This is what I'm reading into the Liberal defence policy, because up until its announcement, Canada has always had an official policy that even when we invite NATO allies to have exercises with us in the Arctic, they are always under Canadian sovereign control. We never call it a NATO operation. I suspect that with the release of the defence policy, and what I see as a change in government policy, we probably will be seeing that.
You should be aware that NATO does do extensive Arctic operations. The Norwegians, starting in 2006, in response to what they saw in Russia, started Exercise Cold Response. Usually in the middle of February or March, they'll have up to 15,000 troops doing exercises in northern Norway. Canada has now started sending troops to participate in that, so we started doing it in that context, and as a good Saskatchewan boy and as a prairie boy, part of the reason why you never saw much of NATO in the Arctic is that so much of what was happening was underwater.
When we look at the Arctic Ocean, it was the second most dangerous frontier during the Cold War, and we know the French, the British, and the Americans worked on underwater co-operation schemes to respond to the Soviets. We now know that Canada co-operated completely with the Americans for underwater ice operations in our waters.
Just because we're not aware of it, and it gets to that whole educational piece, doesn't take away from the fact that this was a central front next to the western front for deterring the Russians.