Good afternoon. It's a great honour and pleasure to be here to meet you. I'm a sort of recovering public servant, or a retired public servant who has fashioned himself into a so-called Arctic expert in the last few years. I'm not an international lawyer, so I can't speak with the certainty that some of my colleagues do.
I want to talk about Arctic sovereignty in a wider, more existential sense, rather than a narrow legal one. I'm interested in Canadian nation building in the Arctic as the ultimate expression of Canadian sovereignty, as well as, of course, in the international and domestic regulatory machinery of sovereignty.
How did I get engaged in the Arctic? As a diplomat, I worked mainly in Washington, Hong Kong and China, for many years. These were great experiences that made me look at my own country in a different way, not necessarily as others see us.
In Ottawa, I had a number of jobs related to Canadian foreign policy planning and transportation. For five years, I had the great pleasure of working at Transport Canada, coordinating the Asia-Pacific gateway and corridor initiative. It was a successful example of multipartisan federal-provincial and private sector co-operation in facilitating Canada's international trade.
I learned first-hand to appreciate the critical historical and contemporary roles of the national government in providing direct or indirect support for major transport, energy and communications infrastructure. Our current web of economic infrastructure, built over centuries, has enabled very broad, deep economic and social development, public and private, in Canada.
In contrast, I also came to understand more deeply the huge infrastructure, economic and social development gap that exists between northern and southern Canada. Frankly, I was shocked by it. I found the lack of national political attention to Arctic economic and social development understandable but troubling, particularly given the changing international environment.
I was impressed in particular by the lack of Canadian attention to the melting of the Arctic Ocean. This huge geographic fact is driving unprecedented thinking, interest and investment in Arctic economic and social development in Alaska, Russia, Norway and Greenland, as well as rising interest in China, a country I know well.
The melting is also precipitating important geopolitical recalculations as global balances shift and shudder. However, Canada sleeps. We are falling further and further behind in investing in the core pan-Canadian Arctic infrastructure and policies that would enable the peoples, communities and regional government of Canada's Arctic and all Canadians to adapt and flourish in this new world. I see it as the maritimization of the Arctic archipelago looking forward 50 years—an astonishing vision that we should be thinking about now.
This infrastructure gap is particularly poignant at a time when the pillars of North American integration and co-operation are threatened by our neighbour to the south and the development of self-reliant Canadian economic development is increasingly urgent.
To step back a bit from the integration and globalization, we have prospered from the benign environment of the last 30 or 40 years.
The Arctic is one of our aces in the hole economically, as it is for Russia now, over the very long term. Think of the third option of the first Trudeau government, revisited under different circumstances that have illustrated our profound vulnerability to changes in U.S. policy. The third-option policy focused on national domestic economic development, not just the usual magical remedy of diversified trade, which I have heard about for 40 or 50 years of my career.
Who's responsible for our huge Arctic development gap? Successive federal governments have mainly focused for decades on important Canadian Arctic identity and governance issues. Nothing I have to say on the importance of infrastructure means that I am mindlessly pro-development or have any problem with a great emphasis on aboriginal reconciliation. Nor do I at all deny climate change.
However, there's been very little attention to parallel economic and social investment programs in these priorities that facilitate other national goals in the Arctic, from security to legal claims, indigenous reconciliation, robust territorial democratic governments and environmental stewardship.
The same complacency affects our approach to the geopolitics of the Arctic. We have ignored important emerging geopolitical challenges since Crimea in Russia and Trump in the United States, because of our very comfortable and complacent place under the U.S.'s security and trade umbrella. Now that trust is somewhat in question. We've seen it shattered in the trade and economic area—which, again, I have worked on extensively—and we're just pulling ourselves out of the debris there. We'll come out all right, but it's equally possible for those disturbances to apply in the defence, security and sovereignty area.
We see new Arctic strategic tensions and military activities all around us—as Heather has mentioned—starting with Russia's decades-long and very impressive military-civil buildup around the northern sea route. China's main Arctic “belt and road” partner is Russia, and China is funding Russian Arctic energy developments in Yamal and elsewhere, despite low oil prices and western sanctions. It's part of Putin's national will.
Threat is always a combination of capacity and intent. It seems to me that prudence demands an updating of our overall strategic analysis, taking the unexpected fully into account. There are also important continental security changes, as the north warning system ages, as new threats appear, as NORAD faces reorganization and as the United States considers a more active surface role in the Arctic Ocean.
As long as Trumpist nationalism reigns, we must put a footnote—a large footnote—under our excellent trust and co-operative relations over many years with the United States. One can only hope the President does not turn his powerful America First machine to the Arctic dimensions of Canada-U.S. continental defence, especially in the Arctic, including his charge that from a security point of view, Canada is a free rider.
We must remember that all of our machinery asserting our Arctic claims depends on a continuation of the liberal international order, which we have supported based on the foundation of United States' support since World War II. We must realize that that cannot be entirely taken as much for granted now as it was three or four years ago.