National Defence committee  So what we did with the science is that once we had the Amundsen, we started to invite the international community, and they started to invite us. So we have expeditions on Russian icebreakers in the Siberian Arctic and things like that. I think we have to build our own toys i

National Defence committee  Let's start with the base. Once we're comfortable in our Arctic, let's invite the others.

National Defence committee  I'm no expert on all the questions, but my personal feeling is that before we invite them into a partnership, I think we have a lot of Canadian capacity to develop. Once we have a basic capacity, we can start inviting them. This is a little bit the way we proceeded with science.

National Defence committee  I'm afraid I don't share Michael's opinion. He's a good colleague of mine. Just recently, for example, the government sold six claims in the Beaufort Sea offshore near the continental shelf edge, for a value of $2 billion. I think there will be some exploration, at least for the

National Defence committee  We could. From a military point of view, I think it would be a good thing. But from a logistic point of view, from the point of view of taking action, I suppose, if a plane falls into that 400 km by 400 km patch, we don't even know what's happening. We have absolutely no clue on

National Defence committee  We absolutely do need a ship like the Diefenbaker. My opinion is that we need two of them. With that infrastructure, if you have only one, most of the time it's going to be idle because it will be broken. If you have two, for some reason they work much better, and you get much mo

National Defence committee  I concur with Whitney that it's not in the next year that there's urgency, but in 10 years from now, we have to be ready to control increased traffic, increased oil spill problems, whatever. Offshore exploration for oil and gas is developing. There are going to be issues of trans

National Defence committee  Absolutely. This is exactly the way I see it. We don't need to militarize the Arctic at this stage. We're not looking for an invasion tomorrow or whatever. In my mind, it's important at this stage to combine the expertise of the coast guard and the expertise of DND to bring our m

National Defence committee  From our point of view, to support research, for example, the American icebreakers are managed by the army, and the conditions are terrible for doing research. They're terrible to do support for other things, too, so I think it should be kept—

National Defence committee  Another ship is being used, Mr. Bachand, the Louis S. St-Laurent, which is Canada's biggest icebreaker.

National Defence committee  This ship works in collaboration with the Healy, which is the new American icebreaker. In the western Arctic, in the Beaufort Sea, these are the two ships that are carrying out the study. In the eastern Arctic, between Greenland and Canada, the line is jointly drawn by Canadians

National Defence committee  Without doubt, this is extremely important. The set of seismological data that we need is very difficult to obtain for Canada. It is absolutely crucial in order to justify our request to the committee. On the Russian side, the ice entirely disappears during two or three weeks in

National Defence committee  To the list of concerns you mentioned, I would add economic development, the exploitation of resources in the arctic, like the oil and gas, which is picking up again, and the mining. I think it was the right thing to have INAC try to coordinate the different departments in the Ar

National Defence committee  If we compare the fleet in Russia to the fleet we have here in Canada, it's obvious that we're not on par with them. The fleet is in good condition, but it's aging. Some of those ships will have to be put on the selling block or scrapped soon. I think the fleet in Russia is too

National Defence committee  It's urgent for Canada to plan and execute the replacement of its fleet of medium-class icebreakers by much more powerful and versatile ships. The building of these new fleets, now scheduled to start in 2020, should actually begin now. It's also important that these new icebreake