Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise this evening in Adjournment Proceedings to pursue a matter I raised on October 8. It is an unusual question I want to pursue tonight because it is not a “gotcha” moment. It is not about how I wish the government had done this but failed to.
I was very impressed and, I must say, inspired by a piece written in The Globe and Mail on October 3 by a Canadian professor, Franklyn Griffiths, who is an expert on Arctic affairs, among other things. For a long time, I have been concerned about how we establish our sovereignty in this current climate and with particular people who live in the White House. We know there have been claims that Canada should be a 51st state. Our sovereignty is important to us. One of the places where our sovereignty can be seen as vulnerable is in our claim to the Northwest Passage. Of course, it is the storied Northwest Passage of Stan Rogers. It is the storied Northwest Passage of Canadian imagination. However, it rests on the fragile legal claim that it is the internal waters of Canada.
What Professor Franklyn Griffiths raised, and I asked this question at the time of the hon. Minister of Northern Affairs, was this: If we were to see the U.S. president launch a naval vessel through the Northwest Passage from the United States, how would we assert our claim of sovereignty? I asked whether the Prime Minister might not think that it was a good idea to follow the line of argument that Professor Griffiths advances, which is that we have a much stronger claim to Arctic sovereignty by virtue of the fact that, through the negotiations of Nunavut, through the conveyance of vast territories of our Arctic and through the Inuit people to Canada in the claim of Nunavut, our legal status is much stronger in recognizing that indigenous sovereignty is Canadian sovereignty. That is a lock on Canadian sovereignty.
Obviously, we need to invest more in our Arctic. We need to invest more in the infrastructure of ports. We have to deal with the fact that, due to the climate crisis, winter ice roads are disappearing. Recent articles have appeared in the Nunavut press about the need for roads and airstrips, which are disappearing or at least very bumpy because of permafrost melt. In terms of the investment in the Arctic, and the hon. member for Nunavut here in this place speaks so eloquently to this issue frequently, we need to pay attention to our north.
The argument advanced by Professor Griffiths would be a very good place for our federal cabinet to spend some time, think about it, mull it around. We can imagine for a moment that the leader of the ITK, Natan Obed, who is an extraordinary leader, was engaged more fully in the decisions that are made by Canada about how we protect our sovereignty. We can imagine actually investing in fighting the climate crisis so that the permafrost of the north stays frozen. We can imagine for a moment that we decide that we want to invest more in the Arctic Council, the only multilateral body to which Canada belongs and probably the only multilateral body in the world with a permanent seat for the Inuit peoples and the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
In pursuing this tonight, and I am very grateful that a parliamentary secretary is here to take this up with me, I ask this: Why can we not do more to assert Arctic sovereignty through solidarity with the Inuit peoples?