Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to our witnesses for appearing.
My questions will be for Dr. Exner-Pirot.
Does the lack of northern water infrastructure pose a risk to our Arctic sovereignty? I know that you have expertise in the north. I'm going to quote from your article entitled “NORAD Modernization and the North—A Primer”. Some will ask how this relates to water. It very much does. The bill we're talking about says, “An Act respecting water, source water, drinking water, wastewater and related infrastructure on First Nation lands”.
Your article says:
The base infrastructure grid—the network of transportation, communication, power, and water lines that southerners take for granted—does not extend into Canada’s Arctic. Many Inuit [and indigenous] communities, small by southern standards, are entirely off the grid and not connected to the rest of Canada by road, rail, fibre optic cable, power line, or water supply.
My first question is this: How important are water and related infrastructure to our Arctic sovereignty and security?