The idea is that the Arctic and Canada are inseparable, in my mind. Our history is steeped in the Arctic. A lot of the immigration that went on actually came through Hudson Bay. York Factory was a big part of that here in northern Manitoba. The connections with the fur trade between the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company are part of the rich history we have. The indigenous peoples we have in the country, those who live in the northern parts of the provinces as well as those who live in the territories, have a long, rich history of living and working in these environments.
When you take it into the modern context, you also have to think about the economic opportunities associated with the north. It's very clear to me, as a guy who's been in the Arctic for almost 40 years now, that the Arctic is really the next big area for us to develop. I've often thought of Canada as having two oceans. We have the Atlantic and the Pacific for development. We've done that development. We've had a lot of development across our land mass. We've had almost no development in the north, terrestrially based development or marine-based development.
Those opportunities are significant. There is a lot of economic opportunity in the north. We're coming out of a time as a society when we had blinders on. We always thought about the two coasts, east and west, and the land mass that was in the southern margin that was right up against the U.S. We need to think more about our entire country, and a big chunk of that is in the north.
I think there's the whole shepherding side of things, where we have to be good stewards of what that land is, but there's also the building of necessary infrastructure to take advantage of these new opportunities that are being unlocked because of climate change.