Foreign Affairs committee  Great, thanks. First of all, thanks to the committee for inviting me to present here. I am an old Arctic hand, I guess you would call it. I started my research career in the Arctic in 1981 so I am now in my fourth decade of doing research in the Arctic. I've seen a lot of chan

Foreign Affairs committee  The idea is that the Arctic and Canada are inseparable, in my mind. Our history is steeped in the Arctic. A lot of the immigration that went on actually came through Hudson Bay. York Factory was a big part of that here in northern Manitoba. The connections with the fur trade betw

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the adage “if you don't use it, you lose it” is a very good one. I think it's very appropriate in this context. Lots of people would like to take over the Canadian Arctic. I think the UNCLOS process that's under way right now, using the United Nations as a way to settle s

Foreign Affairs committee  The Arctic is the same. It's the same Arctic both sides of the pole. The resources and the resource base are very similar between the two. The difference is that the Russians have had their eye on the north and have been doing economic development in the north for decades, and we

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm a marine person. My research is in the marine area, so I understand it a lot better than I do the terrestrial environment. To me, the big areas on the marine side have to do with transportation and development of marine-based resources: fisheries resources, non-renewable res

Foreign Affairs committee  Sure. They're on the front lines of things. The indigenous culture lives with the Arctic environment. When I first started my career in the north 40 years ago, the traditional knowledge of the Inuit who we worked with was very precise and very usable, because it had come from ge

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a really big question. The marine ecosystem is all changing in the Arctic. When we find that climate change affects things in the marine biota, we mean everything from the very smallest organisms right through to the seals and polar bears and things. A lot of species from

Foreign Affairs committee  There already is a lot of co-management going on in the Arctic. There are a lot of co-management boards already, where both indigenous people and people from the ministries have a co-management responsibility for harvestable species. I think in particular about the Inuvialuit J

Foreign Affairs committee  We have an entire fleet of icebreakers. We have about 12 or 13 of them, which are all 1200-class icebreakers and they're very capable. We've overwintered on our icebreaker twice now in the High Arctic. The problem is that the entire icebreaking fleet, which is run by the Coast G

Foreign Affairs committee  It's the frigates that are like that, yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, sure. I think there are two parts to that question. First, I think it's really important that the government develop an Arctic strategy and that we have some harmonization across the different federal departments and link organizations like mine that are university-based to

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that I'd like to talk about this as two different scales. Churchill is fine. It's kind of a local connection with both you and I, both being Manitobans, and it's an important part of the Arctic puzzle, but I think investments in that area are very important. I think that

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. That's very true. That's fair to say. During my first 10 years, the models that we were using at the time suggested that we should see the first and strongest signs of climate change in the Arctic. However, in the first 10 years that we were there, we didn't see it, so as a

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I hear what you're saying. It's a question I get all the time. It kind of asks what science can do to help educate the public about what's going on with climate change, and then people have to pay attention to it. The problem is that I spent a fair bit of time, maybe five or

Foreign Affairs committee  The situation with our Arctic in particular is unique because we've settled land claims there, and ownership of a lot of these resources lies with the Inuit who live there, so they're responsible for these things. I was at one of the COP meetings in Germany last year—COP21 I gues