I think this has been an essential question for the last 50 years. Canada's north, our home, Inuit Nunangat, has always been a reason to hope for the Canadian economy, especially for natural resource extraction. In many parts of our homeland, oil and gas really haven't been the key focus. It's often been critical minerals or deposits, like iron ore in Baffin Island or nickel and cobalt in my home area of Nunatsiavut. Now it's gold in the central part of Nunavut.
Moving forward, especially when we're thinking about renewable technology and nuclear, our homeland may have resources that will be essential for the production of those alternative energy sources, and those minerals may be exported as well. There might be export through Hudson Bay or Hudson Strait. Also there's the Beaufort Sea. There have been moratoriums on oil and gas exploration over the last 10 years. Perhaps in the future, that will change, and maybe that will be of strategic importance to Canadians and to the Inuvialuit.
At this point, we have infrastructure that largely has been built by Cold War interests, not by economic interests or community development interests. Most of our hub communities are based on the Cold War-era infrastructure built in the 1950s and 1960s by the U.S. and Canadian militaries to ensure the distant early warning sites were maintained and upheld. We've used that until now, but we now need the second phase of that north-south connection, whether it's through deepwater ports or through roads like in the Grays Bay road and port project, or through essential infrastructure like the Iqaluit hydro project.
All of those things can work together to ensure that our economies can merge and that we have an opportunity to benefit from whatever opportunities Canadians want to benefit from, but in a systemic way.