Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 9th, 2025

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

I really appreciate your testimony about how there is so much opportunity and things that may not be currently front of mind.

We also have an opportunity now that there is an ambassador. Where do you think the focus and direction should be to take advantage of that position? What could that ambassador be doing ?

I know there's not a lot of time left. Could you give us some of your views on that?

[Jessica M. Shadian]

I'm very excited. I think Virginia Mearns is going to be really great.

This is what we're missing. We go to these international conferences. They're security conferences, Arctic conferences, what have you. Every time you'll have the whole stage filled—first maybe with a minister of foreign affairs, a defence minister or even a prime minister, and then they're talking about the other counterparts—or many times you'll see a stage and it's, let's say, just one country, so you have the minister of foreign....

I mean, we'd look so good if we did this. Let's say we have a minister of foreign affairs, and then we have our ambassador. Then we also bring the territorial premiers and ITK. We show up in force, and we're like team Canada, saying, “This is us. This is who we are as an Arctic nation, and this is what we're doing.”

We're not only not strategic but oftentimes not there. It was excellent to have Mary Simon a couple of years ago at a big conference—that was great—but we often send the wrong ministers, with domestic agendas and not foreign affairs portfolios.

I don't know how much time I have left, so I don't want to....

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

We're done.

I'm sorry, but thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ahmed Hussen]

Thank you for that.

We'll go next to MP Mario Simard.

You may go ahead for six minutes.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your presentation, Ms. Shadian.

You spoke at length about infrastructure. Historically, Quebec pursued development in the north because there was a financial interest in accessing natural resources. As is often the case, infrastructure is built in very northern areas for development purposes, whether it's ore or energy. I think that is the best solution in the short term for developing infrastructure.

I say that because, right now, the government is looking to develop the strategic critical minerals sector. We all know that Canada's north is home to many strategic critical mineral deposits, but what is sorely lacking is the infrastructure to get mining projects off the ground. We've had some discussions with first nations members, including representatives of a natural resource centre of excellence and a major project coalition.

I'd like to know whether you've looked into the infrastructure required for the development of natural resources, especially positive models involving first nations. Finding a proponent for this kind of infrastructure is a challenge. With some sort of financial support, first nations could become proponents for such infrastructure projects.

I'd like to hear, at the very least, your thoughts on the infrastructure needed to develop and deploy natural resource projects in the north.

[Jessica M. Shadian]

Thank you.

This is a larger question, in fact. It's not just infrastructure. The other side is that we need to build new supply chains.

I've learned a lot from listening to really smart people. I've learned that we need to create a new critical minerals economy, and that can't happen with just Canada alone, much less in the north. This is going to have to be done purposefully and in coordination with our allies we like to work with.

There are two pieces to it. It comes from everything.... Infrastructure is a big part of this, but it gets wrapped up into the whole discussion. We need to have an entire supply chain identified, from the mine to the offtake market. We need to have a guaranteed price.

There are a lot of potential critical mineral mines that are Canadian—Canadian-led and proponents of. On that end, there are a lot of indigenous people and northerners who are proponents. The way forward on that is outright equity ownership.

The fact is that there are a lot of junior mines dominated by junior miners, and junior miners are going to have a hard time getting the financing they need. What I've understood is that this is where we need to work in a concerted way with our partners to figure out and identify what those supply chains are. You need to have a whole supply chain from the mine and the mine project all the way to the offtake market identified up front, because that becomes an investable project for pension funds. That's the kind of patient capital that's required, but then it feeds in with the venture capital because a lot of this stuff takes new technologies and information.

We need to have a bigger plan. I don't think the north is going to be able to succeed in this on its own and figure out the infrastructure gaps. This needs to be a national effort. There are a lot of proposed projects in the north led by northerners themselves.

I understand there is now some discussion about how we could do this. This is the only way. Otherwise, China is going to continue to flood the market and keep prices low, and we won't be able to compete with that market.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you.

My next question is directly tied to what you just said. Recently, I heard about the desire of NATO countries to establish a floor price for certain critical minerals. Perhaps you can shed some light on that.

NATO countries rely heavily on rare earths from China, which controls the market. Canada has the potential to develop those rare earths, but it needs the infrastructure, as you rightly pointed out.

Do you think it's likely that NATO countries will agree on a floor price for certain critical minerals, given their strategic importance?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ahmed Hussen]

Give a brief response, please.

[Jessica M. Shadian]

It's something a lot of the new allies want to have happen because we need it for NATO technologies. From the EU to the Nordic countries, they are eager and are going after working out how to create a new critical minerals economy, but they also know there has to be something coordinated because of the price.

Maybe it's stockpiling or however you want to look at it, but these are the efforts and real strategic means we're going to need to take. Otherwise, we're just going to keep talking about our opportunity and it won't be realized.

A lot of our NATO allies are already going in this direction and they have strategic partnerships with a lot of different countries to help build that out.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ahmed Hussen]

Thank you very much.

We will now proceed with more questioning. We are going to MP Rood.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much for being here today.

You've made it incredibly clear that Canada is not prepared to meet the threat that Chinese and Russian expansion means for Canada and our north.

I just wanted to ask this: In your opinion, should Canada be establishing a permanent base to increase our Arctic military presence year-round, and could you expand on what a year-round base would need on day one and over the next 10 years to meet today's threats and future-proof against tomorrow?

[Jessica M. Shadian]

I think there are decisions that there will be several bases put in the north, but that's only one piece. I think we're going to have a lot more assets and people in the north that way so it would be a really big help, but again, we're getting back to the infrastructure thing. We have to figure out how we're going to have adequate energy, telecommunications, water and all the surrounding infrastructure.

There's a housing crisis in the north as well. We need to think more holistically. I said it in the past: I definitely do not think that with trickle-down infrastructure, if we do defence infrastructure, it will all just fall into place for communities, but I don't think it's necessary to even think that way. If you think in a multi-purpose fashion and more strategically, we would be able to address the economic, the defence and the social infrastructure needs together.

I would just say that, yes, bases are important, and I think there are others to defer to as to where they should go and what a year-round presence would look like, people who know much more than I do. All I will add to that is that it's one piece.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Middlesex—London, ON]

You say infrastructure, so beyond buildings in Kit, are there any continuing supports that might be required then to keep pace with, let's say, Finland, Norway and the United States, so that a base up in the north would stay mission-ready and be able to be interoperable year-round?

[Jessica M. Shadian]

I'm sure it could be operable year-round but with what kind of technologies? Parts of the north do not have any fibre cable.

I'll just add out there that there are a few projects already. Allied neighbours are looking to build an undersea fibre cable that stretches all the way from Japan to Europe. It needs to be sensored. It needs to be smart. We need to see what's going on under the water and monitor things, and so forth and so on, and provide very fast communication.

Again, we can focus on one thing but we also need to focus on everything else at the same time.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Middlesex—London, ON]

I have two very loaded final questions then. What do we need to do to meet the current threat environment, and what do we need to do, as you said, to future-proof ourselves because right now we're seriously lagging behind?

[Jessica M. Shadian]

We need to have a very good grasp on what next-generation transportation technologies look like, and not just technologies but infrastructure, and then what we need to do that. When it comes to the north, there's an extra layer of building things and operating in cold weather environments. If we just make that almost a focus, it's going to unlock everything else, all the other pieces that surround it.

I know we're still stuck at trying to figure out if we could build one deepwater port and where it would be. I just don't think we're talking about the north with the kind of sophistication we need to be talking about the north with.

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Middlesex—London, ON]

On that note, how do you think the newest Chinese and Russian heavy icebreakers changed the threat posed to Canada? What foreign threat scenarios would worry you most, and how does Canadian technology now match or beat these capabilities?

[Jessica M. Shadian]

For China, as I said the other day, it's not future-proofing; it's today-proofing. They are already using things like AI-embedded sensor technologies. I don't know how we can even compete. We need to know what's going on under our waters. We need the submarines and then there's also automated piloting going on under the water to do detection as well, but we really do need fibre cable as well. That's one piece—under the water and figuring out what's going on under the water—and we are working on building icebreaker ships. We can't create a ship with...out of nowhere.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ahmed Hussen]

Thank you very much.

We'll go next to MP Bill Blair.

You have five minutes.

[Bill Blair, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you very much.

Dr. Shadian, it's very good to see you again.

I'd like to follow up a bit on the question that Ms. Rood asked. There are a number of different concepts about how to actually establish a stronger Canadian military presence in the north. One of the things we've heard very clearly from the military is that their concept of operations is not to build one base in essentially what is 40% of Canada's entire land mass because the challenges of traversing that territory and getting to any place really would isolate that base. The military concept of operations, as I understand it, is a number of what we call “northern operational support hubs” spread right across the Arctic.

I recall very well, in the spring of last year, there was a suggestion of perhaps building a base in Iqaluit. I went to Iqaluit. I spoke to the premier, to the mayor and to a number of people there, and they were, quite frankly, reeling from the idea. They said that, for them, it would require a significant investment in infrastructure. That wouldn't just mean a military base. It would mean things like power generation and fibre optics, which you mentioned a number of times. You and I discussed this with Madeleine Redfern many times. There were also things about deepwater ports, power generation, water treatment, sewage treatment, health care and education facilities, and housing—a whole litany of investments that would need to be made.

In response to that, in the defence policy update that we brought forward, there was about $220 million for those investments to support the northern operational support hubs. In the spring, the Prime Minister announced another $400 million for those infrastructure investments and for some very specific projects, which I think are helpful as well. There is about $94 million for power plant upgrades in Cambridge Bay, in Gjoa Haven, in Igoolik and in Iqaluit. There is another $78 million to improve critical infrastructure related to drinking water, waste water and stormwater. All of that was informed by people in the north who told us that this is what they really need.

For many of us down south, we think of asserting our sovereignty through submarines, battleships, fighter jets and over-the-horizon radar systems, and those are important components of it. However, when I go to the north—and I know you know this very well, as you alluded to it in your remarks—they're talking about infrastructure. This is infrastructure that supports not only our security but also our prosperity in the north. That means making sure we invest in communities.

I think Ms. Vandenbeld referenced this, but I'd like your take on it again. The challenge is this. How do you really incorporate indigenous leadership and indigenous voices in those investments? I think it can be very difficult if we are not well informed about their perspective on what it takes to live in the north, because then we could make mistakes.

Frankly, there are few dollars, even though I've talked about big numbers. It's not a lot of money when we talk about the scale of the investment required. How do we get this right?

[Jessica M. Shadian]

Again, it comes back to coordination. The mapping project comes back to this. There are partners on that. We work with NTI, and it comes from the private sector, from northern.... NTI has done their infrastructure gap assessment. It's supposed to look at all the infrastructure needs and what we have, and that's from social, economic and defence perspectives.

We just need to wrap our heads.... We need to be able to see everything that's there and that's needed. Then we can start prioritizing, being strategic and figuring out how this connects to that and how that connects to this. How does the base then create water when there's not enough water somewhere else? Where do we put a base, and where will the base be in relation to a port that's going where? Ports, of course, then create opportunities for more goods to arrive in the north.

This is it. I don't, in my mind, understand how we're going to accomplish everything we need to accomplish if social infrastructure is over here, critical minerals are over there and the defence discussions are over there. We need to work this out, and we need to do it quickly. We need to be very strategic. Maybe the projects office needs to be the one that maps this out.

[Bill Blair, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

I tend to agree with that. It's one of the reasons we see the clear nexus between defence policy and foreign policy. I think they complement each other. They need to be lined up.

I have another question. I agree with the advent of Sweden and Finland into the NATO family. All of the Nordic nations, all of the non-Russian Arctic, are now members of NATO, and I think there's a great deal that we can learn from them. I would also note that some of those countries have not done as good a job in dealing with their indigenous populations as we would aspire to. How do we take the best of what they do but also bring our own values to that?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ahmed Hussen]

Give a very brief response.

[Jessica M. Shadian]

We have a very different situation in Canada from the Nordics. The Nordics have cultural rights. We have real land claim agreements. We have Inuit who own surface and subsurface soil, so it's a very different landscape. I'll just say that.