That's a very important question. I guess I did come across as a bit cynical.
As a historian, I see that we've gone down this path many times before. We've had a whole series of Arctic strategies over the years. Governments of different stripes have come forward and said, “Here's our plan.” Ten years later, the north moves forward, but it moves forward at a slower pace than the rest of the country. In fact, the gap between northern Canada and southern Canada gets bigger rather than smaller. You are making some progress in terms of improving opportunities for northern peoples, but as we've heard Marcia and the vice-chief say, it's not exactly working out terribly well.
Can you do a strategy? The short answer is yes. Where would you do this? Well, I just got back from taking a group of students from northern Canada across northern Norway, where there are a whole series of strategies that actually link up military and resource activity; the approach to Sami studies and Sami affairs, the indigenous peoples of northern Norway; and community development overall.
This is going to make the vice-chief feel very sad, but I went through one tunnel today on the Faeroe Islands that cost more than the total amount of money put into the roads in northern Saskatchewan, probably, in the last decade, and that's only one of many tunnels in the Faeroe Islands. Northern Norway has dozens of these things.
Northern Norway put these pieces together. I think you're asking the right question. It isn't just the military. It isn't just infrastructure. When you look at other countries, from northern Australia to Greenland, the military investment is done with a view to the infrastructure needs of society as a whole. You build a road, perhaps, in a slightly different place. You use the military to develop some sort of an energy system that then is applied to the non-military population. You link up the innovation strategies and the scientific work with the absolute needs of the community.
I really like the question about indigenous knowledge, because the other part of this is that we're doing many of these things, and then we basically ask the indigenous people after the plans have been formulated. If we've learned anything, and Yukon is the best example of this, certainly for the last decade or so, it is that first nations people, Métis people and Inuit people should be at the table from the beginning, setting the priorities and making the decisions alongside public governments and the non-indigenous population. You can leapfrog ahead under those circumstances. That's strategic planning. That's actually looking and saying, “What resources do we have? What challenges do we have? What are the priorities? What do we do first, second, and third?”
What we do now is basically.... Sometimes the territorial government goes in one direction. The provincial government, and you heard the challenge in Saskatchewan, doesn't pay a lot of attention to the provincial north, unfortunately, or not as much as it should. Governments go in different directions, and different departments within governments go in different directions.
As I say, I've been travelling in the circumpolar world for the last month. I'll tell you, if you spend even a couple of weeks up there, you'll feel very badly about how we're doing in Canada in the provincial and territorial north, because we haven't had an effective strategy.