Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. It's a pleasure to follow on the remarks of my colleague Dr. Nicol.
I want to focus my opening remarks on how I believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine has impacted Arctic security and the ways that Canada should respond.
I am a student of the Arctic Council and have long admired and celebrated the ability of that forum and of Arctic co-operation in general to compartmentalize itself from broader geopolitical tensions.
I note, Mr. Chair, that you were Canada's representative at the last Arctic Council ministerial.
I have led a group of fellow scholars to nominate the Arctic Council for the Nobel Peace Prize and have authored peer-reviewed articles describing the Arctic's exceptionalism in international affairs, so it is with a heavy heart that I now consider the extraordinary period of Arctic co-operation between Russia and the West, beginning in 1987 with Mikhail Gorbachev's famous Murmansk speech calling for the Arctic to be a zone of peace, to be over and the work of building a new era—