The polar shelf is an agency that I've been working with since the mid-1980s. A lot of the logistics support that it provides is almost impossible for your average Canadian researcher to establish on their own. Of course, there are cost efficiencies by bringing in a large agency to set the procedures in place. A lot of my research support is helicopter-based, so what I'm looking for from them is to supply the helicopter and, very often, the fuel to conduct research in various locations.
It hasn't kept pace with the rising costs. It's a very small fraction of my research budget. This past spring, it was in the neighbourhood of about 20%. However, it's the logistics support that puts things in place, which allows me to bring in other funding and be more efficient.
I don't work out of Resolute right now, but in the past—in the 1980s—something I pushed for when I was on the scientific steering committee for the polar continental shelf was that we try to retain the base we had at that time in Tuktoyaktuk. The closing of it was a major blow to research efforts in the western Arctic. It was a hub for much of the research that you were probably involved with in the Herschel Island area at that time.
The problem is that right now, polar shelf is centred out of Resolute, but we don't have the infrastructure to base from many other areas. It's extremely expensive to move across different parts of the Arctic. To speak to the scale of the Canadian Arctic, while CHARS itself is a major step forward, it cannot serve Nunavik and the other northern parts of Nunavut very well. Again, I think we need to see that infrastructure.
If we could do one thing, it would be to increase support going to the shelf and also to NSERC and the northern research supplement. That really doesn't carry the day anymore.