I'll take the first stab at that.
In terms of whether our work can contribute to sovereignty, it's a tricky question. It's a good question. I'm one of those who is doubtful that sovereignty is what we should be thinking about in terms of technical, legal meanings. Sovereignty is a very interesting proxy in Canadian policy for a whole range of things, domestic and international. There aren't many other Arctic states that actually have sovereignty crises, as we do from time to time. The Norwegians, for example, when they were dealing with the Russians on Svalbard, did not have a sovereignty crisis. They had an issue.
For us, we bundle a lot of things into that word. I would just say that an organization like ours can have a huge impact in ways that are perhaps lateral; we have to think laterally to do them. For example, I have been engaged with some of the Pacific Rim countries—China, Korea, Japan, and Singapore, and of course the U.S. and Russia are in that box—talking about the globalization dimension of the Arctic. I think we have to understand that the Arctic is an area where we have not just climate change occurring, but also globalization. We have seven billion people on the planet at the moment, and it's not just a case that the things that will change the Arctic occur in the Arctic. Most of them, in fact, occur outside of the Arctic. Whether that's pressure for transportation routes, or minerals, or transboundary pollutants, or climate change itself, they're caused by non-Arctic drivers.
Where does that relate to Canada and its borders? I think the bottom line is that this part of the planet is increasingly attractive for the human species, all seven billion of us. So it has to be understood certainly in its physical science dimension—the climate change, the ice regime—but more importantly in its human dimensions. That's why I think we hear so much talk about the Arctic voice in terms of foreign policy. It's not because statecraft is talked about on the streets of Tuktoyaktuk on a daily basis. It's because very often when we deal with the Arctic, we forget that people live there. We tend to look at it as a frontier, which means we're going there to get something, or we're going through to get to southern destination points, or we think of it as a laboratory, or we think of it as a big wilderness, a big park that we can preserve by drawing lines around it. But most importantly, for people like Dennis and me, it's a homeland. It's where people live.
If you want to engage in a thought exercise, think about how a person living in Ottawa would react if northerners were having almost daily, around the planet, conferences on how people in Ottawa should structure their affairs and how they should be more environmentally responsible or more economically responsible. That's the pressure that people of the north feel.
As to sovereignty, I don't think we have, in a legal sense, any burning sovereignty issue. We have a territorial dispute with the U.S. in the Beaufort Sea. We have some issues around Hans Island, which are close to being resolved. But we don't have a sovereignty crisis. As I said, I think one has to look at that word and think of all the proxies it serves.
