Thank you very much.
I was actually hoping that Heather Exner-Pirot would go first, because she always has, I think, more interesting and more informative things to say than I do.
I'm speaking from the perspective of an educator, somebody who has been involved in the delivery of courses, particularly through UArctic's circumpolar courses, and who works at an institution that has a focus on educating about the north, but not from the perspective of the north.
That's led me to something I would like to share with you today that I take quite seriously, which is how to align the current needs for education, curriculum and educational development in the north—something I'm quite interested in—with the need for maintaining and creating a culturally relevant and co-created curriculum. I would align that more specifically with another great need in education in the north, which I think is underdeveloped, particularly in light of events that have happened both over the weekend on the east coast and, more sadly, in western Canada, on the James Smith Cree Nation. This would be the need for training and a co-development of post-secondary accredited education at existing northern institutions on disaster management, on community policing, on logistical planning and response, all of which require both specialized equipment and highly qualified personnel at the community level.
I know that Canada's Arctic and northern policy framework suggests the capacity of northern communities to face the looming threat of climate change and human vulnerability has to be developed in order to deliver and ensure security in the north, but I don't think, really, that policy framework encourages the development of civilian capacity, in specific ways.
I've made a submission before with Dr. Christian Leuprecht from the Royal Military College on the role of Canadian Armed Forces, but I think it's more than this. I would argue that there's a lot of responsibility.
I've been involved in many activities designed to raise awareness of the need for a civilian and military involvement in delivery of human security in the north. Even at meetings designed to talk about the role of defence and the military, communities' response is that we need to be trained ourselves. We're on the front line of the arc of unprecedented climate change and other forms of disaster created by climate change and vulnerability in other forms of insecurities that are coming about because of increased human activity in the north, and we need to be trained.
We can talk about this later. There are a number of programs from the Canadian government's side that are looking to increase capacity in training. What I'm talking about really is accredited post-secondary education. We have CHARS research lab in Cambridge Bay, the High Arctic Research Station, and that's there to track scientific community to the north and encourage it to interact with northern communities, but we haven't, to my knowledge, developed any kind of sustained, accredited, civic program there for training in disaster response. Again, we can talk about this later.
We speak often about building cultural resiliency in the north and co-creating programs and curriculum for that, but I think that developing capacity in the north is incredibly important. If you note, throughout Canada there are probably nine universities that offer disaster training at both the undergraduate and graduate level along these kinds of lines, yet none of them are oriented towards northern disaster, northern response, northern planning or northern logistics. This is a very different context and situation for training.
There are models for the sort of thing I'm proposing. I'm proposing basically appropriate funding for targeted programming at institutions that could be encouraged to develop appropriate regional training and research from a northern point of view. It's research and curriculum that I think are interesting.
Certainly, there are models in Alaska, centres that have been developed to do this sort of thing, but only two universities in Canada offer comprehensive disaster management curriculum at the undergraduate level, and then there are several more that offer at the graduate level.
In light of those realities, I think a targeted funding focus with program development at federal and provincial/territorial level could serve to increase overall public safety and emergency management capacity and capability in the Arctic and its communities consistent, I think, with the aspirations of the Arctic and northern policy framework.
