In regard to climate change, the only thing I can say is that we maybe need to get with the program.
If we look around the Arctic, we see that lots of our Arctic neighbours are actually using the cold and the fact that it is remote and there is climate change happening, and melting permafrost, as an advantage to find new innovations, to figure out how to build better infrastructure to withstand climatic changes generally, and especially in terms of permafrost melt. Svaldbard is doing a lot on this, because they have a big seed bank. They're looking at how steel interacts with permafrost.
We should not be looking at this only as a challenge, as an impossibility, as an obstacle, but actually we need to start looking at this as a real opportunity for Canada to be more innovative. This is where ISED has a role to play.
On cruise ships, the bottom line is that they need infrastructure. Without infrastructure, it is a risk. I think all the cruise ship companies would argue for the same. They would like to do what they want to do, and they'd like to do more of it, but they can't do it. As much as they would like to respect the communities and work with the communities, if there is no infrastructure, from ports to hotels....
In terms of NORAD helping northerners, I guess I don't believe in trickle-down infrastructure. We cannot just have NORAD saying, “Oh, yes, we're going to build all this infrastructure”, and all of a sudden with all these defence things, “Sure, it's going to help. Maybe there will be telecoms, maybe there won't. We're going to build some things here and there.”
I think this is where we come back to our having to have multi-purpose, multi-user, strategically thought-out infrastructure, because we have no guarantee or even a sense of whether it's automatically going to help northern communities.