Someone has to take the lead, and in my view, it should be Canada. We should start speaking and acting in favour of stewardship. I think we should start acting in the North American context. We should be talking to the United States, but we should also be talking to Greenland, that is, Denmark. We don't need to take credit, but we should lead the way to a unified North American approach to stewardship--the fisheries, shipping, the tourist cruise boat industry, pollution prevention, and emergency response. We should do this in North America and then move forward as stewards with a common attitude and common approach.
This is not going to be easy. Governments on the whole prefer freedom of action. They do not like to be encumbered and they don't like to answer to others. This is normal, but I think there's a common-sense requirement here for us to act together. Sooner or later, somebody upwind or upwater will do something that will spill down into our sovereign domain, which is not free-standing and independent. We are all in it together up there in the Arctic, and we need to manage these interdependencies.