I think it is a cause of great concern. Essentially, because of Mr. Putin's badly advised or probably not advised invasion of Ukraine, Russia will be considerably weakened, both militarily because they're losing a lot of stuff—they lost the Moskva in the Black Sea—and they're also going to have their economy crippled. This will force Russia to have to rely more on China for export of the commodities that sustain Russia's prosperity, oil and minerals, and also to rely on China for bucking the sanctions that we've imposed. China has facilitated North Korea in effectively avoiding the sanctions that we attempted to impose on that regime.
We'll be in a situation where China I think will certainly extract a price for this, which will be that they will expect Russia to collaborate with China in China's overall global agenda, and that could include seeking Russian military support for action taken against Taiwan in the future, and combining with Russia with regard to claims in the Arctic.
Russia, as you know, claims pretty much everything under the Canadian continental shelf, and China has the resources and ability to actually start to exploit those Arctic resources. China referred to itself recently as “a near-Arctic state”. I think it's about as near to the Arctic as Yemen, but in any event, they want access to our northern resources for strategic purposes, ports and so on, and to our natural resources.
With the strategic positioning of Russia, if they go together, this is really very bad news for Canada. As I've argued elsewhere, unlike some of the other witnesses to this committee, I really feel that we need to start thinking about what sort of protection we can have for our northern regions. It's not really about do we give 2% or less or more. It's really about how much is it going to cost to overcome decades of neglect of our Arctic, particularly as Russia and China combine together and actually start to pose an effective threat in the light of global warming opening up those waters to navigation by Chinese and Russian vessels of various kinds.