Mr. Speaker, the Arctic summit would have been a great opportunity to regain our lost respect and lost leadership in the Arctic. Unfortunately, we did not do that.
We have lost our leadership by sending lower officials to sub-meetings. In fact, we even fired our circumpolar ambassador. At the summit when Hillary Clinton criticized Canada for emissions, that had been unheard of in diplomatic circles. The United States is our closest friend and ally. Imagine the United States in a public situation like that, criticizing Canada on the Arctic. What about the countries that are actually against this? Imagine how they are feeling.
I want to talk about two outcomes, or lack thereof, from the summit.
First, it was suggested by the minister that the summit talked about a legally binding search and rescue agreement through the Arctic Council. That is rich for Canada to be talking about that. We have gone to a number of Arctic conferences recently and even brought forward the idea of sharing in search and rescue in the Arctic, which of course is needed. It is ironic that we are talking about it when we cannot even do our own search and rescue in the north.
As I have been saying for years, we do not have a single fixed-wing search and rescue plane in our fleet stationed north of 60. We do not have one of our search and rescue specialized helicopters stationed north of 60. Unlike other Canadians, northerners in harsher conditions have to wait for those planes to come from the far south. Why are we putting our armed forces at risk? Parliament was told years ago that the ageing search and rescue fleet, not only for the Arctic but for the whole country, needed to be replaced. Where is it? There is no sign of it being replaced anytime soon and Canadians and the military are being put at risk.
The second item I wanted to speak about on the summit was that the Arctic Ocean coastal states discussed the central importance of scientific research to better understand the dynamics of the region, especially as it relates to natural resource development. While we are all talking about how important science research is, I wonder if the other countries know how much Canada has cut research in the Arctic in recent years.
It is amazing that the entire Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences has been cancelled. That whole organization has projects all over the country. A lot of them are related to the north. Some are related to drought in the Prairies. Think of all our Arctic climate scientists in the country. It is as though we were in the dark ages, cancelling all that, closing it just like that. Even PEARL, which is close to the North Pole, will have to close. That is where most of the funding came from. We will abandon any sovereignty that particular station gave us by having scientists up there. More important, we are losing the ongoing collection of statistics that we need year after year, and which are more important now than at any other time in history because of the rapidly changing Arctic.
When it comes to natural resource development all countries agree that this is important. For over a year now, at committee I have been raising the importance for Canada to study the effect of oil spills and how to develop in the north. Time and time again, if we look at committee records, the government refused to invest in that. Now look what happened off the coast of Louisiana, an easy situation to clean up as it is warm water, but imagine if that occurred under the ice in the north. The Beaufort project in the 1970s which never got finished would have provided a solution, but the government will not proceed with more research.