Thank you. Those are excellent questions.
First of all, I would suggest that we need to be very clear in identifying what we see as particular Arctic vulnerabilities that are beyond the capacity of our national or allied solutions to meet these threats.
Often, we treat everything Arctic as if it is inherently different from the suite of risks and threats that we face across Canada, so I think the first set of questions asks what is specifically “Arctic” about those threats. After that, we can assess whether or not we have the right capabilities and, most importantly, relationships to be able to meet them.
In terms of immediate-term priorities, I think it's improving our domain awareness. It's our situational awareness of what is happening within our Arctic and recognizing that a lot of the activity is not going to be overt and it's not going to be military. It's not going to take the form of a conventional challenge to our sovereignty, which is something that we love to fixate on.
A lot more of these challenges are competition for narratives. It's trying to shape what we want to be as a country, what our opportunities are for leadership domestically and internationally within the Arctic and ensuring that we have the right relationships, not only across government departments and agencies, but across governments. It must be centred on northerners first and foremost, as the most important source of information in detecting a lot of anomalies in the environmental and human space. Who better than northerners themselves to determine if something is out of the ordinary in the conversations happening on Facebook or with people coming to their communities and interacting in strange ways?