Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. Right now, hydrographic services are a branch of the federal department that has responsibility for that. They simply lack the resources to be able to map properly. We have the technology to do it. The federal agencies need the money to be able to do proper mapping. That's

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, folks, and good luck with your deliberations.

Foreign Affairs committee  No. We need to have a proper polar-class icebreaker and we've been trying to get one for decades. The Diefenbaker is currently the incarnation of that. It's been provisionally funded and supposedly it's going to be developed, but we're kind of trapped in this situation of buildin

Foreign Affairs committee  Okay, the Reader's Digest version is that we need a military base in the north for sure. It's being developed right now in Resolute Bay. The polar continental shelf project is doubling up as a forward operating base for our Canadian Forces. They do a lot of programs right now wi

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

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely. They're very much for that. They all have economic arms of their land title and land agreement processes, so they're very interested in economic development because they have to look to the future. How are they going to raise their kids? How are they going to hav

Foreign Affairs committee  I've never met one.

Foreign Affairs committee  It's a really good question. This is something I get quite a lot, in that the thought on such a thing is that the ice is disappearing and we're not going to have that thick ice and it's not going to be really hard and difficult to navigate through, so why are we going to need i

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  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  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.