That's a wonderful question.
I actually received a grant a couple of years ago to study how the pandemic influenced research and research innovation in the north during the pandemic, because we couldn't go any more. It's been a really interesting adventure, I'd say, in research, because we have this bizarre natural experiment that happened where suddenly.... I know that my federal colleagues, for instance, flat out couldn't go for almost a year and a half or so. At one point, I had a colleague at Environment Canada. I went to the research station because he hadn't been there in so long—and he was running it—and I had a bit more flexibility to go up.
I'd say that, regrettably, I didn't find that a lot of these multi-year research programs were able to keep going as normal while the southern folks were not there. I do think, though—and this comes back to leadership in the north—that some programs were able to keep going. I think this comes back to what Dr. Shadian said earlier around having the remote sensing type of equipment. Some of this equipment kept running and data could be collected. The ones that were the most successful had people actually collecting and looking at data locally as well. They were trained and had that capacity within towns.
I'm thinking that I'm going to talk about one that you may have heard about, which is called SmartICE. SmartICE has become a kind of a social enterprise now. They've got operators in a bunch of different.... I don't know the number, but I'd say that in Inuit Nunangat as a whole and in I think Nunatsiavut and Nunavut at least, in the eastern Canadian Arctic and moving west, those programs did fine. They didn't need us to come up north any more.
That's sort of my endgame, perhaps: to research myself out of a job and to really to build that. It took many years to build those partnerships and build in that training element to have that level of independence.
There are shining examples of this that we can look at for solutions.