Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, guests, for coming.
When you look at the big picture here, you know how the Europeans went west to Atlantic Canada, and then everybody was pushing them further west for expansionism, and you can see how that went.
All of a sudden, it's all eyes are on the north, right? You alluded to Antarctica, but maybe because we're in the northern hemisphere, of course, it seems like the biggest change is happening up there. The Arctic is a bit of a barometer of the environment of our planet. It's also going to open up all these great economic opportunities. One would say, did we do it right in the last couple of centuries, and how are we going to do it in this upcoming century if the Arctic is the so-called last frontier?
I'm more curious about international protocol and how we go down that route. The recent article in The Economist talked about how the species are going to change. Fish are going to move from one area to another area; birds, wildlife, everything is going to change if the graph continues the way it goes.
I think we're going to be chairing this Arctic Council, and the Americans are going to follow suit. On the Obama administration, my sense from him in his State of the Union address is they want to put a bit of a stamp on being environmentalists. That all being said, what should we push to make sure we take into consideration indigenous people and everything I talked about? How do we really enforce something in this Arctic Council that will set the table, which could be key for the upcoming century on how the Arctic is going to be handled overall?