Well, there are a great many things broken, but one thing that really worries me is that we are spending a lot of time trying to reassure ourselves that there's no real external threat. We look at this kind of binary approach, thinking that if we spend on the military, we can't spend on social welfare needs in the north, which are indeed important.
I wish I could share the sanguine outlook of my colleague, Professor Roussel, but that is not the reality in the international system. This kind of Arctic exceptionalism is not tenable. We have to face the reality that we have to spend more altogether. We have to be able to do both. We have to take care of the aboriginal people and their needs, but we also have to take a long-range view of our defence commitments and defence requirements.
We saw, when we tried to help Ukraine, that we were so down on our equipment that our cupboards were basically bare. We'd run down our capacity.
We are a major international player, a G7 country. We have the ability to do more. It takes sacrifice and it takes commitment and it's not going to be easy, but we can't just have this kind of false assurance that there's some future threat that is undefined, that is not significant. When we look at the international system, if we spend a bit of time on Russian military doctrine and look at the behaviour of China, it's time to have a reality check.