Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for the question.

Foreign Affairs committee  As the council has evolved over the 16 years, its ways of working to make it more effective have evolved, clearly. Particularly under the Scandinavian chairmanship, as they call it, the three Scandinavian countries worked very closely together. They had one secretariat for the th

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm getting there.

Foreign Affairs committee  Canada and Sweden have worked very closely on the—

Foreign Affairs committee  Canada and Sweden have been working very closely on the existing Swedish chairmanship. Canada will do exactly the same thing with the United States as we are delivering our chairmanship. We are moving towards a troika system, where there is the former chair, the current chair,

Foreign Affairs committee  I think as we've discussed a couple of times—Mr. Kessel perhaps articulated it best—it's frequently an issue of language. We will certainly be working very closely with the Americans.

Foreign Affairs committee  The Arctic Council is viewed as the primary forum for engagement on circumpolar issues and it has had great success since it was established 16 years ago in 1996, because of the way it works. The combination of the eight states plus the six permanent participants, which are the g

Foreign Affairs committee  I do see very clear measurables coming out of that. It has had enormous success in doing a lot of the baseline research, which has led to international instruments, such as the POPs convention in Stockholm. We hope international mercury negotiations will be finalized in January

Foreign Affairs committee  The name of the community that we met in last week is Haparanda. You'd be interested to know that apparently in the 1800s, Thomas Cook, of Thomas Cook travel agencies, said that to honestly become a true globetrotter one has to visit three places on earth: Samarkand, Timbuktu, an

Foreign Affairs committee  There are some Sami people and some non-indigenous people as well.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Bevington. I hate to disagree with you, but I think in fact sustainable communities are relevant to the entire circumpolar region. If you look at the north of Russia, the north of Scandinavia, Alaska, and the three Canadian territories, they are

Foreign Affairs committee  Very soon after Minister Aglukkaq was named, she spoke immediately by telephone to Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who is the current chair of the Arctic Council. She will be having a bilateral meeting with him in Sweden in about two weeks' time. As her representative, I continue to

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting me to speak on a very timely subject today: Canada's 2013-2015 chairmanship of the Arctic Council. As Jillian Stirk mentioned earlier, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade plays an important role in deliverin