First off, I would say that I'm personally quite concerned about what you described as a love affair. I think our notions have always been romantic and mythological. Very few Canadians travel to the north, and the number of Canadians who go to the Yukon is much smaller than the number of Canadians who go to Florida, for example. We haven't embraced the north in that kind of practical sense.
When you talk about what we could do, I think sometimes the vision people have of the Yukon, with a quarter million people, and of the Northwest Territories, with 500,000 to 600,000 people, is wrong-headed. I don't think those territories can sustain that kind of activity, or surely it wouldn't be beneficial in the short term. I think we need stability. We need stability in the population, we need security of jobs, and we need a sort of sustained and properly planned development of natural resources, rather than the quick hit, taking the cream of the crop of our resources as quickly as we can.
I think we need to know that in fact we understand the whole region, that we have a presence across the whole north. I don't, again, mean that we should have 10,000 people in the military base on Ellesmere Island. Those kinds of things are impractical and are very expensive.
I was raised in the Yukon. When I first went to the Yukon, we had an air force base in Whitehorse, and it actually stabilized the population. It meant there were more stores, more businesses, and more things going on. Then it went away, and for a long time there was virtually no Canadian defence presence in the Yukon at all, and the Yukon suffered as a consequence. I would suggest to you that as you start thinking about how you plan the military expenditures—whether it's a permanent station, an air force base, or actual infrastructure such as satellites or whatever else—you combine it with not just the military side but with all the other sides. When you build a road, an airfield, a vital communications system, you'll actually build a better north.