Foreign Affairs committee  Again, you hit the nail on the head there. We have opportunities and problems that are created by a warming north. I think I'd probably hit more on the positive side in terms of an extended marine season, a marine transportation season that has extended way beyond what we were

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much.

Foreign Affairs committee  Your point is well taken. Specifically in the Mackenzie Delta, there's an awful lot of gas, and the community of Inuvik is out of gas, which is kind of ironic because they're sitting right there next to a huge gas field. The problem, of course, is it's a very small rate base, a v

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you're exactly right. That's a positive. We are getting infrastructure in the north, courtesy of the private sector, where they see a return on investment in mineral extraction that requires them to develop transportation infrastructure that can be used for the public as

Foreign Affairs committee  I'd like to pick up on your point. Just as I said that we should be looking at common user capability, at private sector resource development with Canadian governments, territorial and federal, we should also be looking internationally with the U.S. for the same opportunities.

Foreign Affairs committee  The project that I managed, the Alaska-Canada rail link project for the State of Alaska and the Government of Yukon, was to look at linking the Alaska railroad, which will shortly terminate at Delta Junction in Alaska, near Fairbanks, and to tie that all the way into the continen

Foreign Affairs committee  There are two things. First, if you talk to any container ship operator right now, shipowners will tell you that we're not going to use any Arctic route for our container ships as long as it's a seasonal operation; we have scheduled services set up, with time-specific departures

Foreign Affairs committee  What I can tell you is we have very skinny infrastructure, basically two deepwater ports: Churchill, which really isn't in the Arctic, and at Nanisivik. Beyond that, we don't have any deepwater ports. At some point we will require more. My message to your committee is that for b

Foreign Affairs committee  Again, I think there are some opportunities to piggyback defence requirements, in terms of shore-based infrastructure, on resource development projects. Resource development projects provide the financing that government currently has a hard time doing in the north. Witness the f

Foreign Affairs committee  The challenge is coming up with the money to develop the infrastructure to provide the resource exports that are beneficial to this country. My answer to your question is, impose a sense of coordination as part of the terms and conditions of some of these projects when they're b

Foreign Affairs committee  Definitely when we're talking about bulk carriers, they're going to offshore markets. There's no legal requirement for them to be registered in Canada. They're in international trade. It's not a coastal Canadian operation that requires Canadian-crewed vessels, so you could very w

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm really not the expert. That gets into the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and right of innocent passage, and a lot of things that I'm not an expert on, so I had better not touch that. Sorry.

Foreign Affairs committee  No question. I don't think the Chinese icebreakers were built to open up that passage for commercial cargo or transportation. I would guess it's more for resource development and maybe some scientific work, but in international waters, as opposed to either the Northeast Passage

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, to your point with those icebreakers, the Chinese will be in a very good position to do exactly that, and we should be figuring out how to do it ourselves. Yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  NORDREG certainly has a marine tracking service right now. It will certainly have to be expanded with the level of activity that's going to be seen in the Arctic, even with just the origin and destination traffic I talked about. You can see, for example, when the Mary River mine