Evidence of meeting #60 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was north.
A recording is available from Parliament.
10:40 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Actually, my question sort of stems from what you just talked about in terms of sustainable development. In your involvement over the years with the Arctic Council, how have you seen the evolution of that? That sort of touches on what you just talked about. You've obviously seen a lot of changes in the evolution of the Arctic Council since 1996, so could you briefly touch on those?
10:40 a.m.
Chairperson, Canadian Polar Commission
Certainly. It's been a remarkable and quite amazing evolution, in my view. There are a lot of detractors, but the process took time.
Sustainable development was not based on any kind of theoretical or definitional approach. The States didn't want to define it at the front end, so it started off as a collection of projects, and the projects were simply approved based on who was interested and who had money to do them. But over the course of the first 10 years, a pattern started to develop. I think we have now, actually looking at the Arctic human development report that came out of the Icelandic chairmanship in 2004, sort of a pattern, almost a strategic framework for how you look at sustainable development questions.
The challenge, of course, in sustainable development in the Arctic is determining who it is for. Is it for the local people, or is it to sustain the seven billion who live on the planet? As I said, I think the globalization pressures are such that this is the next thing in terms of potential energy resources, certainly mining resources—we don't know too much about fisheries—and even tourism. So the question is, who's it for?
“Sustainable development” is a tricky term because it's a process as opposed to a result or a destination. I think it's gone well. I think there's more effort now to try to bring in business perspectives. Certainly, the working group has been a very strong supporter of the indigenous perspective. We won't get the balance completely right, but the dialogue is much more healthy than it was in 1996, when I started.
10:45 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you very much.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for taking the time to be here today. We appreciate it.
The meeting is adjourned.
