over the time. Go ahead.

[Anja Jeffrey]

Within the centre mandate, I'm going to take all of the research that we've done—and we have a lot more in the pipe—and I'm going to write an interim report: What does the research tell us? What are the predominant themes and what are the linkages? What's going on in the north? Then I'm going to ground-truth it; I'm going to take it back to the region.

Then I'm going to couple it with international best practices. I'm going to look at a cost-benefit analysis. At the end of it, we're probably going to be able to come up with something that's called “Future options for Canada's north”. It's not a northern strategy, because I don't believe in one strategy for Canada's north. I think that's off the mark, actually. I don't believe in a balanced approach; I believe in cutting-edge policy-making that addresses critical issues. For that, you actually need to go a little further. You need to have people state the priorities.