Okay.
I would like to mention also that we do have access to an instrument, aside from Makivik Corporation, which is a national organization called ITK. It is also engaged with the Government of Canada on a Crown-relationship basis.
We also have another organization called ICC, the Inuit Circumpolar Council. I was at that meeting just a few months ago in Point Barrow, Alaska. We talked about a number of different issues that are related and are of concern to the Inuit.
We passed a huge number of declarations that we consider to be important and that need to be known by the outside world in order for us to survive. Climate change is a big factor. The food chain is being affected. The security of our food is being affected. We have to become a very heavily innovative people.
At times, we look around to see where we can get help. Maybe the only way that we can get help is if we make it explicitly clear that without money there's very little we can do, even in the north. We need money. Without money, there's very little you can do, as I mentioned.
There was another instrument that I helped build in the very early years, which is the Arctic Council. It allows seven Arctic countries to rotate on the chairmanship of that organization. Where are the Inuit? They have permanent participation. What does that participation mean? It's a token participation. They don't have a very clear voice in terms of being able to use it to get their points across. They're not decision-makers. Even when it comes down to their life, they don't make decisions. Who makes the decisions? It's the seven Arctic countries. We have no role. The only role that we have is tokenism.
That has to change. If we're going to get somewhere and close the gap between understanding what we're dealing with, that instrument has to change. We have to be able to learn to accept the permanent residents of the Arctic. It's their homeland; they have to be part of it. I was even wondering why they aren't calling on them to bring them in as a chair of the Arctic Council.
This is an issue I've been dealing with over the last 15 years. They're trying to make the point. I'm trying to get these different countries, ambassadors and so on, to understand. They do understand it, but they think, if we allow you to have access, what about the others?
Here we are dealing with the question of the Arctic. It's a very sensitive Arctic, as you know. It's a very special area. It's a last frontier. Inuit have lived there for thousands of years, before anybody else, so they must have some understanding of what the Arctic is all about. The rest of the world can learn from that. Now, they leave us on the side and never bother to give us an answer as to where we stand in regard to this whole development.