You're right to say they're very different. Canada has phenomenal unrealized potential, but it also has very formidable challenges. If we had colleagues with us at the table from Nunavut.... The dispersed population, the vast distances and the extreme cold are very different from what you see in northern Norway, for example.
If you go across the circumpolar world you discover a couple of things.
Russia is spending a staggering amount of money. Russia has floating nuclear power plants in the Arctic waters. Is anybody here ready to propose that for northern Canada? It's not going to happen. Authoritarian states can get away with all sorts of things because they don't have to go through the processes that democratic nations have.
Northern Norway, Finland and Scandinavia in general have a simple commitment that regardless of where you are in a country, you'll have a comparable level of services—paved roads to all the communities, good Internet coverage, good electricity coverage and good health care—basically regardless of where you are in any of those countries.
Greenland has made remarkable transitions over the last 20 years, based on the revival of the Greenlandic people, who are the Inuit cousins of folks from Nunavut. They are doing a remarkable job of re-establishing control of their own jurisdiction and moving towards likely full autonomy in time.
The minister talked about Alaska. The numbers I saw were that the department of national defence industries in the United States spend more money in Alaska than the entire Canadian defence industry. It is massively militarized. When Alaska says that it has great infrastructure, great roads, great Internet and all that kind of stuff, it's because it has a massive military presence that goes back to the Cold War. It has a foundation that makes prosperity relatively easy to achieve, because it has the underpinnings of that remarkable military spending.
How do we stand up in the Canadian north? It's not very well, to be honest. I don't mean that to be cynical. I look at my colleagues—the vice-chief and Marcia—and at the work they do. The effort they put in is absolutely staggering. It is difficult to feel comfortable with how we're doing in the Canadian north, to be honest.