I think it comes back what the other witness said here, that communities are heterogeneous. The wants and desires of communities, quote-unquote, are difficult to understand. I tend to work with certain leadership groups to understand that. I tend to talk to people. That's kind of what I do, right? I talk to people about what they want in research. These are exactly the kinds of things I do.
Once you have established that, you have a whole bunch of different things, as I'm doing right now, around what you need to do good research in town. I have an active research project right now around research infrastructure in communities and what that means. One of them, as I said earlier, is community space. There's nowhere to do anything. I work in Pond Inlet, for instance, which is a relatively big hamlet in Nunavut. There's an Environment Canada research station that's pretty small, and there's no real physical space for community research to happen.
That's the point I was trying to drive home earlier. We tend to think of Arctic research as being outside, on the land, but what about writing grants? What about analyzing data? What about lab space for communities?
Some are doing it. They are partnering with Université Laval, for instance, and we talked earlier about the Centre d'études nordiques. These are places that are building research stations actively and trying to establish good partnerships in designing those. I do think that will really help.
As I said earlier, I think the idea would be to have something more than Arctic College. It's wonderful, but there are not very many people there in Iqaluit. Having a degree-granting university in Nunavut would be tremendous, because people could train there instead of coming south. I have had a few students and colleagues in Nunavut try to come south to do a degree, and it often didn't lead to any good outcome for them.