Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's a pleasure to be here with you, at least for this particular meeting.
I want to come back to that quote, “To develop the North, we must know the North. To protect the North, we must control the North.” I'm sure this was not taken from the Inuit perspective, this particular quote.
First of all, when you talk about development, it almost has a certain connotation of somehow being primitive, which it isn't. Secondly, on “we must know the North”, well there are 40,000 Canadians who know the north very well, and they're the Inuit of the north, and we don't seem to include them within our strategy.
Regarding “to protect the North we must control the North”, I just want to ask a question to Mr. Coates and to Mr. Reimer. I just read the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans report talking about the coast guard. It seems that throughout this document there is a fair criticism that the Inuit have been ignored, in terms of the development of the strategy and maybe now the implementation of the strategy. We have legally binding agreements with the Inuit, from Labrador right to the Yukon, the land claims agreements.
There is a conference happening this week, actually right here in Ottawa, starting today, about the problems regarding land claims implementation. Do you think if we had proper implementation of those claims, which are enshrined in the Constitution of Canada, that would actually add to our sovereignty in terms of a legal perspective? Secondly, if we strengthen the self-determination—and that's kind of an oxymoron, but if Inuit had the tools for self-determination—does that not also enhance sovereignty?
The only other question I have is that we have a lot of assets out there within the north—Labrador, I agree, Mr. Coates, should be included, as well as the Yukon. We have a base for instance--$90 million goes in there every year--and we have 68 regular force personnel on that particular base. Because of the urgency, should not the Department of National Defence and other agencies be taking a very close look at the existing assets we have and how they can be better utilized in terms of developing our Arctic sovereignty and our whole policy around that particular issue?