Thank you, Mr. McKay, for the excellent question.
I'll start off by saying that I think it's all about activity in the Arctic. It's all about increasing human activity in the Arctic. That is the challenge that is being presented to us and to all polar nations: how do you deal with the increased human activity from a maritime shipping perspective, and with the increased activities in the Arctic from increasing seabed resource extraction activities—enabled by technologies that just weren't available until recently—and with the effects of climate change and its impact upon our first nations? How do we deal with all of these pressures?
For me, the Arctic is like a parable in the 21st century of the kinds of pressures that are beginning to make themselves known upon the world's oceans, which have a direct bearing on Canadian national interests and the fact that the globalized economy floats. It needs to be kept open and rules-based, following the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Wherever there are illicit activities or trends that challenge the rules-based international order, I think we as Canadians need to be paying attention.
A few years ago it was brought to my attention that those who design ships for transoceanic commerce—the Maersks and the Daewoos of the world—had drawn up designs for ships that would be Arctic-capable in the 2020s and 2030s. What this signalled to me was that the shipping coming out of Singapore bound for Europe, instead of going west across the Indian Ocean, would go northeast of Japan, over the transpolar route, and into Europe that way. Why? It's because it's shorter and would save money.
What that tells me is that we as Canadians, from a naval perspective, need to continue to focus our priority on the Arctic and be able to develop a persistent “maritime domain awareness”, as we call it, a recognized maritime picture of what is happening in the Arctic, and to do so through a combination of deployed ships, space-based and other surveillance assets, working with our federal partners, the RCMP—