Transport committee  Okay.

Transport committee  Thank you very much. I almost feel like there's a little bit of an old Manitoba mafia here, finding out you're from Selkirk and Brandon, being a good Birds Hill boy myself. In the context of my comments overall, I have four comments in regard to the bill. But let me begin, first

Transport committee  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 circumpol

Transport committee  I believe we should have taken this first step back in 1986, to be honest, when we enclosed the Arctic with straight baselines. My view is, better late than never. The Russians are moving toward enclosure; the Americans and Europeans are moving towards openness in the context of

Transport committee  But we are going to have to deal with countries coming in, and that's going to require DND also.

Transport committee  Absolutely.

Transport committee  Absolutely.

Transport committee  I would argue that the Arctic is as important to us as our response to 9/11. If you recall, the events of 9/11 caused a fundamental reorganization of the cabinet structures and the very way that cabinet itself approached the issues of internal security. I believe the time has co

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. It is indeed my pleasure to be here. I applaud the committee for its examination and work on this critically important issue. There are about four major points that I want to make. The first one is the issue of why we care about Arctic sovereignty and secur

National Defence committee  Certainly. In terms of the re-equipment, the major issue is that we have a long-term challenge before us. To be quite blunt, and this is quite frankly a bipartisan issue, we have not had a good record in our procurement policy. We have had an issue where we tend to buy a whole bu

National Defence committee  There is no question in my mind that this should be with DND. DND has the experience on the two coasts. They understand what is necessary. They have shown the best track record of not only having a vision--once again, one can look to lead mark and vectors, and it doesn't matter i

National Defence committee  I have absolutely argued in favour of making NORDREG compulsory. To take a metaphor from Calgary, the idea of having the Deerfoot Highway given a speed limit but then asking everybody to report whether or not they are speeding is ludicrous. I think it's equally ludicrous to turn

National Defence committee  They've been developing this under key policies. They have been doing the classic bad cop, good cop. The bad cop for the Arctic is Chilingarov. He's the one who is making by far the most unilateral statements--the patrols are, clearly. The Russians are clearly developing a diplom

National Defence committee  The major thing about the partition is about oil. It's about the soil and subsoil. If everybody does what they say they're going to do, which is to follow the rules exactly, then we may see this as an example of great cooperation. The test will be when we have an overlap with e

National Defence committee  Those are outstanding questions, sir, and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to clarify on the international cooperation. You're absolutely right, we need both. They cannot be separated. In fact, if there has been a critique with Canadian policy in the long term,