No. We need to have a proper polar-class icebreaker and we've been trying to get one for decades. The Diefenbaker is currently the incarnation of that. It's been provisionally funded and supposedly it's going to be developed, but we're kind of trapped in this situation of building our icebreakers inside our own Canadian system. To be honest, it's taking a long time to do this, because with the shipyards we have we're getting a lot of pressure on them to build these things, and the timelines are getting extended and extended.
I'll give you an example of the practicalities of this. This year, my group is going to do a circumnavigation of Greenland in an icebreaker. The north end of Greenland has some of the thickest and heaviest ice that we have left on the planet and to get around that north end of Greenland is very difficult. We have a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker doing an escort of our icebreaker around the north end of Greenland so that we can get through that condition.
We were just told about a month ago or so that our research icebreaker, which is the Amundsen, will be unavailable for that cruise because it has to go into dry dock. It has more problems. This has been a typical problem with the Amundsen. It's basically falling apart because it's over 40 years old. Instead, we're taking a second Russian icebreaker on this thing. We're taking a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker and a Russian electric icebreaker to do this circumnavigation of Greenland.
Here's an international science project going on in the Arctic and all supported by Russian infrastructure. That's a really bad sign when we can't even get our Canadian infrastructure to collaborate with the Russians on a circumnavigation of Greenland. We don't have enough stability in our icebreaker fleet to be able to do that. I think that's a real problem for us as a nation.