Wonderful, I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment of people first. I think that seems to be coming out of the consultation process towards the new Arctic policy framework in terms of really affirming that message strongly. As well, I think it has come out of the northern consultations that the government has undertaken. I think they're pointing in the right direction.
Obviously, the social indicators and the health indicators in the north are dismal. This is very much a black mark on Canada's international reputation, and it's something that we should all be taking seriously. It's certainly worthy of our intention and our investment, not only in material resources but also in intellectual resources, to come up with new models of delivering.
Looking across to Greenland, realizing that it is a different colonial history—albeit a very colonial one as well—given the nature of how the North Atlantic flows up to those coastlines, a lot of those communities, ironically, even through they're just across the Davis Strait, are open for much larger parts of the season and have viable fisheries and different economic opportunities than have existed to date within the Canadian Arctic. There's a very striking visible reality when you go to a community such as Uummannaq in Greenland versus, say, one of our wonderful communities of Baffin Island. They have a different feel to them.
Again, looking outwardly, rather than inwardly as we've consistently done as a country, in looking at the Arctic and potential models I think we should look at best practices, and perhaps Greenland will be one of them. From the economic models, we can look at success stories like Baffinland and how they've made things work with limited infrastructure, and what that offers in terms of opportunity. They've undertaken quite a miraculous achievement in what they've been doing out of the Mary River mine in the last decade.
I'm not trying to dodge your question. It's just to say, again, that in opening up our aperture a bit as a country, in looking outside our own borders and at some of the comparisons, we'll be realizing that we do have a lot of uniqueness in our north, and that a lot of our challenges are in some cases shared within the circumpolar world, such as abysmally high suicide rates, rates of tuberculosis that are scandalous and, in my mind, unconscionable for a country like ours to have. In essence, we have to be careful that when we're comparing apples and oranges, we're realizing that they're both fruits, but in some cases they're different fruits.