A colleague and I produced a report, which came out last week, called “On Uncertain Ice”. I'm very skeptical, at least within horizons where we have some sort of predictive capability, that the Northwest Passage as a transit route is going to be used for a high tempo of transits. It means distinguishing between the Northwest Passage, as it's often popularly understood, as just a route through versus Canada's Arctic waters. When you're talking about the Port of Churchill and other resupply activities for communities, that tempo of vessel activity has been going up, but there is not a sovereignty dimension to it. If they're coming into Canadian ports or landing in any Canadian communities they're having to declare that they're doing so on Canadian soil. There's not a strong defence component to a lot of those activities.
If, for some reason a lot of the obstacles—and there are many obstacles to navigation in Canada's Arctic waters still today, you mentioned a few—are overcome most of the activities are going to be constabulatory in nature. One would hope that if the tempo of activity does go up, and if there are threats, that we would have the Arctic offshore patrol vessels able to deploy into the region, and that we will have a heavy icebreaker to complement our medium icebreakers, to be able to go up and bring up police forces, or CBSA agents, or whoever else is needed to deal with whatever threat is perceived coming from that. For the most part these are not going to be core defence issues.
Where those do still come in...the potential for submarine activities, absolutely. I think Rob has already gestured appropriately to the northern watch technology demonstration project, which has been going on for a number of years now. I'm not privy to whatever classified findings they have from it, but it's taking all the different capabilities—subsurface, surface, space-based assets—taking all of that data being generated, and putting it together to have a better operating picture of what's going on. To me that's the first step for what we need to bring into place: harmonize a lot of the information-gathering and develop technologies that are appropriate to be able to supplement what we have now. When that activity picks up, even though it may not be a threat to our sovereignty and even though I don't anticipate large-scale international commercial transit shipping just passing through our waters, I still think that we want to be able to have eyes, and ears, and capabilities to respond to any sort of oil spills, search and rescue contingencies, and other threats that may pose themselves to Canadian communities, many of which are going to be outside the defence component of the spectrum.