Unfortunately, you're absolutely right. If you look back to the history of the creation of the Arctic Council, which was a Canadian initiative, our hope was that we could create the council as a means of having a political body that would deal with all these issues on a circumpolar basis. The focus was environmental protection. This was very specific. Because of the Americans' concern in terms of their disagreements with us and their disagreements with the Russians, at the time, on the Bering Strait, which continues to be a boundary issue for them, the Americans refused to participate on anything that would give political power to creating the type of cooperative effort that we were going to be seeing.
We're now having new actors. One of your colleagues made reference to China. The Chinese recently have made several statements that they see the Arctic as a common heritage, and in fact, they are starting to give signs that they will, in fact, be taking the American and European position on the status of the Northwest Passage.
We talk about the requirement for surveillance. Another issue that no one has brought up is that we also have to have surveillance of where the industry, particularly the shipping industry, is now going. Most Canadians will be very surprised to find out that it is the South Koreans, Samsung and Daewoo in particular, that have become the world leaders in commercial vessels in Arctic waters. We need to ensure that we are also negotiating with these countries so that as they are building both the oil and liquefied natural gas carriers that are being designed for Arctic operation, they are, in fact, building them to standards that fit our requirements. This is also a means of forward surveillance, in my view.
We are doing what is necessary with the passage of this law, but I think the committee needs to be very aware that we will be creating a series of political issues. Hopefully they can be kept relatively low key, but my suspicions are that we probably will not be able to contain each and every one of them. But we should be prepared and not let that veer us from this course.