There are threats we can see and threats we can't see. I know you've discussed some of them with the navy.
With our focus on safety of life at sea and safety of the marine environment, when we're talking about threats, we're talking about an increase in adventure travel, from fibreglass sailboats trying to sail the Northwest Passage up to and including very large cruise ships, as we've already seen.
We also consider the increase in commercial traffic to be a threat. You all will have seen that China is being fairly open about its plan to send commercial traffic through the Northwest Passage. We see this sporadically at the moment. We all know that even small amounts of fuel from a shipper's perspective are intolerably large amounts of fuel from a citizen's perspective, from an individual Canadian's perspective.
We're talking about the possibility of oil in the water, whether it be diesel or bunker fuel. We're concerned about an increase in possible oil shipment through the Arctic, which at the moment is only at the scale of community resupply. But even that is a lot of product, again from an individual perspective.
We're looking at other threats. We're looking at threats to marine mammals that communities rely on. We're looking at threats such as commercial vessels going through sensitive or even sacred areas to indigenous communities that may rely on those areas for food supply or traditional activities. We see that as a threat to a Canadian way of life.
We are mindful of the fact that the number of submarines around the Pacific is increasing almost exponentially at the moment. We want to work with our naval counterparts in domain awareness, as we've said a couple of times. We don't have a role in those threats, except we generally have a good sense of when something doesn't look right, because we're watching all the time, and we want to feed that information into our security partners as quickly as we can.
At a high level, that's generally what we're talking about when we talk about threats in the Arctic. We're environmentalists at heart in our organization. We protect the environment every day, so of course we're also paying attention to climate change as it is occurring in the north. Almost counterintuitively, melting ice means more traffic. It means more icebreaking. That's the counterintuitive part. We will have to have as robust a presence as ever, from the icebreaking perspective, as the ice melts, because more and more ships will venture through those waters.