Proceedings of the Special Senate Committee on the Arctic
Issue 4 - Evidence - March 19, 2018
OTTAWA, Monday, March 19, 2018
The Special Senate Committee on the Arctic met this day at 6:30 p.m. for the election of the chair and deputy chair; and to consider the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic, and impacts on original inhabitants.
[English]
Maxime Fortin, Clerk of the Committee: Honourable senators, as clerk of your committee, it is my duty to preside over the election of the chair. I am ready to receive a motion to that effect.
Senator Oh: I nominate Senator Patterson.
Ms. Fortin: Are there any other nominations?
Senator Eaton: I second it.
Senator Day: I’d like to move nominations cease.
Ms. Fortin: It is moved by the Honourable Senator Oh that the Honourable Senator Patterson do take the chair of this committee. Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
Ms. Fortin: I declare the motion carried.
Senator Patterson, you may take the chair.
Senator Dennis Glen Patterson (Chair) in the chair.
The Chair: Thank you, colleagues. I am humbled and honoured by your trust in me.
With my election as chair, which resulted from the resignation of Senator Charlie Watt last week, we now have a vacancy in the deputy chair position, which I had held. We will now proceed to the election of a deputy chair. Agreed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: I am ready to receive a nomination for a deputy chair.
Senator Galvez: I nominate Senator Bovey.
The Chair: Thank you, Senator Galvez.
Senator Coyle: I second that motion.
The Chair: Senator Bovey is nominated a deputy chair.
Senator Neufeld: I move nominations close.
The Chair: There is a nomination from Senator Neufeld to cease nominations. Is it agreed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Congratulations, Senator Bovey. I look forward to working with you.
Senator Bovey: Thank you, and I look forward to working with you.
The Chair: Colleagues, we’re now ready to start hearing from our witnesses. Before we do that, I would ask senators around the table to introduce themselves.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
Senator Galvez: Rosa Galvez, Quebec.
Senator Day: Joseph Day, New Brunswick.
Senator Coyle: Mary Coyle, Nova Scotia.
Senator Eaton: Nicole Eaton, Ontario.
Senator Bovey: Patricia Bovey, Manitoba.
Senator Neufeld: Richard Neufeld, British Columbia.
The Chair: Thank you.
Colleagues, in September the Senate appointed this Special Senate Committee on the Arctic with the mandate to consider the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic and impacts on original inhabitants. This is our third meeting, organized to give us some background on important Arctic issues.
Tonight I am pleased to welcome, from Polar Knowledge Canada, David J. Scott, President and Chief Executive Officer. Thank you for joining us. Please proceed with your opening statement, after which we will go to a question and answer session.
David J. Scott, President and Chief Executive Officer, Polar Knowledge Canada: Good evening, senators. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share some information with you.
I have the honour and privilege of leading Polar Knowledge Canada, which is a relatively new micro agency that reports to Minister Bennett in Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs. Polar Knowledge Canada has a very specific mandate that is provided to us through the Canadian High Arctic Research Station Act that was introduced and passed in December 2014.
Our act states our organization has four key purposes, and I think you will agree that they are oriented in answering some of the very same questions that your committee has — understanding the rapid change in the Arctic and its impacts on the Indigenous and other inhabitants.
Our act states that we are to advance knowledge of the Canadian Arctic in order to improve economic opportunities, environmental stewardship and the quality of life for northerners and all Canadians. Second, we are to promote the development and dissemination of knowledge of the other circumpolar regions, including the Antarctic. We are to strengthen Canada’s leadership on Arctic issues and, last but not least, establish a physical hub for scientific research in the Canadian Arctic, and that is a reference to our headquarters, the Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.
The key contributions that we have to make as Polar Knowledge Canada are through our science and technology research activities and the mobilization of that knowledge, making sure that knowledge that we or others create about the Arctic is available and ready for use by northerners who are in decision-making roles, whether it’s at the community level, the subregional, territorial or, indeed, national levels. Again, referring to the theme of this committee, we too are focusing on the changes that are occurring in the Arctic and the impacts that they have, and the angle that we have is the creation of new knowledge will assist and facilitate the creation of better decisions about the Arctic going forward.
We also work with the international community. There is a broad range of countries — some Arctic, most non-Arctic — who are interested in creating knowledge about the Arctic, again for the purposes of better understanding change, primarily environmental change but also social change and economic change. Those three elements are in rapid change in the Arctic.
Although not part of this evening’s focus, we also have a knowledge management mandate for the Antarctic. We are one of a few Canadian federal agencies that has that. The significance is a global one. What happens in the Arctic and Antarctic doesn’t stay in those regions. When sea level rises due to glacial melt, it impacts the whole planet. When unseasonably warm or cold weather occurs, quite often it is a polar phenomenon that is guiding or driving those phenomena. The reach of the polar regions is beyond the polar regions themselves. It extends to the rest of the planet where the majority of Earth’s population lives, so the reach is important.
Just a few words about the CHARS campus itself: It is a major research infrastructure that is within weeks of being complete in terms of construction. Our organization has been operating from the campus for almost two years now, using the smaller buildings of the campus, while the main, most complex, building is completed. That is weeks away from happening.
At that point, we will be much better equipped to open the doors to community members, community-based scientists, many of whom are Inuit in the case of Cambridge Bay, and visitors from other parts of Canada and around the world. We are going to welcome Canada and the world to Cambridge Bay to work together with Indigenous knowledge holders to create new knowledge required to understand the rapid changes in the Arctic.
The vision of our organization is driven by statements of the current government that good scientific knowledge needs to inform decision making, working together with provinces, territories and Indigenous peoples to create knowledge to better manage the land and oceans, to bring about positive change in the lives of Inuit across Canada and to work together to unlock the North’s amazing potential.
Last but not least, we are increasingly putting an emphasis on the importance of traditional and local knowledge. In the case of our home community in Cambridge Bay, that’s Inuit knowledge. We are already benefiting from generations of knowledge that is still with current experts of being on the land and on the sea, who have in their memories evidence of the changes that are now happening more rapidly than others. So we are always looking for ways to bring in Indigenous knowledge, as well as the kind of knowledge I have from having spent quite a few years in university.
The Arctic knowledge-creation community is quite diverse. There are, of course, other federal players, the major federal departments — Fisheries and Oceans, Environment and Climate Change, Natural Resources Canada, among many others — academic institutions both here in Canada and around the world, northern-based research organizations in the territories and Indigenous organizations.
In particular, I would like to foreshadow the release later this week of the national Inuit strategy on research that Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami will release. Without giving away secrets of the soon-to-be-released document, it will very much help us reorient the focus of knowledge creation in the North to be more respectful and inclusive of Indigenous knowledge. This will lead to better knowledge being created — better because it will be more readily able to address the changing needs of northerners themselves.
For those of you following along on the deck, we’re on slide 6. There are many dots on the map where some sort of research infrastructure takes place. Keep in mind that this map is about 75 per cent of our country. There are numerous areas in the North where you could fit the province of New Brunswick and no research infrastructure exists, so despite many dots on the map, there are many gaps on the land and the sea where we are not routinely gathering data to help us calibrate the changes in the environment.
If we look, for example, at the left-hand side of the map, there’s almost the complete trace of the Mackenzie River. Many of the dots along the river are sites where permafrost temperature is currently being measured. Although there are many dots and a lot of useful data, it covers a relatively narrow or small part of our North. There’s an increasing need for additional knowledge and data being gathered and created across our North.
Slide 7 shows the distribution of some of the projects that we are co-funding. It illustrates that the footprint of our organization is from coast to coast to coast. We have projects in Nunatsiavut in the east through Hudson Bay, across Quebec and into Manitoba, and then across the three territories of Nunavut, N.W.T. and the Yukon. So although we are headquartered in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, in the central part of the Arctic, our project reach covers coast to coast to coast.
In our current five-year science and technology agenda, we’re focused on four areas of research: renewable and alternative energy; understanding the changes in the biosphere, the living part of our planet; understanding changes in the cryosphere, the frozen part of the planet: the sea ice, the permafrost, the snow; and last, but not least, changes to infrastructure. We are primarily focused on housing. We have an important pan-territorial housing forum coming up at the end of April, beginning of May, in Yellowknife, bringing together expert practitioners from the North and the South to focus on technical design, cultural relevance and financial aspects of housing going forward. It builds very much on the report that the Senate released two years ago focusing on key gaps in Inuit housing. Many of those gaps are actually broader than that across the entire Canadian Arctic.
On slide 8 is a view from north to south of the research projects that the Polar Continental Shelf Program that’s housed currently within Natural Resources Canada provides logistical support to. Again, it illustrates that new knowledge is being gained right across our North, while keeping in mind that this map shows approximately two thirds of our country and there are relatively few dots on this map. Much is happening, but there are many gaps, and much more can be done to create the knowledge to better manage the rapidly changing Arctic.
Slide 9 reminds me to speak a bit about our role in encouraging circumpolar science cooperation. We were quite instrumental on behalf of Canada in negotiating a new binding agreement called the Agreement on Enhancing International Arctic Scientific Cooperation. It is a creature of the Arctic Council. This agreement will assist us in welcoming international researchers to the Canadian Arctic, helping them focus their technical abilities on the questions that Arctic residents are asking and ensuring that they follow the existing regulatory expectations. Some northern jurisdictions require a licence before a scientist can undertake research. This agreement will help us ensure that we can bring additional capacity to the Canadian Arctic. That capacity will be focused on Canadian priority questions, and the work will be done in accordance with our rules and regulations as a sovereign country. These rules include community consultation with northerners to ensure that research will be appropriately conducted and knowledge returned to northerners.
Perhaps just in the interest of time, I’ll skip over slide 10, which relates a bit to our minister’s special representative, Mary Simon, and her report on Arctic priorities and move ahead to slide 11, noting that this new Shared Arctic Leadership Model that Ms. Simon has outlined and advocated is currently guiding the work that Polar Knowledge Canada does. It speaks to the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge, dealing with priorities that matter to northern Canadians, particularly in regard to the rapid changes that are taking place.
Moving ahead, then, to slide 12, I understand that you have had a briefing from my colleague Stephen Van Dine at Crown-Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada in regard to the Arctic Policy Framework, which is a very important, very ambitious undertaking to co-develop a new framework for Canadian Arctic policy. It’s a very ambitious undertaking. It is very inclusive in terms of bringing in Indigenous and northern perspectives, and, frankly, it is a bit of an experiment. The federal government is not necessarily expert at co-developing policy, so this has been a very interesting experience for us. I believe that by working together with northerners, we will create better policy that will be more relevant for northerners. Polar Knowledge Canada has been a very active federal player in many aspects of the Arctic Policy Framework, including co-chairing the Arctic Science and Indigenous Knowledge Working Group, which is bringing input from external stakeholders in the areas of science and Indigenous knowledge together so that we can better inform how federal science and technology players are able to move forward most constructively.
The Chair: Are you wrapping up?
Mr. Scott: I am, senator. I am on my last slide.
Finally, we want to emphasize that Polar is engaging with northerners now in a new initiative that will help us set up our next five-year science and technology plan that will take us from the years 2020 through 2025. We are going to be as extensive and inclusive as we can in terms of hearing from northerners. Better understanding the issues of concern to them where additional knowledge will help them move forward will help us set our new five-year strategic plan that will take us the next year to accomplish and then kick off in 2020 for a five-year period. Again, its focus will be on serving northern Canadians first in terms of creating new knowledge and ensuring that that knowledge is mobilized for decision-making to improve lives in a rapidly changing Arctic.
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Galvez: Thank you very much for this interesting presentation. There are so many things going on in the Arctic.
If it is possible, I would like you to send the clerk detail on the areas that you are studying, because there was no slide on the areas.
What is the budget for Polar? How many people, or Canadian researchers, are involved? Is the attribution of the budget according to the areas that are being developed? What is the role of industries?
Mr. Scott: Thank you, senator, for your questions. I will certainly undertake, with the permission of the chair, to follow up with some specific detail about the geographic distribution of our projects. We can certainly turn that around very quickly.
The Chair: Provide that to the clerk.
Mr. Scott: We will follow up with the clerk.
Senator Galvez: Just give us the topics of the research.
Mr. Scott: Yes. We’ll get both, the topics of the projects and where they are taking place.
Senator Galvez: Thank you.
Mr. Scott: The budget of our organization is presently about $20.1 million per year. We were very fortunate, in the most recent budget, to receive an extra $5.1 million per year ongoing, starting in 2019, in order to operate the Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay. That new funding will not create new programming, but it will allow us to operate the research station once it is open and therefore preserve our existing program funding so we will continue to be able to move forward.
At present, we are approved to have 58 full time equivalent positions in our organization. At the moment, approximately 40 of those positions are at our headquarters in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, with the remainder here in a smaller office in the National Capital Region.
The staff are quite diverse in their technical backgrounds. We have approximately 10 research professionals with us, and all of them are from the South. We have currently eight Inuit working with us in Cambridge Bay. A number of them are graduates of the Arctic College environmental technology program, where these young Inuit use their existing land-based skills, learn some additional technical skills and then join with us at a relatively entry level in our organization, where we will then continue to advance their technical skills.
We also have graduates of Nunavut Arctic College working with us in business support in our general administration areas. We will have Inuit working with us in the laboratory setting in the main building when it becomes fully operational. Inuit will cover the full spectrum of our job types, and we will continue to work with them as they gain additional experience on the job.
Our most senior Inuit employee is a senior policy analyst with us. She has recently completed a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is from Gjoa Haven in Nunavut. She is a real role model and inspiration to other young Inuit across the North.
With respect to the role of industry, we are always open to partnering with the private sector. One area that is quite promising is in regard to understanding climatic change. For example, in the resource extraction industry, current producing mines as well as advanced exploration projects will all have extensive environmental monitoring programs related to their physical sites. Although these data are likely to be in the public domain, they’re not widely used by the research community. We believe that by partnering with industry, we should be able to make better use of that data to fill some of the key gaps that were on that map that had many dots but many gaps. We can partner with the industry to help create that knowledge that northerners need to manage change going forward.
Senator Eaton: I have two quick questions for you, Mr. Scott. Thank you, it’s most interesting.
Speaking of industry, I noticed that amongst your priorities on your website, there’s not a word about traditional sources of energy that exist in great abundance in the North. Are we overlooking a source of sustainability for the northern economy, namely, jobs, skill training, et cetera, and also a huge matter that will concern our northern security or our country’s security? Certainly other countries are looking at our natural resources. When countries like Singapore want observation status, you know something is in the air. However, you don’t mention any traditional sources of energy. Is that not part of your mandate?
Mr. Scott: Could you clarify “traditional sources of energy?”
Senator Eaton: Oil and gas.
Mr. Scott: In our current mandate, we’re focused on renewable and alternative energies to reduce the dependence on imported diesel.
Senator Eaton: You’ve answered my question. You’re not interested. That’s fine.
You talked about a housing forum, which is something that has been interesting me for a long time. I sit on the Senate Finance Committee. Every year, Northern Affairs come before us and, when I see how much money is going to Indigenous housing, I always ask, and they are always prepared for this question: Is it being built to some kind of building code? They always say, no, very sorry, lack of respect, we don’t intrude, we just give the money. However, it turns out that a lot of First Nations children suffer from viruses and lung diseases because of the mould. Houses are falling down and they don’t have a life cycle that’s comparable to our own. In this housing forum you’re going to have, are you working with Indigenous peoples to come up with some kind of code that will match the geography they live in? Is this the purpose of this?
Mr. Scott: The short answer there is yes, we are absolutely seeking input from Indigenous people. Working with the National Research Council, work is under way to revise a building code and make it specific to northern conditions, noting that they are very different from the rest of the country. That work is under way.
Senator Eaton: Akwesasne, which is not northern but has its own problems, and northern, of course. So you are?
Mr. Scott: Yes. Again, the purpose of the forum is to bring together northern experts and southern experts in three key areas. One is around the financial aspects. That is, can we be creative? Are there different ways of financing housing rather than simply a transfer of dollars? That’s one way, but are there additional ways we can explore, namely, co-ownership and leasing to own, creating and working with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation on that.
The cultural aspects of design—
Senator Eaton: Yes, because they don’t always live traditionally the way southerners do.
Mr. Scott: Precisely; yes. There are flexible design options that are much more suited to the way northerners wish to live their lives rather than folks who live in the suburbs of southern Canada.
Senator Eaton: I agree completely.
Mr. Scott: That’s a major focus area.
The third one is on the technological aspects, and that is things like heat recovery ventilators that can maintain better air quality to avoid mould but still function at minus 35 for six months of the year.
So bringing together innovation, technology and energy efficiency, innovation and design and innovation in financial aspects and engaging with key northern decision-makers so that those new dollars that have been announced and will be announced will be better spent by the terms of northerners themselves.
Senator Eaton: I’m glad for the northerners themselves. Thank you.
The Chair: Will there be an outcome from that Northern Housing Forum that could be shared with the committee?
Mr. Scott: There absolutely will. Our short-term deliverable will be a report summarizing the outcomes of the meeting. The output will be the technical conclusions of the meeting, and we also have a plan in place to mobilize that knowledge into the hands of key decision-makers in the five northern jurisdictions — so the three territories plus Nunavik and Nunatsiavut — to ensure that those who will be making decisions about future dollars and how they will be spent will have the best available information and where to chase it back to source so they can make better decisions.
Senator Eaton: You talked about a release coming out, but you didn’t want to betray the secrets. Could we get a copy of that when it is released?
The Chair: The Inuit science —
Mr. Scott: The national Inuit strategy on research. Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami intends to release it Thursday of this week, and we can certainly ensure through the clerk that —
The Chair: We’ll circulate it.
Senator Bovey: Thank you, Mr. Scott. I appreciate your being here and the work that you are doing.
My question is about research linkages. I guess it’s two parts. I’d be interested to have you talk a little bit about the relationship and research that’s going on in Cambridge Bay, what’s going on in the Churchill Northern Studies Centre and the Churchill Marine Observatory.
Secondly, what kind of links do you have with the polar institute in Cambridge, England? How are you linking the research with the circumpolar universities?
Mr. Scott: On both the Churchill Northern Studies Centre and the nascent initiative being led by Dr. David Barber at the University of Manitoba, we are working together with those organizations. We provided a significant amount of funding two years ago to Dr. Barber’s nascent Hudson Bay initiative. I believe the contribution was $2 million in order to accelerate the creation of infrastructure at Churchill.
Senator Bovey: And, of course, that slowed down because the rail link was broken so they couldn’t get the building supplies up to build it last summer.
Mr. Scott: Yes. It’s another major unforeseen logistical hurdle.
Both the Churchill Northern Studies Centre and this new initiative are excellent examples of existing research infrastructure and research programs led by Canadian universities where we are able to provide partial funding and attempt to amplify the work that these institutions and researchers are carrying on.
With respect to the polar institute of the U.K. at Cambridge, our namesake in the U.K., we have very, I would say, preliminary contact at this point. Our main partner from the U.K. is the British Antarctic Survey, also based in Cambridge.
What we are currently doing with the British Antarctic Survey is taking advantage of the fact that, for their Antarctic program, they use Canadian-made Twin Otter aircraft that are operated by a Canadian company in Calgary, Kenn Borek Air, and each season after the Antarctic summer they return to Canada for servicing in Calgary. We’ve arranged that, literally for the price of fuelling the aircraft, they will bring their instrument-equipped aircraft to Cambridge Bay. Last spring we flew an extensive snow and ice survey, calibrating our ground-based measurements with their airborne measurements in order to further extrapolate broader areas using our ground-based observations, their high-resolution aircraft observations and satellite observations that we’re making in partnership with NASA in a program called ABoVE, the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment.
These are good examples of how we work in partnership with another organization to bring in capabilities that we don’t have at Polar or sometimes in Canada and leverage their investments into our agenda to work in the Canadian Arctic to solve problems that matter to northerners. The fundamental causes of those phenomena matter to the international science community as well. While solving problems in Canada that are practical in nature for northerners and academic in nature, that can be published in the refereed literature of interest to all polar researchers.
Finally, with respect to — I believe you’re referring to the University of the Arctic, which is a coalition —
Senator Bovey: No. I’m referring to the universities around the Arctic Circle internationally. Having been at the University of Akureyri a few years ago, I was intrigued with what they were doing and, of course, I was involved in the University of Manitoba, so you put all that together. I just think Canada has been very — I don’t want to use the word “lax.” I guess that’s too strong, but I think there are opportunities and links that I wonder if we are using to maximum strength and ability.
Mr. Scott: Many of those universities, including those in Iceland, are members of this coalition called the University of the Arctic, which is a virtual network of Arctic-based or Arctic-interested universities. They offer virtual programming for graduate students, summer field courses and that sort of thing. We are continuing to find ways to work with them in partnership to, again, perhaps attract international students to the Canadian Arctic to bring diverse ways of knowing, as well as helping Canadian students go abroad, ideally northern-based students, to get additional external perspectives.
Senator Bovey: Coming back to the polar institute in Cambridge, I’m aware of long associations with some of the Canadian researchers. I’m not sure where that’s standing right now. I was in Cambridge recently and I walked by it but didn’t have time to go into it.
Mr. Scott: About a year and a half ago, I spent a couple of days in Cambridge, at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, not necessarily a relation of mine. I spoke with a couple of the research professors there, and what we agreed to sort of start on was a student exchange. We would start to set up even masters-level projects that are of interest again to northerners and that might be delivered by a visiting Cambridge student taking that on as a thesis, in which case we also get access to the professor as well as to the student. We can provide, through our partnerships or at the campus in Cambridge Bay, research opportunities that are literally a trip of a lifetime for a foreign student while helping us create knowledge that matters here at home.
Senator Bovey: And with a Canadian as a Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, you have it.
The Chair: Dr. Scott, would you be able to tell us now or later what funding contributions Canada makes to the University of the Arctic network?
Mr. Scott: I do not have the details.
The Chair: That’s why I say you could provide those later.
Mr. Scott: Yes. At this point, it’s mostly through other universities rather than through the federal government. I will see what I can dig up on that.
Senator Neufeld: Thank you, Dr. Scott, for being here and the very interesting information that you have given us.
I remember the act was passed in December 2014. Has that act been changed at all? Help me here. Things happen around here sometimes where you don’t know what’s happening. Has the act been changed at all?
Mr. Scott: Subsequent to the act coming into force, a number of technical inconsistencies were identified.
Senator Neufeld: Nothing major, then?
Mr. Scott: Nothing major, no. And our minister’s department is undertaking to correct a number of them. One is an inconsistency between our proposed ability to own or lease real property and the Federal Real Property Act. We’re just trying to bring the act a little bit closer into sync with existing acts.
Senator Neufeld: Okay. You also talked about the number of FTEs being 58 and 40 in Cambridge Bay, and eight in Ottawa. I think you said there were eight Inuit in those 58. Are they from Cambridge Bay or from other communities in the Arctic?
Mr. Scott: At present, of the eight Inuit working with us in Cambridge Bay, one is from Gjoa Haven, a little to the east but still in the same region, and the rest are from Cambridge Bay. We have two Inuit here in Ottawa, one of whom is from Iqaluit, and I would need to defer to my colleague for the town of origin of the second employee here, but she’s not from Cambridge Bay.
Senator Neufeld: I would think you would try to encourage people from the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, all of those communities, to at least come. Have you been to those places talking to them about the opportunities?
Mr. Scott: Yes. Let me start by prefacing that with our headquarters in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, we are subject to the Nunavut agreement. Article 23 of that agreement obligates federal departments operating in Nunavut to work towards representative employment of Inuit in the federal government system. That’s why, at our headquarters, we’re particularly focused on Inuit employment; it’s because of our headquarters being in Nunavut and being subject to the Nunavut agreement.
We are interested in expanding, and our act encourages us to have locations elsewhere in the North other than Cambridge Bay. As we grow and mature as an organization, we look forward to fulfilling that. We recently hired an individual who lives in Dawson, Yukon, who started a week and a half ago as a senior policy analyst and engagement specialist. So we are beginning to move that out.
Senator Neufeld: Is it your wish that some Inuit will come to southern universities, or universities that Senator Bovey talked about, to actually learn— not always there, but to bring that knowledge back? Is that part of what will take place?
Mr. Scott: Yes, that’s part of our longer-term capacity-building objectives. We recognize that it will take quite a while for additional northerners to work through the secondary and then the post-secondary system.
Senator Neufeld: It has to be done.
Mr. Scott: Absolutely, and many northerners would prefer to have those educational opportunities closer to home. The Nunavut Arctic College has campuses in each community, but distance learning is challenged by the relatively slow Internet connectivity that exists. In the foreseeable future, we’ll take a combination of local learning, distance learning in cumbersome ways until Internet speeds pick up in Nunavut, and study in the south. We’ll take a combination of those things.
Senator Neufeld: I often ask questions in the Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee about adaptation. We just had a report from the federal government that we’re a long way away from meeting our commitments to even 2020, let alone 2030 or 2050. When you look around the world, we’re not the only country. Most of them are failing to meet those targets.
What’s your take on what happens? I read some of the information. It’s warmed by 3 degrees— some people say 2, some say 3. I don’t know what it actually is, and I’m not arguing that. What is your take on what’s actually going to happen? How do we adapt? How do we help people adapt in those situations to what is inevitable. It’s going to happen. As much as I hope it doesn’t, there is nothing that gives me any assurance that those targets will be met. And even if they are met, we keep it to 2 degrees; using 3 degrees and 2, that’s 5. What happens?
Mr. Scott: I share the perspective, and it’s built into our programming that much of what we do in terms of knowledge creation and mobilization is to help people adapt to a changing Arctic. Mitigation measures take things like national or international policies to use or not use some product, or more of some, less of another, whereas our focus is much more on understanding the phenomena and how those phenomena impact the local environment, whether it’s the stability of the airstrip that may have ice wedges in it that are now thawing and causing your only link to the outside world to be unserviceable.
How can we better adapt to the changes? Part of adaptation is calibration of how quickly it may change so that investment decisions can be prioritized toward those geographic areas that may be hardest hit, most quickly. Part of our efforts in understanding the changing climate is to be able to better calibrate how temperature is changing and, therefore, understand specific conditions in different parts of the Arctic — which areas are most vulnerable, which impacts can be foreseen and what actions could be taken at the community level, many of which will require funding. But it’s developing that understanding of what is most vulnerable, where are the vulnerabilities and what mitigation efforts might be taken so that the adaptation, the continued sustainment of those communities, can happen as cost efficiently as possible.
Senator Neufeld: Those kinds of reports will start coming out relatively soon, I hope.
Mr. Scott: We and others are moving towards that. Currently, the Arctic Council and its working groups are some of the most prolific in putting out synoptic views of what change could look like. We continue to focus our efforts on understanding why things are changing and then, by mobilizing that knowledge, helping communities understand what that may mean in their backyard and what their vulnerabilities are.
Senator Neufeld: Just as a footnote to Kenn Borek Air: I live in Fort St. John, a mere 70 kilometres from Dawson Creek. Kenn Borek Air’s headquarters are in Dawson Creek. That’s where he lived and that’s where his family still lives. He has the largest number of Twin Otters in the world under his name, out of a place in Dawson Creek that did work in the Arctic for many years.
Mr. Scott: They’re a major operator in the Antarctic as well. That aircraft and that operation have some of the most unusually skilled pilots anywhere.
Senator Oh: Was there a special reason for picking Cambridge Bay as the site for the research centre?
Mr. Scott: I can’t comment on the full process, as it predates me and was run by our minister’s department. My understanding is that three sites were considered: Pond Inlet, at the northern end of Baffin Island; Resolute Bay, in the central High Arctic; and then Cambridge Bay, a little bit further south and west of Resolute. One of the rationales for selecting Cambridge Bay was the many knowledge gaps around the area and a community that was very welcoming of having this major physical infrastructure parked in their community. That’s the limit of my knowledge of the selection process.
Senator Oh: I want to follow up. Senator Eaton mentioned earlier that now, suddenly, the international community is interested. Singapore, China and a lot of the tropical countries are interested in Arctic research. Maybe it’s the Northern Passage or minerals or whatever. Do we trust all these observers? Do they have to be a club member of the Arctic Circle or do they contribute towards research funds or whatever?
Mr. Scott: First I will maybe comment on sovereignty of existing resources. Certainly in the coastal area and the current 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, where most of the known hydrocarbon resources are found, I don’t think anyone questions Canada’s jurisdiction over those resources and how, when or if they will be developed. I don’t think it is accurate to suspect that Singapore could show up with a drill rig and start extracting oil. I think there is sufficient federal regulation and recognized sovereignty that will allow us to control if, when and how any resources in the Arctic are developed.
Another driver that is of interest to many of the observer countries is transport. Singapore, I think, is one of the best examples, and China is another, of recognizing the importance of global distribution networks to their domestic economies, always finding ways for efficiency, and recognizing the potential of Canada’s Northwest Passage as an emerging route that differs from some that are longer and are restricted in size by things like locks, such as the Panama Canal. So there are a number of drivers.
Some countries are motivated to demonstrate that they can do what the big countries do. Big countries work in the Arctic and the Antarctic; and some smaller, less northern countries are interested in doing that as well. India comes to mind. They are a strong player in the Antarctic and are increasingly interested in having an Arctic program. They have a space program. They’re planning to put a man on the moon. They too want to work in the Arctic to demonstrate the technical capabilities of their country. That’s a motivator for some of these countries.
Senator Coyle: Thank you very much, Dr. Scott. That was a very interesting presentation, and we wish you well with the work of Polar.
First, you speak about the questions that Arctic residents are asking and the paramount importance of those questions. I would be curious, because I don’t have that experience that you have, if you could tell us what are the top two or three big questions that you’re hearing over and over again from Arctic residents? What are they asking?
Second, related to that, what are the women asking? I’m curious about that. You mentioned Mary Simon’s report and, of course, Mary was the head of ITK at one time when I first knew her, and now there is this new document coming out this week. I’m curious whether there is synchronicity between those two or what the differences are as you predict them to be.
Mr. Scott: I will give you a couple of examples of the sorts of questions we hear. One, is the ice safe to travel on? From the knowledge that we have, in some cases people will reflect that the ice is different now. It’s different at different times of the year now. We’re less certain, and potentially you see more snow machines go through the ice where it looked good but it isn’t anymore. In response to that, we are supporting, as are others, an initiative called SmartICE, that brings together the best of traditional knowledge, the hunters travelling on the land, with some high-tech gadgetry they can haul behind their snow machine which in real time gauges the thickness of the ice beneath them as they travel. It all looks good on the surface, but because of warmer waters, it erodes from underneath and can become unsafe without them knowing. Is the sea ice safe to travel on today is a very common question, and there are ways we can help with that.
Another one relates in general terms to the abundance of wildlife. There seem to be less caribou around. Is that because we are seeing more wolves for some reason? This is a question we recently discussed with the hunters and trappers organization in Cambridge Bay. This is a research project they wish to initiate. They have a hypothesis: We think part of the decline in the caribou and muskoxen population here on Victoria Island is because of an increase in the wolf population. We see that anecdotally when we are out on the land, but we never stop to systematically count, photograph, document or use a GPS. Are there ways to work together to have a better understanding of the population of the predators, primarily the wolves? We are beginning to work with them to formulate a work plan about helping them answer their question so that others will understand the work they’ve done and will agree that it’s not just over hunting but other pressures that have not been previously recognized.
Another area is around food security. The char are coming at different times and going to different places. This is maybe answering your third question or second part. Some elders, including women, are saying it tastes different now. Why does it taste different? At this point, I have no idea how we might help to address that question, but certainly if the fish are going to different places when they’re not in the lake, if they’re eating different foods because those foods are now available, that’s the kind of thing that might impact the taste of these things that people counted on for millennia.
We need to find ways to listen to the questions posed and find ways to combine knowledge that these people have that we don’t have and ways of knowing, like molecular biology and genetics at the molecular level, that aren’t available in the North yet, and combining the knowledge and studying through time to come up with some of those definitive answers that will allow them to make better decisions.
Senator Coyle: You didn’t answer my question about women and Mary Simon’s report.
Mr. Scott: The short answer with respect to Mary Simon’s report is we find it inspirational. It gives us ideas on how to do our jobs better. The number one take away is to spend more time listening to Indigenous northerners and their questions and to be inspired to work with them and respectfully include their knowledge as we move forward.
Senator Coyle: And women?
Mr. Scott: I can’t tell you right now. I don’t have a breakdown. I see the aggregated questions but not the attribution.
Senator Coyle: But you do desegregate the —
Mr. Scott: We have that. Through the Arctic Policy Framework process, we are getting an enormous amount of input and it does have attributions. We will be able to answer that question.
Senator Day: I would like to refer you to page 6 of your handout to us. It’s on Arctic research infrastructure. There are green and red dots. All the red ones are Government of Canada research infrastructure. That looks like a lot to me. I congratulate you for the ongoing work. I would never have guessed there was that much. I do take your point that this is a huge geographic area and there is a lot of space in between that has to be filled. Could you tell us about some of these green dots that are non-Government of Canada research infrastructure? You mentioned mining earlier. This is research that’s going on. Are these corporate? What’s happening?
Mr. Scott: The short answer is most of these green dots are non-federal but they might be territorial government agencies or university-based agencies. The Churchill Northern Studies Centre is the green dot at the northeast corner of Manitoba. A number of green dots through Quebec are stations of the Centre d’etudes nordiques, the northern studies centre at Laval and McGill. So the green dots are largely either northern-based organizations or southern universities’ northern installations.
Many of the red dots are a bit misleading. The ones in the Mackenzie Valley are measuring permafrost temperatures, but not other parameters. Some of the ones in the central part of Nunavut, west of Hudson Bay, are measuring stream flows but not other parameters. The Canadian Hydrographic Service monitors the flow of many rivers in Canada, but not temperature or permafrost at that site. There is a lack of integration of this data and this map gives a pretty optimistic view. There are many areas where no physical parameters are being measured, and we can’t make predictions in the absence of data.
Senator Day: Are any of those green dots form sovereign countries that are doing research and have establishments in the Canadian North and the Arctic?
Mr. Scott: There may be one or two.
Senator Day: Would there be a trend in that way to follow the Antarctic activity of many countries?
Mr. Scott: The trend we see emerging with international players is they want to partner with Canadian partners, whether at the community level or from Canadian universities. The Alfred Wegener Institute from Germany is a major polar player north and south. They just received European funding to work in the Beaufort Delta on permafrost issues. They have actively engaged with Canadian researchers, and you may hear that from some of the subsequent witnesses. International researchers tend to want to work with Canadians and, if they set up a piece of German-owned infrastructure, there will be Canadians participating in data gathering and analysis as well.
The Chair: I think Dr. Scott will give us detailed information on the research projects you are sponsoring.
Can you tell us now or submit the composition of the Polar Knowledge Canada board and whether there are any vacancies?
Mr. Scott: There are nine positions on our board of directors. The chairman of the board is Richard Boudreault. He is from Montreal, Quebec, and he is a technological entrepreneur by trade.
The vice chair of our board is Liseanne Forand, who is a retired senior federal bureaucrat who has worked in a number of different federal departments, including what was called Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada at that time. She is no stranger to the North and was, in fact, with the department at the inception of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station project.
There are seven regular member positions, six of which are filled, one of which is vacant at this time.
Dr. Janet King is one of our board members. She is currently the chair of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, but she is appointed not in that capacity but in the capacity of someone with a career’s worth of northern experience.
Nancy Karetak-Lindell, who is a former president of Inuit Circumpolar Council and from Arviat, Nunavut, is one of our members.
Adamie Delisle-Alaku from Kuujjuaq in Nunavik in northern Quebec works with the Makivik Corporation. I believe he’s the VP of natural resources, if I’m not mistaken.
Gerald Anderson, who is of Inuit heritage from Nunatsiavut in Labrador, the Goose Bay region, currently runs the Marine Institute at Memorial University in St. John’s.
Dr. Maribeth Murray is with the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary. Her expertise is in climate change and data management.
The Chair: You can give that to us later. Is the vacancy for a region or —
Mr. Scott: None of our positions are defined as being geographically specific, but we’re grateful that we have three Inuit on our board at this time.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Scott. We look forward to interfacing with you as our work continues.
I would like to now welcome the panel of Dr. Louis Fortier, Professor, Laval University and ArcticNet Network of Centres of Excellence; Dr. Christopher Burn, Chancellor’s Professor of Geography, Carleton University; and Dr. Joel Heath, Executive Director, Arctic Eider Society. We have an hour. If you kept your presentation to five minutes, that would leave time for questions. Thank you.
Louis Fortier, Professor, Laval University and ArcticNet Network of Centres of Excellence, as an individual: Thank you for the invitation. I’m the Scientific Director of ArcticNet, the Network of Centres of Excellence, which for the last 14 years has been studying all aspects of the changes in the Arctic. I’m also in charge of the research icebreaker Amundsen, which is on your $50 bill.
The Arctic is changing, of course, as you probably heard before and you’re well aware of. It’s not only warming; it’s also modernization and industrialization that is a sequitur or a consequence of this warming. This transformation of the Arctic already has major climactic, geopolitical, economic, environmental and social consequences.
There is especially a human dimension to all this change, of course, because in Canada we have, for example, 60,000 Canadian Inuit in 53 coastal communities. We also have other nations represented in the North. These people who have been living there for a long time see the transformation of their land and sea environments, the deterioration of their physical and mental health, destabilization of their infrastructure and threats to their freshwater and food supplies. They are worried about the devolution of governance. They see economic opportunities, of course. Their education system needs some upgrading, and there is the aspect of globalization that comes with the transformation of their world.
To study all these questions, which are really central and strategic for Canada and other countries too, in 2003-04 we created the Network of Centres of Excellence ArcticNet, which was aimed at bringing cross-sectoral research, that is research that brings together the natural sciences, the environmental sciences, as well as the social sciences and the health sciences, so cross-sector research in support of decisions in the changing Arctic.
The network is very large: 41 research projects, 155 network investigators in 32 Canadian universities. We have trained up to 1,600 HQP — that is highly qualified personnel — so far, including northerners, in science; 29 research chairs. We have significant collaborations with 14 countries at this time.
One very important point of the philosophy of ArcticNet is that we brought the Inuit expertise at all levels of the network, from the board of directors to the fieldwork.
We also developed major research partnerships with the private sector. We also deploy large infrastructures, like the Amundsen, but also the field station of the Centre d’études nordiques, which my colleague David Scott just mentioned.
We have a core research program, as I said, that covers the marine and terrestrial systems, Inuit health, the education and adaptation of Inuit, northern policy and development, and knowledge transfer.
One of the ways that we bring all that research and all that science together is through what we call the Integrated Regional Impact Studies protocol. That is a framework. We divided the maritime Arctic, the Inuit Nunangat, into four regions. For each of those regions, we consulted with the communities, with the governments and everything, to see what issues and questions they were interested. Then we did the research to answer those questions.
We brought all these together with projections of what the climate will be in 25, 50 or 100 years from now to try and come up with recommendations on how to adapt to the change in the North. For each of those regions, we produced an Integrated Regional Impact Studies assessment. At this time, we’re modernizing this process to accelerate it so that we can answer questions faster and faster.
In relation to the kind of things we study, Senator Coyle asked what the women were asking. One of the questions they tasked us with was what will happen with the berry production at this time in the tundra? That’s a large part of the domestic economy for women. So we had projects on what will happen with the blueberries and whatever other berries. Other examples are drinking water in communities, permafrost destabilization, the sea ice cover, what’s happening with the caribou, with the char, and what’s up with food security and insecurity in the North. These are the kind of questions that we’ve been answering, with their collaboration, involving and also integrating traditional knowledge — what I’d rather call “northern expertise” rather than traditional knowledge.
At this time, we’re seeing what we call the ecosystem services, which are the goods, products and benefits that come from the different ecosystems, are dwindling. The traditional food is more difficult to get. The traditional health that comes with the traditional food is also declining. Drinking water, local transport, social bonding and cultural benefits that came from the ecosystems are things that are threatened at this time. People are worried about this.
Paradoxically, the new ecosystem services that are created by the transformation of the Arctic are mostly benefiting southern societies. These are things such as tourism, commercial fisheries, shipping, hydroelectricity and access to natural resources. There is a kind of ecological imbalance there with the local people not getting as many benefits as they could from those situations. This is what we see at this time.
ArcticNet is now in a renewal competition; that is, our funding has just ended this month. We are running for additional funding. Our main strategic objective for ArcticNet is to bring together what we consider the three pillars of northern science in Canada. We have a tendency in Canada to fund or to support either one sector or the other, but at this time in the Arctic we need to support the university-based research, the department-based research that David Scott described and also a new pillar, if you want, a third pillar, which is the North-based research and training capacity in Canada. Instead of having a tug-of-war between those sectors, we need to come together and build synergy. To make sure that we present a national program of Arctic research that is commensurate with our international responsibilities for the Arctic, we need to come together to do that.
We want to maintain and further develop partnerships with northern communities, international research and the private sector. We want to expand access to the Arctic for research. For example, we need a new research icebreaker. The Amundsen is aging. She’s breaking down all the time. She’s relatively small and she was not built for science. At this time, every country is building a research icebreaker. We need to be in that race. We need to be there and be leaders there.
We hope that the new Arctic Policy Framework will provide us with the means to achieve those objectives. One of those strategic objectives is to increase capacity to participate in large multinational endeavours. There are many examples. One that you wanted to hear about, but the leaders of that endeavour could not join us tonight, is the BBOS, the Baffin Bay Observatory System, which is a very large multinational program. At this time, we don’t have the capacity to participate to the level we should be participating in this thing.
This is where we are. Again, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to explain the situation.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr.Fortier. Could you make available your application for renewal? Is that something that could be shared with the committee?
Mr. Fortier: I wish I could do that tonight, but it’s not written yet. The letter of intent for renewal of ArcticNet has been accepted. It has been retained, along with 11 other network applications, but only three of those network applications are for mature networks that have reached their end of funding, their first two seven-year cycles. Actually, we’re competing with two other networks for an envelope of about $9 million, which is not enough, of course, but it’s never enough. At this time, the full proposal is due on July 19. Normally, they are pretty confidential documents, and we would have to check with the NCE, but I think we could provide you with the letter of intent, which is a document that outlines what’s going to be in the full proposal.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
We’ll now invite Dr. Christopher Burn from Carleton, please.
Christopher Burn, Chancellor’s Professor of Geography, Carleton University, as an individual: Thank you, Senator Patterson. Last week I submitted a short document as evidence, and there were also some slides submitted. I’ll summarize the items in the document and then I’m going to present four recommendations for your consideration. There are six slides in the presentation and there are five more after the introductory slide.
The second slide shows records of air temperature for the Mackenzie Delta area since 1926. This data indicates that the climate was relatively stable between 1926 and 1970, but subsequently annual temperature has risen steadily and is now 3 degrees Celsius higher than it was. Last year, 2017, presented the second warmest conditions in the record — 5 degrees Celsius higher than in 1926 to 1970.
The next image presents the rainfall record from Inuvik, which is almost complete since 1958. I’ve organized the data for rainfall on the slide in rank order. You will notice that nine of the years within the top 16 have occurred since 2002. Until then, there was no substantial change in the rainfall regime.
You will see in the written evidence I submitted that in 2003 we assembled a small group to provide predictions of climate change in the Mackenzie Valley over the anticipated life of the Mackenzie gas project. The substantial climate change in the region has equaled or exceeded the projections for climate change that were made in 2003.
The next coloured slide is a photograph taken in 2016 of the Dempster Highway in an area of construction. Government records indicate a significant increase in cost for climate-related maintenance activities on the road since 2005.
The third graph on the fourth slide shows maintenance costs in the Yukon portion of the road that are related to snow management, landslides and washouts that block the road and seepage of groundwater in autumn and winter that leads to build-up of ice on the road. These costs have risen annually. The costs magnify when engineering rehabilitation is included in addition to routine maintenance.
The last slide shows that these climate-related costs have increased by over $400,000 per year on the Yukon section of the Dempster Highway. In 2005, climate-related maintenance was about 20 per cent of the budget. Now, about 45 per cent of the maintenance budget is spent on these activities.
Research that is being conducted on the effects of climate change in the North largely takes place in the traditional territories of Indigenous Canadians. Some scientists develop partnerships that explicitly recognize the intimate insight and experience of people who spend time on the land. Indigenous knowledge shares attributes with western science but is also distinct. The distinctions are important because they alter and may even enhance participation in decision-making processes.
Finally, devolution of governance and settlement of land claims has transferred much responsibility for land and renewable resource management in Arctic Canada to northern agencies. The Auditor General has recently expressed concern about the lack of capacity in the territories to manage the issues that are arising and are anticipated following further climate change. It is in the national interest that scientific research in the North assist these agencies to carry out their mandates.
Furthermore, international scientific research in the Arctic has surged in the last decade, but at the moment we have no mechanism for harnessing foreign-based research to assist our northern agencies.
I respectfully submit four recommendations for your consideration. The first is that the federal government should increase the capacity of northern agencies to manage and mitigate the effects of climate change.
The Chair: Could you assist the committee? You’re referring to the paper you submitted, and those recommendations are Item No. 9?
Mr. Burn: That’s right.
The Chair: Thank you. We just wanted to make sure we could follow along.
Mr. Burn: There are four recommendations. The first, as Senator Patterson said, is Item No. 9 in the evidence that I submitted.
The first is that the federal government should increase the capacity of northern agencies to manage and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Second, the government should sponsor a series of workshops across the North to evaluate the partnerships in knowledge development possible between Indigenous knowledge and western science and the capacities of these knowledges to assist decision making during a period of rapid climate change.
Third, the federal government should assist the development of administrative instruments to ensure that science conducted in the North assists northern agencies to fulfill their mandates.
Finally, the federal government should take steps to ensure that science originating in foreign countries similarly assists northern agencies to meet the challenges they face.
I’d like to thank you honourable senators for your consideration and for inviting me to your committee.
The Chair: Thank you. We’ll now turn to Mr.Heath, please.
Joel Heath, Executive Director, Arctic Eider Society: Thank you. It’s a privilege to be here.
There’s a handout with a duck on the front of it. The Arctic Eider Society is the name of our charity.
Forgive my voice. I was just on an expedition up North. It’s a little weak.
Our charity is a small charity. We’re six years old, but we’re based on 18 years of work in Sanikiluaq. The eider is our symbol, the eider down being the warmest feather in the world. Nature’s technology, Inuit innovation, so it’s really a metaphor for Inuit innovation. We do a lot more than study ducks now. There’s a bit of a back story there I’ll give you.
Our work is based in the Hudson Bay region. Hudson Bay has been the forgotten part of the Arctic. Until more recently, it was significantly underfunded compared to other parts of the Arctic because it wasn’t the Northwest Passage, but there are big impacts. There are things like Plan Nord, Ring of Fire, Arctic Bridge, those are all things that are up and coming. Because of the jurisdictional overlap of the different regions, which I’ll talk about in a bit, there needs to be coordination among those different areas. That’s a big priority. It’s also a huge historic importance for Canada. It’s a huge source of freshwater. It drains over 40 per cent of the country and part of the states, and it’s a huge part of the freshwater pump of the planet. I think it’s an important thing that we need to study.
Our charity started in the southeast corner out in the middle of the bay on the Belcher Islands in the community of Sanikiluaq. You can see there’s an ice bridge, a big ice platform. Despite being out in the middle of the bay, we have this huge platform where we can monitor different oceanographic regimes. There are floe edges in every direction. There are 20 polynyas. Just last week we crossed, for the first time in 20 years, from the Belchers in Nunavut to the mainland of Quebec, monitoring the freshwater out in the middle of Hudson Bay with a team of five people from a community. These sorts of community-driven programs can really have a big impact and be able to make important measurements as well.
The community there didn’t have any caribou. They had eider ducks. They used that for their clothing and food. That’s kind of the little bit of back story. There were tens of thousands of them getting stuck in the ice and dying. That was what motivated my time up there. There was a bunch of them stuck in the ice with a survey done with Environment Canada in 2018 due to some rapid freeze up events that have been happening. They can fly. This population is a sedentary subspecies that stays there all year and they over-winter in the ice. People use them year-round for their clothing and food.
I went up there as a grad student. I was a PhD student. I went up there for more academic reasons, I guess. I was really interested in the system. They are in these polynyas, which are like an oasis. There’s no spatial decisions. When I went up there, the community was concerned about these die offs, but the cost as an academic and trying to get my PhD, the questions that were driving my focus were also about getting a PhD and scaling concepts in ecology and big questions in ecology, which are also important. So I sat in that box next to polynyas watching ducks and the ice form for months at a time and trying to think outside the box. Eventually, I got my PhD and the people in the community were like, “That’s awesome, you learned a lot, but we’re sorry to tell you that you’re still kindergarten in Inuit knowledge and you have a lot to learn.”
I really took that to heart. My background was in quantitative ecology and math. I took it as a challenge of thinking how can we meaningfully incorporate Indigenous observations into the science that we do and vice versa. Their observations are often said to be anecdotal. In some cases, that might be the case, but they’re out there every single day taking measurements. They do have data behind that. When you talk about traditional knowledge, there’s time and local knowledge as a spatial scale. How do we link those things together? That kind of took me on a bit of a different career path to be in the community and focus on how we can meaningfully incorporate Indigenous approaches into Inuit-driven research.
Our charity was catalyzed by International Polar Year. We got funding to create the film People of a Feather, which was a big catalyst for our charity, and started some of our community-driven programs.
Since that time, we have started a community-driven research network. Sanikiluaq is very proactive. They had a program called Voices from the Bay, which catalyzed a lot of collaboration between Hudson Bay communities. We networked with Inukjuak, Umiujaq and Kuujjuaraapik in Nunavik, Chisasibi in the region of Northern Quebec and Sanikiluaq in Nunavut to form this network. Each community has a different piece of the puzzle that the community can get to by Ski-Doo in the winter or by boat. By putting the pieces together, we can get a bigger picture of what’s been happening and look at the cumulative impacts of environmental change, such as hydroelectric electric projects, climate change and development.
Our approach is we work with communities. We’re an Indigenous charity. Our board of directors has Inuit from Sanikiluaq on our board. Although we might be paying hunters for their time, we still consider we’re working for the community and not the other way around. We are developing culturally relevant curriculum, using some of the data collected by community researchers, to teach math and science to high school students to inspire them to become the next generation of researchers in the North. We are partnering those youth with hunters to go out on the ice to do the monitoring and to be part of the programs, linking education to training to research.
The big thing we have been working on recently — not at the grassroots but at a bigger level— is stewardship. I mentioned Hudson Bay. It’s Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Nunavut. At the southeast corner, there is a map there and the Nunavut, Nunavik and Eeyou marine region overlap, and they have overlap agreements. It’s the most jurisdictionally complex part of the Arctic. Furthermore, if you go from Sanikiluaq to Umiujaq next door, you’re switching federal departments. It goes from central Arctic region for DFO and Environment Canada to Quebec region. When you put all these things together, it has made it complicated to get anything done in Hudson Bay. Everything has been piecemeal. It is a “tragedy of the commons” situation. We have been working hard to try to overcome those boundaries.
We formed the Hudson Bay Consortium recently. We hosted the first Hudson Bay summit in Montreal a few weeks ago. That was supported by the federal government in a big way. Polar, DFO and INAC played a big part in helping make that happen. It was community-driven from the beginning. For the first time, the 27 communities around Hudson Bay and James Bay, Inuit and Cree, came together to share their priorities and think about how to work together and see the big picture coming from a community perspective. It was a really powerful thing to see. A lot of communities want to do different types of ice monitoring. To be able to coordinate that was important.
Another approach we’re using to link everything is on the technology side. We have been developing an on-line mapping platform and a mobile app called SIKU. We got funding from Google last year to help make that a reality. The idea is to use that to help document the data that has always been behind Indigenous observations. For example, one of our elders is out on the ice every day. He hunts at the flow edge for seals in the winter time and noticed the diets of seals changing from Arctic cod to shrimp. Traditionally, that information would be said to be anecdotal, but he has collected data in his mind, done the analysis and talked to his colleagues in the community and got the Inuit peer review that helped drive that observation. The SIKU app is like Facebook, but you can tag animals and Inuktitut terminology for sea ice. It’s empowering people to use their own classification system to document their observations. Peter can now take a photo of the seal’s stomach contents and will have a data set that he can plot showing the change in diet of the seals. That can provide meaningful ways to link Indigenous knowledge and science together. Those are the kinds of tools we’re working on together. That is helping with Hudson Bay Consortium efforts as well.
A lot of our priorities come from communities, but obviously Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization, plays a big role. Inuit self-determination is the main thing, and that is the basis for a lot of our recommendations.
On the last slide, you will some recommendations. In terms of Indigenous knowledge, it’s to move towards more meaningful incorporation of community-driven perspectives in research, so more than just taking people on the land but having communities drive what research has done. My background is in academics, so I think there needs to be funding for pure science, but I think there also needs to be funding driven by community priorities. I was initially interested in purely academic things, but there needs to be a motivation to address the community’s applied priorities and tools for mobilizing that knowledge.
In terms of research centres, we’re excited to hear that there will be an expansion of networks. Working in communities like Chisasibi, where they have been trying to establish their own and also in Sanikiluaq, we’re trying to do that as well. It’s important to have them be owned by communities as well so that communities can really take self-determination and research and the intellectual property and drive that process. I think there is just as much room for academics to be a part of it. I don’t think all stations necessarily need to be community owned, but when communities can take that ownership, it will make it that much more successful. Currently, the funding is often very project based. There needs to be funding that’s sustainable so communities can have a full-time local Inuit station manager hired to run programs. That needs to move beyond project-based funding.
The last part was Indigenous collaborative networks. That is related to the Hudson Bay Consortium effort and having these big networks of academics. ArcticNet has been amazing and supportive of our work. Having Indigenous networks linked with scientific networks like the Hudson Bay Consortium has done very well in our context because the Hudson Bay IRIS that Louis talked about has helped to bring together that knowledge as well as the Indigenous knowledge. That kind of thing has been project based and there needs to be sustainable funding for operations for those kinds of things as well. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much, witnesses. We do have a short time remaining, so I’m going to start being a little authoritarian about asking for one question. We will begin with the deputy chair.
Senator Bovey: I’m really interested in your SIKU program and the interview you gave on CBC Quebec this past December. Obviously, you’ve talked about the link of local knowledge and science. To what degree has this change or this interrelationship of local knowledge and pure science knowledge changed the relationships within the North and the scientists studying there? What changes are we seeing going forward?
Mr. Heath: I think it is still in process. This is the first year we had the mobile app developed. We had hunters in Inukjuak and Sanikiluaq sending in their data this winter, and I think the benefits are still to come. I think even just having some of the same data on the same platform has been exciting. People that have been monitoring seals sinking have noticed that the seals don’t float like they used because of layers of fresh water. They have been able to make those observations using the app. We have been doing contaminants sampling for the Northern Contaminants program and water sampling with the Nunavut General Monitoring Program in the Nunavik Marine Region. Although unplanned, we can now link those observations to the oceanographic data so they see a seal sink and we can let them know what the water conditions were associated with that. Even now, at the beginning, those relationships have been compelling.
Senator Bovey: Within a year, that’s impressive.
Senator Eaton: Dr. Fortier, I was struck by your presentation. You talked about traditional food and health, drinking water, local transport and infrastructure stability, which Mr. Burn also addressed, cultural benefits and social bonding. What happens when you have these huge challenges and you see something like a cruise ship, the Crystal? How do people in the North feel? I can see the money and the tourists coming in, but it’s pretty fragile up there. What a disaster that could be.
Mr. Fortier: That’s an interesting example.
I was on the Crystal Serenity for the northwest crossing this summer. There was excellent wine and food on board. I think it’s done very professionally. With the Crystal Serenity, for example, the way they operate is all the small craft that are used to bring people on land to visit the communities or the archaeological site are operated by local people. Along the way, they change. So there is a lot of involvement of the local people, and it’s a good source of revenue for them.
Senator Eaton: So it’s welcomed.
Mr. Fortier: It’s well organized. I asked the Inuit people that were actually operating these crafts if they are worried or if they like or appreciate or do not like the operation, and they said yes, it’s a good thing. They say, “We know that they will come in a way that there will be some tourism development.” The way it is done, it’s through an agency, a company that they trust and that they enjoy working with, and it brings revenue into the community.
Also, from a security point of view for the ecosystem, those ships are very clean. They are all self-contained. In the case of theCrystal Serenity, they are escorted by an icebreaker, which is a British ship, the RRS Ernest Shackleton. When they went through this year, for example, they had more ice through Bellot Strait, which is a very narrow strait in the Canadian Arctic, and they wanted to go through there. There the CCGS Des Groseilliers, the Canadian icebreaker, brought support. So it’s very well planned and organized.
That was the last time that the Crystal Serenity, such a huge ship, would do this cruise. Now it will be replaced by two smaller ships, which are probably less of an issue from a security perspective.
Senator Oh: Thank you, witnesses. I think the most impacted people up there are the Indigenous communities. What policy or activities are required to increase Indigenous participation in all aspects of Arctic research?
The Chair: Is your question to any witness?
Senator Oh: Yes.
Mr. Fortier: Maybe I can start. As we’ve seen in ArcticNet, we have been increasingly involving the northern Indigenous people in the research process itself. We also trained several Inuit youth and tried to interest them in science through programs like the Schools on Board program, which brings secondary school students on board the Amundsen, and we have Inuit involved in most of the projects that we fund.
But we need to go further than that. There is a willingness at this time. The premiers of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut have produced a very clear document, a very clear policy, about the need to increase research and training at the post-secondary level in the North. This is one of the elements of the components that we propose in the renewal of ArcticNet, a means by which we can fund the research and training directly in the North, that it doesn’t have to go necessarily through a university system, that it can be a call for proposals broadcast by the territories and the Inuit governments themselves. We’re moving towards that. It’s not easy. What the Inuit would like is a distributed university in the North. It would have to be small by definition because you have only maybe 40,000 or 45,000 Inuit people living in the North. But these are things we are working on with them, and upgrading their educational system in general.
Mr. Burn: I would like to point out that for many scientists in the South, we have a way of making a living that is maybe not absolutely directly associated with our science. In my case, I teach at a university. That pays my salary. The science that I am supported to do, this federal granting agency doesn’t pay my salary. My university pays my salary for my teaching, not for my science directly. But if people are to be involved in science in a serious way, they need to put bread on their tables. They need to have food and somewhere to live. In other words, they need it to be part of their professional activity. When association with science is on a part-time, amateur, maybe a God-bless-you basis, then people can only give a small amount of their time because they have to spend time doing their work. This means that the requirement for professional positions, that is for PYs, people who will be doing science at all different levels, is a requirement if that’s what you want people to do.
Mr. Heath: I think the whole concept I was mentioning about community-driven research centres is a key part of it. Like you said, if it is part-time, seasonal work — there are students who are doing the environmental technology program. There are two students from Sanikiluaq there now. When they come back to their communities — and they do want to come back to their communities — where is the full-time job that allows them do that? If you can have a number of small stations and the resources are spread between them, there can be full-time jobs for people, for Inuit running those stations and doing the research, then that can help in a big way.
I think INAC’s new community-based Indigenous monitoring program is a step in the right direction because it is helping to facilitate community-driven projects. But again, it’s still a project-based system, and we need funding there that’s sustainable for long-term positions for these people when they come back.
Senator Oh: It’s important they have a place to go back to.
Mr. Heath: Yes. Even the knowledge transfer. The head of the Hunters and Trappers Association, there is not a process in place for that knowledge transfer to go to those young students. So by having these stations there and linking them to the local organizations like the Hunters and Trappers Association, they can help pass on that knowledge and training as well.
Senator Galvez: Thank you very much. It was very interesting to have these conversations, because living in the South, it is very difficult to understand everything that is going on in the North.
When I visit the North, climate change is so evident. There is no doubt. You see it; you smell it. But the minute you come to the South, everyone doubts it. It doesn’t exist; it’s not there yet. But when we go to the North, it is very evident.
As you can see, many of the decisions that are taken are political decisions, so who pushes more, who lobbies more, who screams more. The North is opening, and there are plenty of opportunities. There is plenty for doing research and integrating traditional knowledge. But there are competing interests. There are people saying, “No, there are natural resources. Let’s get the gas and oil.” So my question is, because we don’t have millions of dollars, what is the priority, according to you? Where should the money go? In studying how the climate is changing? In studying how it impacts on the people? In exploring new resources? Diffusing or transferring knowledge so the South knows more about the preoccupations? I know my question is complex.
The Chair: Did you understand the question?
Mr. Fortier: Yes, I understood the question. It’s a fundamental question, a fundamental issue.
What’s the point of adapting the North if we don’t do something to mitigate climate change? If we end up with five, six or seven degrees of warming, all these things that we do in the North now will be totally futile because there will be hardly any way to adapt.
The message that I often give to the general public and also to the scientists — for example, the last time it was at the Arctic Change meeting in Quebec City — is that we have to use the Arctic, and increasingly so, as a symbol of climate change, as a demonstration that climate change is real. It is happening faster than expected, than the models are predicting, and this means that it will come south faster and more intensely than we expect as well.
The scientists working in the Arctic have to play a double role. We have to try to adapt people to what’s going on in the transformation of the Arctic, but we have to also use that transformation as a bellwether, as a demonstration that climate change is a serious thing and that we have to fully buy into the Paris accord; otherwise we will be in trouble soon.
Mr. Burn: Senator, I think that, as you point out, the climate change train has left the station in the North. There is no question. The data I showed you indicate this. The response really is, what can we do about it? There are agencies in the northern territories whose job is to try to prepare us for this and to deal with things like adapting the building code, finding out if there are different ways to design structures, highways and municipal arrangements, even to investigate whether highways are, in fact, not sustainable in the future and we need a transportation network that is based on airships — another kind of thinking that is outside the conventional thinking.
For something like 150 years, there will be thawing of near-surface permafrost and the ground will lose its strength to support material that is on top of it. If we don’t begin to think like that — and there are people whose job it is to think about these things. If we don’t support them, then all we will be doing is waiting to react; and then after something that has happened, we will be pointing our fingers: You should have thought about that before.
Now, the great thing about science is it gives an opportunity to anticipate what might happen and then plan for that. But — and this is what you alluded to — that involves a degree of belief, not knowledge. It’s a belief about how the future will be. That is where the contest is, because it’s people contesting what they believe will happen. We know what happened in the past, but we only believe what will happen in the future. That is a fundamental problem that we have to deal with, and that is why we have people in politics.
Senator Neufeld: Just help me here a little bit: How long have you been doing this research in the four Integrated Regional Impact Studies, and how do you integrate that with Polar? How does all that come together so that you’re not just out doing something — and I don’t think you are, by the way — and Polaris doing something else, and everyone is talking, but no rubber is hitting the road?
Mr. Fortier: We have been working on the Integrated Regional Impact Assessments for about 12 years. Two of them are published for two regions, and the other two will be published this year. We’re trying to accelerate this space. The way we do it is to publish a big book and also a digest. It’s all in layman’s language so that everyone can understand. The digest is in two Inuktitut dialects, in French and in English. These are useful, but this is the traditional way of doing it and we want to go faster.
In the new iteration of ArcticNet, if we are funded, we have in this proposal that Polar Knowledge Canada, but also other organizations, would come together into IRIS. They already contribute to it. We will strengthen that and, most importantly, we’re going to join forces so that the research is not duplicated, so that we have a coordination of the call for proposals and the science that is funded, and that all those research projects together contribute to this IRIS framework. If we are funded again, we’re going to accelerate that process of assessments so that we can actually answer the questions in a more timely horizon. We will do this with Polar Knowledge Canada and other groups too.
Senator Day: Could you reassure me on this point? We’ve talked a lot about development and research in the North and how things can change from that research. There is a lot of research going on in other parts of the world, basic science. I’m thinking in terms of communities up North that could benefit from micro hydroelectric. They have a terrible time getting diesel in at times of the year. If they had good, new applications of hydroelectric, that would solve a big problem. There are many other developments like that, that weren’t developed for the North but could be adapted for the North. Is that type of work going on as well?
The Chair: Dr. Burn, you referred to this in one of your recommendations about finding foreign countries’ research, making it relevant to Canada.
Mr. Burn: Yes, Mr. Chair. There are a number of places where there are what you might call micro-scale activity. The community sizes that we are concerned with in Northern Canada are not big. Most of the communities are fewer than 1,000 people. So a big place is maybe 30,000 people; 25,000 would be Whitehorse. We’re talking about something the size of Smiths Falls, which is not a big place.
So there are some, but characteristically that depends on individuals in those communities being motivated to find out something and then scouring the world on the Internet to find another good idea. It’s not something that is necessarily conducted systematically.
When the building code is renewed, as was alluded to earlier today, there is discussion amongst different people about how building codes are adjusted in different parts of the world. But the fundamental problem with that issue is actually thawing of permafrost, and so we either go to the Russian experience, the Alaskan experience or maybe even the Chinese experience. There are relatively few circumpolar countries that have quite the same environment that we have, but there are individuals who are motivated, and those individuals will have ideas. The difficulty is putting those ideas into the mainstream discussion.
I think if you travel to Whitehorse, Yellowknife or Iqaluit, you will listen to people who have ideas, and sometimes the problem is the penetration of those ideas into the bureaucracy so that those ideas develop legs. Because people do not want to back a risky horse. If it is 100 to 1, you will not put much money on it. You will put money on a safe bet, not on a risky bet, and yet the change we are considering and that we anticipate is a game changer; it’s very different from what we’ve experienced.
The Chair: Dr. Burn, you’ve done some interesting research on the Dempster Highway and the Mackenzie Valley. Right now there are three diamond mines depending on ice roads for transportation. Could you give us data on the trends with the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, whether the season is starting to shorten, and other ice roads in Canada that Carleton may have studied?
Mr. Burn: There are three different sorts of ice roads that you might wish to consider. The first are what we would call ice bridges. That is where there is a road that, in the summer, maybe a ferry crosses, such as at Dawson and the Yukon River, but in the winter there is a transit across the ice that’s made. There’s a fair amount of information that is available on the shortening of that season and the difficulties in the fall of the ice bridge becoming established. I can supply you information on that. I can’t spurt it from my head; I’m sorry.
The second are the longer ice roads, such as the ones at the diamond mine. The problem there is what’s happening at the south end of the road. There is information from Nuna Logistics that I can find and transfer to you.
The third are the ice roads in the provinces, particularly northern Ontario and northern Manitoba. The provincial agencies I think I’ll be able to find the information for you on that. Those ice roads are, in a sense, more critical than some of the ice roads in other parts of the country because those communities are landlocked. There is no alternative to the road other than air transport, which is expensive, whereas with the Mackenzie Delta communities, there is a long-term alternative, which is to use the Mackenzie River as a transportation artery again.
I’ll find you material on those three.
The Chair: Thank you.
Witnesses, thank you very much for your presentations. They were very informative. We’ll appreciate hearing more as requested.
(The committee adjourned.)