Proceedings of the Special
Senate Committee on the Arctic
Issue No. 24 - Evidence - April 1, 2019 (morning meeting)
OTTAWA, Monday, April 1, 2019
The Special Senate Committee on the Arctic met this day at 9:03 a.m. to consider the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic, and impacts on original inhabitants.
Senator Dennis Glen Patterson (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning. Ullaakuut. Welcome to the Senate Special Committee on the Arctic. My name is Dennis Patterson. I’m privileged to be the senator for Nunavut and chair of this committee. I would ask senators to introduce themselves.
Senator Bovey: Patricia Bovey, Manitoba.
Senator Anderson: Akana. Dawn Anderson, Northwest Territories.
Senator Coyle: Mary Coyle, Nova Scotia.
Senator Eaton: Nicky Eaton, Ontario.
The Chair: Colleagues, today we continue our study on the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic and the impacts on original inhabitants.
For our first panel, I’m pleased to welcome, by video conference, Mikhail Voevoda, President and Professor of Medicine, Institute of Internal Medicine of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Medical Science, International Union for Circumpolar Health, who is joining us from Copenhagen, Denmark; and Mr. Anders Koch, Past President and Professor, University of Greenland, International Union for Circumpolar Health, who is joining us from Novosibirsk, Russia; and present in the room is Patrice Gilbert, Vice President, Health and Safety and Community Affairs, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited — a company I’m well familiar with.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
I would ask the gentleman from the International Union for Circumpolar Health, Mr. Voevoda, President, to please proceed with his opening statement.
Mikhail Voevoda, President and Professor of Medicine, Institute of Internal Medicine of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Medical Science, International Union for Circumpolar Health: The only correction is that I am from Russia, from Novosibirsk, and Mr. Koch is from Copenhagen, past president. Good morning.
The Chair: Good morning.
Mr. Voevoda: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to participate in this important meeting. As the President of the International Union for Circumpolar Health, today’s topic is a very important issue for the union for many years. At present the significance of this problem is recognized and is even more important due to dramatic changes in climate, circumpolar health. Not only climate, but also in socio-economic transition which is currently in place in all countries of the circumpolar region.
It was recognized that medical care systems in this region have significant peculiarities due to several reasons. First, because of the Aboriginal population, which is an important part of the population of the circumpolar region. They have their own genetic peculiarities which greatly influence the susceptibility to different diseases.
On the other hand, their socio-economic situation in the circumpolar region is different from other parts of the world and require special conditions to provide high-level quality to the people living in this region.
It is important that natural pollution and other pollution have a special impact on the health in this region through many peculiarities because, in general, the environment is quite different from other parts of the world. As I said, at present all these features of these regions are even more important due to the changes in the environment and the socio-economic situation in this region.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Anders Koch, Past President and Professor, Illisimatusarfik, University of Greenland, International Union for Circumpolar Health: I can add to what Professor Voevoda has said, that the International Union of Circumpolar Health is an organization that is concerned with the health of inhabitants of circumpolar areas. We consist of representatives from the medical, scientific societies in the United States, Canada, Greenland, Denmark, northern Scandinavia and the Russian Republic.
We work with health issues on a wide variety of topics that are relevant to populations living in the circumpolar areas, follow the health conditions, organize conferences and do collaborative studies on health issues.
The Chair: Thank you. I’m sure we will have questions for you both. I would now like to turn to Mr. Gilbert.
Patrice Gilbert, Vice President, Health Safety and Community, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to recognize that we are on Algonquin territory.
[Translation]
Mr. Chair, honourable senators, distinguished members of the committee, my name is Patrice Gilbert. I work for Agnico Eagle Mines Limited, as Vice President, Health Safety and Community.
[English]
Agnico Eagle is a leading mining company. We own eight mines around the world, in Finland, Mexico and Canada. We have four mines in the Arctic; three in Nunavut and one in Finland. I am also a member of the Arctic Economic Council. The council was created by the previous government between 2013 and 2015.
I would like to talk a bit about my experience in the Arctic with Agnico Eagle, as well as my role in the Arctic Economic Council and the importance of mining in the development of the Arctic.
Let’s start with Agnico Eagle. We have been in the Arctic for more than 12 years, in Finland first and then in Nunavut. We have identified Nunavut as a main platform for development of our company in Canada. We will have invested about $1.2 billion towards the end of this year in the development of our mines in Nunavut.
We have two operating mines. I understood that some of you had the opportunity to visit Meadowbank. It was certainly a pleasure to have some committee members there. We have just opened a Meliadine mine close to Rankin Inlet. We are developing the Amaruq project north of Meadowbank. We currently employ 2,400 employees in the North, more than 500 of them being Inuit beneficiaries.
The Inuit beneficiaries are an important part of our future. We are aiming to have 100 per cent of our employment long term to be from the region and for doing so, an important component of training and development is necessary. We invested $8 million in the training and development of our Inuit employees in the last year.
We have also been a significant contributor in the development of the region. We build roads. We are a mining company but nevertheless we need transportation. We built 200 kilometres of road at a cost of $200 million. Of course, we are the producer of the longest road in the Nunavut territory. As well, we built electric power generators, 40 megawatts, an airstrip and a barge docking station.
We believe our projects have the potential to realize one important thing for this country, and it’s to build the middle class in Nunavut in the mid-term future. We are also investing in supporting local businesses, to the order of $120 million last year. And that was awarded to Inuit-registered companies. We are providing more than $20 million in salary for the employees from the Kivalliq region.
We have also signed three Inuit impact benefit agreements. And we believe that those arrangements are the way to go for the future. It is allowing proper commitment from the partners for social development, economical development and more important, human resources development.
We also work closely with the Nunavut government. The project will generate $450 million in royalties over the next 15 years.
As well, I have a quick word on my role on the Arctic Economic Council. The AEC includes business members from eight Arctic nations and six permanent participant groups recognized by the Arctic Council, which is very important for the credibility of the committee and the entire association. Those local community members are the Aleut International Association, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Saami Council, the RAIPON and Arctic Athabaskan Council. The AEC has different groups — five of them. They are: maritime transportation, responsible resource development — the one that I’m working more on — connectivity investments and infrastructure and energy.
As a member of the responsible resource development committee, I am pleased to announce that the latest report from the committee has been produced. It will be posted on the web page of the Arctic Economic Council. It’s the fruit of work of about a year and a half where we were able to put some recommendations on several topics. Our conclusion leads to believe that without any doubt, mining is a core component of the successful prosperity of the region in the mid-and long-term future.
Successful mineral development projects build trust and create relationships with Indigenous communities directly impacted by those resources. Our report is intended to serve as a resource for understanding best practices in the North and the unique challenges we are facing when we are developing those projects. The recommendations are aiming at five different topics. These include human capacity, building of infrastructure, economic viability, data sharing and accessibility. This will help to ensure responsible resource development and enhance the industry’s reputation as a driver of sustainable development in the region. As I was saying, the report will be available this week on the Arctic Economic Council web page.
In conclusion, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contribution in the redaction of this report, of Mr. Larry Connell, a well-known mining professional in the industry who dedicated almost his entire career to mining development in the Arctic.
I would like to thank you for your attention. We are looking forward to findings of the committee to see how we could contribute to enhance our presence in the Arctic. Mr. Chair, thank you, Mat’na.
The Chair: I would like to thank the witnesses for joining us from afar and for helping us to focus on this important theme of circumpolar institutions and circumpolar cooperation.
Senator Bovey: Thank you all for your presentations. I am particularly interested in the evolution of research of health issues in the North. I have enjoyed reading an abstract of a paper on circumpolar health research and the group that started in 1967. If I am correct, the focus has shifted in these last 50 years from the biology to the sociology of health. Mr. Voevoda, you mentioned the genetic peculiarities, the socio-economic differences in the circumpolar and the special conditions. Mr. Koch, you certainly picked up on that.
I wonder if you can talk a bit about that shift in research from the biology to the sociology of health, and correct me if I’m wrong, that current research has been looking at the epidemiology of Indigenous people in the North, the health care delivery in the North and the effect of physical factors, particularly the cold and the dark, on human physiology and health.
If you could dig deeper for us on that. And correct me again if I’m wrong, but I think you have been working both on Indigenous people and the effects of people who have lived in the North for centuries, as well as newcomers, non-Indigenous peoples.
Could you give us more context of your work? I appreciate it’s different from the South, and I find it very interesting.
Mr. Voevoda: Thank you very much for your questions. I’ll try to be relatively short.
At the beginning of the history of medical research, the primary focus was on infections problems, like tuberculosis, for example. It was concluded that Indigenous populations were relatively free of the disease that had been common for the rest of society — such diseases as diabetes and other diseases of civilization.
Now we have quite different situation, and we know that Indigenous populations are even more susceptible to civilization disease than western Europe’s populations. Right now, we can face the cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other current diseases are very prevalent in Indigenous populations. All this happened over 60 years. We didn’t see so much tuberculosis or other infectious diseases, which play the most important role in previous ages.
To understand what is responsible for this shift, we have moved from the biological background to socio-economic factors. This clears it with a nice type of life and is a switcher of these diseases, past and present. This is our estimation of the whole situation and how it looks now.
The Chair: Thank you. Professor Koch, can you add to that, please?
Mr. Koch: Yes, I would like to thank the senator for the question. It’s completely right that the circumpolar health movement, as such, started around 1967 with a symposium in Alaska, where the focus, rightly, was on biology. But I would rather say, then, that instead of saying that the focus has changed from biology to social health, the universe or the scope of circumpolar health has expanded to comprise not only, let’s say, factors related to living in Arctic areas with cold and particular biological conditions, but also to include health changes and effects on changing lifestyles and environmental conditions.
Now in the circumpolar health movement, we look on a wide variety of health issues, but also recognizing that we are not just talking about one region; it is one region with somewhat similar living conditions, yet they are different. The health systems that you experience in northern Russia with increasing rates of tuberculosis may be different than in Greenland, let’s say, where high rates of tuberculosis might have come down, yes, but are difficult to get totally rid of.
They are also political conditions. The political situations and the different circumpolar countries are widely different, with Greenland, for instance, being an independent country, with the majority of people being Aboriginal versus Northern Canada, northern Alaska and northern Russia, where the Aboriginal populations are minorities and have particular issues.
The circumpolar health movement is quite broad. We look at many different health issues.
Senator Bovey: I have one follow-up question. As I said when I posed my first question, I found this very interesting. In your research, are you looking at both empirical medical science — and how do you combine that with Indigenous knowledge?
Mr. Koch: At our conferences, we present research from both angles. In all of the circumpolar countries, we discuss and there is much work with Indigenous knowledge and approaches to a variety of issues.
We look both at hardcore epidemiology or biology, but definitely also with the knowledge and the traditions of the circumpolar populations.
Senator Bovey: Do you find those two traditions blend well together to give a greater depth of knowledge and understanding of the special conditions in the Arctic?
Mr. Koch: Absolutely. Let me give an example. We have high rates of sexually transmitted infections and high rates of abortions in Greenland, for instance. We document that from an epidemiological angle. We look at the microbiology and particular biological factors. But we definitely also need to look at the populations’ perspective on sexual health in order to reduce the rates. There are two important sides of the problem.
All of us who work in the region realize that we need to look at the issues from the populations’ points of view, and need to involve the local knowledge and traditions.
Senator Bovey: Thank you.
Senator Eaton: Thank you very much, all three of you, for your very interesting presentations.
The genetic peculiarities — TB, perhaps; mercury poisoning from the fish; addiction, certainly, we found out; you mentioned diabetes — my concern is more about how we keep health care professionals in the North. Looking at all these peculiarities, a lot of them could be because we have taken them away from the Inuit’s traditional way of life — hunting. They are very crowded — overcrowded in housing. I don’t know if it’s the same where you both work, but it certainly is in the Canadian North, which would lead to a lot of addiction and violence, and because they are not eating traditional food — but food we sometimes send them — probably diabetes.
Would you comment on that?
In your experience, how could we keep or make it more attractive for health-care professionals to work in the North?
Mr. Voevoda: It is not a simple question,. There is no simple answer.
From the Russian experience, in Soviet time, the most powerful mechanism for motivating those who worked in the North, including health-care providers, was salary.
Indeed, it is working right now as well because the average salary for health workers who are working in the northern region is about three times higher than the country’s average salary, which is important.
Senator Eaton: If I’m a doctor in Moscow, if I go north I will earn three times my salary?
Mr. Voevoda: Yes. The salary is three times higher. Another important mechanism is to motivate Aboriginal people to get involved in the medical profession. It is simpler for nurses and more difficult for higher medical education, but still it works. In some parts of northern Russia, we succeed fairly well. The majority of medical staff working there are from the Aboriginal population. It’s more difficult in smaller Aboriginal groups, but it works as well. In some cases, we have examples where Aboriginal medical professionals get a specific scientific education.
A more difficult question for which we don’t have an exact answer is about how to motivate Aboriginal people to keep their traditional way of life in some respects, particularly with their diet.
I have tried to answer you honestly on the situation that we have in Russia.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Koch: The senator raises relevant questions. I mostly work in Greenland. As in other circumpolar areas, there are difficulties in recruiting staff. We haven’t found a golden solution. In the long term, the best and most sustainable solution would be to educate as many Greenlandic nurses, doctors, midwives and health staff as possible because they are more likely to stay in Greenland. Efforts are being done to do so. We must realize that you can’t do without medical staff from mainly from Denmark or from elsewhere.
Senator Eaton: Sorry, but you said you can’t do without medical staff from Denmark — why? Because they’re not comfortable?
Mr. Koch: No, I said from Greenland.
We still need doctors and nurses from Denmark. As Mr. Voevoda said, one of the means is to make it more attractive to work there. That is, to make it extremely exciting from a personal point of view. We can’t pay salaries three times as much as when you work in Denmark. But if you can give them an education, good working conditions and, very importantly, partnerships with health institutions and hospitals in Denmark — perhaps joint positions — so they can increase their professional skills and work in a part of the world where they feel they’re doing better than in Denmark, that may help.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Mr. Gilbert: The question of the challenges faced by the Arctic is an important one not only for health professionals but also for different sorts of professionals. I would qualify, to a different degree, the human impact of the challenges we’re facing in the mining industry presently to have mining engineers, geologists and other professionals. Our vision is to have 100 per cent of our employees coming from the mine site. That’s a nice thing to say, but we have to put actions together to be able to do the same as we have done in other places in this country as well as in different places in the world.
I challenge the fact that there’s no university in Nunavut. To give you a concrete example, if we want to have professionals in the regions where we have needs, first, we need schools that can provide the required training. Then we have to respect the fact that it’s not only by increasing the salary that will be able to attract people. People will stay where they are because it’s their land, the place they know and the place they are used to living in.
Senator Eaton: When we visited your mine, Meadowbank, I was struck by how nice it was and by the food when we went into the cafeteria for breakfast. The quarters were warm and comfortable. You felt very safe there. For a lot of people living in smaller isolated communities in the North, I would imagine that, in itself, would be very attractive.
You can shrug your shoulders because you’re probably used to it, but is it because there are food insecurities and lack of good housing in the North? Is that also a factor in not attracting health professionals from the South?
Mr. Gilbert: I’m not so sure I understand your question properly.
[Translation]
Senator Eaton: Many small communities don’t have food security on a daily basis. They also don’t have the comfort of a house. We are used to living in the south; we have our own apartments and we do not share them with 15 other people. In addition to housing and food security, are other factors making it difficult to attract medical personnel to the north?
Mr. Gilbert: I respect your comment, but I am in a better position to see the challenges we have with the professionals working in the mines. In terms of health professionals, I imagine you have points that have been or will be studied.
[English]
However, if you want to successfully have professionals in the long term, you need to train those professionals in the region. That is, you need to have a view and a hope that in the longer term you will be able to maintain and attract those people who grew up on the land to provide their services for the groups of people they grew up with.
The Chair: Just to follow up on that, Mr. Gilbert, we were impressed with the step-training program that Agnico Eagle has established for its operations in Nunavut. I think the Inuit employment was about 36 per cent and growing at Meadowbank when we were there.
You mentioned you have had success in other places. Could you tell me how the company is doing with respect to employing native Finns in your mine in Finland? How has that evolved?
Mr. Gilbert: I will speak specifically about the Finland. All our employees are from Finland, 100 per cent. We used to have, at the beginning, I would say, for some transfer of culture and knowledge, about 1 or 2 per cent of the Canadian workforce and since then, 100 per cent of our workforce is in Finland.
It’s the same in Mexico. In places where other Canadian mining companies would often have a different number of expatriates, we are at 100 per cent because I think the circumstances were proper to do so. Culturally, we believe that there is no other way to sustain the success of a region than to have the people own the mine site, not only employees and management, but community leaders. That’s why it’s so important, when we are in the new region, to seek acceptability of our presence, through IBAs in Nunavut and different agreements in other jurisdictions where we operate.
It’s the same as in other places in Canada. In Abitibi in northwestern Quebec, 15 or 20 years ago we would not have contemplated having IBAs with First Nations. It’s an important component of our long-term success to work closely with First Nations groups who were using and, in some cases, owned the land. All of that is to say that we truly believe that successful mining and sustainable development of our operation need to reside in the hands of the residents of those mine sites.
The Chair: It takes an enlightened corporate attitude to achieve success, Mr. Gilbert, is what I think you’re saying.
Senator Coyle: Thank you to all our witnesses here this morning. I will start with Mr. Gilbert. Thank you for being with us. We really, as my colleagues have said, very much enjoyed and learned a lot from our visit to both Baker Lake and then Meadowbank. It was useful to go to the community that is most closely related and affected by the mining in good and other ways.
I am curious about the mining industry and Canada’s Arctic on a broader level. I know you are one company and as I understand it, it’s fairly early days in terms of tapping into the resources in Canada’s Arctic.
When we’re looking at communities, which is one of the things we’re talking about here today, and health, a more enlightened approach to resource development and sustainability, I am interested because we know the experience of mining. Mining goes in, extracts, maybe processes and sells and then when that is done, that’s done.
In many places and communities across Canada and around the world, there has been this boom and bust cycle which, while it’s booming, can be absolutely wonderful. But as we look at the changes to the Arctic, which is what our job as a committee is to do, how do you see mining as a sector evolving over time as a contributor to the health and well-being of the people of Canada’s Arctic in a sustainable way? I’m sure there have been some projections looking well into the future. I’m interested in those projections and what you have been learning from your early forays and how that will affect the future so that we can continue to sustain the kinds of benefits that you have been talking about.
Mr. Gilbert: I can try to comment on that. I will start with the first portion of your comment, which was referring to mining in Canada as an entity. More and more, of course, there are some Canadian projects that are developing everywhere in the Arctic. We are carrying a longer history on the west side of the country than on the east side.
Nevertheless, in order to try to find those best long-term practices that reside in the end of the mining industry, I did refer in the introduction to the work of the Arctic Economic Council. Of course, it was created and led by Canadians who were raising, more or less, very similar questions as you just did, very eloquently, about the challenges we’re facing in the future.
Different committees that are working on the council are trying to see how best we can sustain the mining industry in the Arctic. The work that has been done for the mining portion is illustrating that we need to be working closely with the community leaders and then be able to project what will be needed long-term to make sure that even though we’re operating cyclically, we will maintain a positive outcome of our presence in a place.
What mining houses are doing more and more is projecting their long-term needs in terms of a workforce. In our case, we have three operating sites. We want to ensure we have enough capacity to avoid downsizing our presence in a mine site in a major way, and be able to transfer one group of employees to another mine site.
The Chair: Mr. Gilbert, I think what you’re saying is the sustainability of a mining operation depends on creating a workforce that is mobile and can move to other opportunities.
Am I summarizing that correctly?
Mr. Gilbert: It was the first portion of my presentation. The other thing I wanted to say is that mining is more and more optimized. You don’t have a traditional mining profile of a worker who will only be trained in one specific job. Now, people will be able to mine from hubs. You have seen that in the south of the country in Ontario and Quebec, where a mining operator in Sudbury would be downtown and operating equipment underground 50 kilometres away.
The challenge that we raise in the Arctic is to be able to train those people to not only be doing their work manually but to be able to do it from remote places, and their employability will increase dramatically, as well. It’s an important component. If a mine site is closing, you can stay home and be able to work in a different working location.
Senator Coyle: Thank you very much, that’s very helpful. For our other two witnesses, Mr. Koch and Mr. Voevoda, you’ve looked at your own environments. I’m curious, as part of the large, International Union for Circumpolar Health, where are you seeing any positive health outcomes, particularly across the Indigenous populations in the circumpolar region? Can you tell us if you have been tracking any pockets of positive health outcomes and what you might be attributing those to?
Mr. Voevoda: In general, the health conditions of Indigenous peoples in Russia just evolved to the same degree as health conditions of the general population.
We see real improvement in the infectious diseases situation. Of course, previous problems with mother and child health improved dramatically at the present. In general, the situation changed from prevalence of infectious disease issues to common Western-type disease issues. Of course, we face a lot of problems at the same time. As you mentioned, with development in industry, we have wave development in medical systems.
For example, in Soviet time, we developed mobile organization of prophylactic systems aimed primarily at tuberculosis diagnosis. At the same time, it solved a lot of other problems. In the recent past, it was destroyed. Right now, we are organizing the system again. We are returning somehow to what we had in the past concerning mobile groups of medical specialists who can quickly move around to provide not only emergency services, but prophylactic services to people in remote settlements.
The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Koch, did you wish to add to that?
Mr. Koch: There are quite a few examples of things getting better. Infant mortality is getting much better; in Alaska and Greenland, rates are declining. The rates of smoking are declining. Rates of alcohol abuse in general are declining. Hepatitis B in Alaska — the rates have been reduced drastically for chronic hepatitis due to focused vaccination programs. Also, regarding tuberculosis, Northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland had the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world in the 1950s, but they have been reduced significantly.
Rates of suicide are decreasing, particularly in the bigger towns in Greenland. Also, health care delivery is improving in many locations in the circumpolar world.
There are definitely things that work very well.
Senator Coyle: We don’t have time to delve into each of those today. If there is more information on any of those factors — because we want to learn also from the positives — the impacts of the various interventions and approaches that you have described. Those would be very interesting to us.
The Chair: Maybe I will ask a supplementary question. Professor Voevoda, you spoke in your opening remarks about the genetic peculiarities of Aboriginal people that make them susceptible to certain diseases. Would you be able to elaborate on that?
Mr. Voevoda: Yes, of course. There are some known examples of genetic peculiarities; actually, there are a lot of them. We know there are some genes that specifically predispose this population to certain health issues and conditions.
I stress in general that large populations of circumpolar areas, starting from Siberia to Greenland, are much more closely related to each other than to other populations. These Indigenous groups are also related to Native Americans. Many years ago, even in the 1950s, a very famous American geneticist saw that a gene exists in these populations that can help them survive in particular disastrous periods of food shortages. When they get in the current situation, in the present, and there is no limitation of any kind of goods, they start to develop chronic conditions more rapidly than other populations, like obesity and a whole spectrum of related diseases.
We know some of these genes — not all — but some of these genes we know.
The Chair: Thank you very much for that.
Senator Anderson: Thank you for your information this morning.
In Canada, there are lawyers who are currently preparing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Inuit who have faced discrimination in Canada’s health care system. Is that an issue that presents itself internationally, and if so, what can be done to address Aboriginal discrimination in health care?
Mr. Voevoda: I don’t know an example of such issues in Russia. I didn’t hear about it being a problem in this matter in other countries. Maybe Professor Koch will correct me.
Mr. Koch: Instead of discrimination, I would rather say there is disparity in health throughout the circumpolar world. It’s obvious that people living in remote communities have more difficulty accessing health care; yet, in Alaska, for instance, the native population has access to free health care, unlike the non-native population of Alaska.
In Greenland, there is no discrimination in health depending on your ethnic background; yet, there is disparity in the sense that the remoter you live — the native Greenlanders live farther away from the bigger towns. In that sense, there is disparity in health. We do not see, from my point of view, discrimination in health.
The Chair: With that, I would like to very much thank the witnesses for joining us from afar, and Mr. Gilbert, for being with us here this morning. This has been a very enlightening session for us all.
We will look for the report of the Arctic Economic Council. Thank you for letting us know that is available soon.
For our second panel today I’m pleased to welcome Sandra Kunuk Inutiq, Chief Negotiator, Tallurutiup Imanga Inuit Benefit Agreement, Qikiqtani Inuit Association; and Christopher Debicki, Vice President, Policy Development and Counsel, Oceans North. Thank you both for being with us today.
Perhaps we can begin with Ms. Kunuk Inutiq, followed by Mr. Debicki. You can expect questions and answers afterward.
Sandra Kunuk Inutiq, Chief Negotiator, Tallurutiup Imanga Inuit Benefit Agreement, Qikiqtani Inuit Association: On this day that marks the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the Nunavut territory, it seems appropriate I’m here to talk about Tallurutiup Imanga as a conversation model for the Qikiqtaaluk/Baffin region. We are under negotiations with the Government of Canada to create a marine conservation area. Our land claim in Nunavut requires that there be an impact benefit agreement with Inuit before this can be created.
Our aim is to have this impact benefit agreement done by early June. The Inuit land claim was driven by wanting to protect our way of life, Inuit wanting a say on the use, management and conservation of wildlife, land, water, and other resources. This is an application of those rights that have been fought for. Inuit have been trying to protect Tallurutiup Imanga since the exploration started in the 1970s, basically helping to propel the drive to settle a land claim agreement.
This area, abundant with wildlife, provides Inuit with sustenance and a way of life, and has been referred to as the Arctic Serengeti. It is vast. The boundary is 109,000 square kilometres.
Inuit are a marine people, our ocean just happens to be frozen much of the year. We rely heavily on marine life for food.
In a report to the Government of Canada in October 2016 by Mary Simon called A new Shared Arctic Leadership Model, she proposed a conservation economy. Our proposal to Canada includes Inuit of Qikiqtaaluk defining what “conservation economy” means to us. It includes marine and community infrastructure, a stewardship model called Uattijiit — like a guardians program, where Inuit are already traversing the land and sea scape, trying to advance or support this further, that Inuit are already the eyes and ears of our homeland — as well as a robust research model informed by the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami research strategy that allows Inuit to define their own research priorities.
We have also agreed to consider options to pursue the creation of a marine conservation area in the High Arctic Basin or Tuvaijuittuq. In summary, we are supporting a hunting way of life, which has stood the test of time as an economic model that works for Inuit since Inuit have been Inuit.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Christopher Debicki, Vice President, Policy Development and Counsel, Oceans North: Good morning, senators. Thank you, chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak before you this morning. My name is Christopher Debicki, Vice President, Policy Development and Counsel, Oceans North. We’re a Canadian non-profit organization focused on marine conservation in Canada’s northern oceans. We emphasize made in the Arctic solutions through partnerships with Indigenous organizations northern communities to foster Arctic ecological resilience and abundance. We are very proud that Mary Simon, to whom Ms. Inutiq referred, has recently returned as chair of our board of directors. I am confident that her formidable career as a northern thinker ambassador and advocate for Indigenous rights is well-known to this committee.
Indeed, her report continues to inform the report that Sandra alluded to informs both national and regional conversations about Canada’s approach to Arctic policy broadly, and the need to focus on human and, by extension, environmental wellness at the centre of all our efforts. Mary reminds us that it’s not acceptable for anyone, let alone environmentalists of any stripe, to push for some of kind of absolute protection of a pristine Arctic as though it were not a peopled place.
We started our efforts, and to this day, predominantly work in, Inuit Nunangat. I want to be careful: We aren’t spokespeople for Inuit, Inuit organizations or any Indigenous constituency. We work in Northern regions where Inuit are a majority and where conversations about environmental issues and conservation can’t take place in a vacuum. We are informed by social context and guided by the voices of Northern partners.
I am personally shaped by my own experiences with Canada’s North. I first arrived in Iqaluit as a doe-eyed criminal defence lawyer in 2004, working, like the chair, Senator Patterson, in Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik Legal Services, serving the Baffin region.
I enjoyed the work immensely. I was never a clinical lawyer and wasn’t able to sequester my emotions and separate them from my work. Many of the life stories of my clients — the hurt they endured and the hurt they passed on to others — left me deeply affected.
After working in the courthouse, teaching at the jail, and dealing with dozens and dozens of folks — mostly men — caught up in the criminal justice system, I became well versed in the patterns of social dysfunction and the infinite ways in which such tragedy unfolds. One of the coping mechanisms I discovered and which probably saved me from less healthy coping mechanisms was to spend as much time on the land as possible. I was lucky in that a wonderful man, whose job title, Aboriginal court worker, matched the federal funding category, somehow decided to take me hunting and fishing with his family, and share at least enough of his incredible land skills to keep me from killing myself through some combination of overconfidence and ineptitude. Abraham taught me to see a welcoming, rich, abundant natural world where before I saw a hostile, forbidding landscape. The lessons he taught me have stayed with me, and in many ways, have shaped the life I have since led.
Another lesson emerged in those early forays on the land. It was out on the trails, tending fishing nets, setting up canvas tents, enjoying tea and hunting cabins that I started to meet families who reflected a different narrative from the one I saw in court — families who were thriving. I learned something then that has been confirmed over and over since: Families who are still spending time on the land are simply doing better.
Too often, unfortunately, there are significant barriers that cut northerners from the natural world outside of their communities. Once grandparents and grandchildren no longer share a language, once a generation or two have lost land skills, it takes a lot of work to get those things back.
Additionally, traditions evolve. Land skills now also incorporate a lot of technology, none of which comes cheap in the North.
While we know that families who spend time on the land tend to do better, it is also true that families that are doing better materially are more able to spend that profound time on the land.
What does this have to do with conservation? I would suggest a lot.
I am taking it for granted today, before this distinguished committee, that the need for Arctic conservation efforts to ensure the protection of ecosystems that exist nowhere else on Earth — for present purposes, I want to pretend that I’m speaking to a group of senators appointed by the Green Party.
What I am focused on and what brought me here through my long-winded creation story that started in a dingy legal aid office is the relationship between robust, productive habitats and social wellness. I’m not proposing any panacea for all that ails our Arctic communities. I want to highlight, by way of a few of the initiatives we have attempted to support, the importance of conservation efforts in the Arctic and why, beyond meeting international commitments, they are important for our domestic well-being.
First and foremost, what we hope will be the successful completion of the Tallurutiup Imanga — and I’m glad that Ms. Inutiq presented before me today. I would like to take the opportunity to commend her and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association for their perseverance and vision.
They first started negotiations with the federal government in the context of competing aspirations for a place we, at the time, still called Lancaster Sound, a name provided by the British admiralty. Our hope is that Tallurutiup Imanga, as Canada’s largest NMCA, will result in infrastructure commitments, long-term monitoring and stewardship. If done right — and we have every expectation it will be done right — this NMCA should create employment opportunities for High Arctic communities — opportunities that recognize the inherent and incredible value of the land skills that, until now, have been existing at the margins of the wage economy.
Tallurutiup Imanga will be living proof that conservation and development can coexist; indeed, the very same region also accommodates Nunavut’s largest industrial development and, likely, at this point, already the largest private employer. The Mary River iron ore mine, with which this committee is no doubt familiar, employs roughly 900 people at the mine and port facility, and by all accounts, is profitable at present output.
I note it’s an interesting segue that we heard from a representative from Agnico Eagle Mines this morning. Baffinland has Indigenous employment numbers well below those of comparative northern mines situated in or adjacent to Indigenous communities, notably Voisey’s Bay and Agnico Eagle’s Nunavut mines.
At this point, Inuit still occupy a very small share of the jobs at Mary River, somewhere in the range of 12 to 14 per cent, almost all at the lower end of the wage spectrum. This is not to diminish the importance of 100 jobs, as well as the very significant royalty streams that are projected to one day flow to Inuit from this project. The mine delivers very real economic benefits. But far too many of the net benefits from this mine flow south, reminding us that 70 years of an imposed education system has failed to create a labour force for the existing wage economy.
While a new benefit agreement and increased investments in training seek to increase Inuit employment at the mine, the company’s own labour market analysis suggests that the proposed expansion of the workforce and output at the mine will, in all likelihood, further reduce the Inuit share.
As an aside, we recently commissioned a report by a University of Manitoba economist, John Loxley, who concludes that if the mine expands too quickly, Inuit may not be in a position to capitalize on revenues that should flow from the resource.
Tallurutiup Imanga, with strong local stewardship, should provide a level of assurance to the people of Mittimatilik, Pond Inlet in particular, the people who live closest to the mine and are increasingly anxious of the industrial shipping that is occurring in Eclipse Sound and more anxious even about the expansion of shipping proposed.
The other initiative I want to highlight is the effort of the Pikialasorsuaq Commission. Pikialasorsuaq, which is a Greenlandic word that means “a great upwelling,” dubbed the North Water by early European whalers, is the largest polynya, or year-round open-water area surrounded by ice in the northern hemisphere. It has been a place of great interest to scientists, who typically visit the area by icebreaker.
Its importance to Inuit goes back way beyond the advent of European whaling. The northern ice arch that extends from Ellesmere Island and Greenland was the bridge that Inuit and their ancestors migrated on and settled to Greenland. The productivity that starts in the polynya, where the sun can be absorbed in open water because the ice is not reflecting it back, feeds larger animals that in turn have fed the northernmost human settlements in the world for at least 5,000 years.
Communities in Nunavut and Avanersuaq, which is northwest Greenland, continue to rely upon the productivity the polynya. In 2017, the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s Pikialasorsuaq Commission published a report recommending, among other things, that Pikialasorsuaq be jointly managed by regional Inuit from Canada and Greenland. The commission based this recommendation on what it heard during consultations with High Arctic peoples on both sides of Baffin Bay who expressed a strong desire to work more closely together, a reflection perhaps of their shared history.
I also note this committee has heard from Greenlandic witnesses. I encourage the committee to investigate to the greatest extent possible the extraordinary parallel country that is Greenland. Greenland, which is not without many of the same challenges as are faced by many of our Arctic citizens, is nevertheless doing a bit better than Arctic Canada on just about every socio-economic and health indicator. There is much we can learn.
I am greatly encouraged that we are operating at a time in which the Government of Canada has not only received the report of the Pikialasorsuaq Commission, but takes it seriously to the point of having assigned a representative to explore options.
Finally, Mary Simon’s report, guardian initiatives being developed across the country, and the anticipated benefits agreement between Qikiqtani Inuit Association and Parks Canada — all of these things remind us that conservation, legislation and policy cannot be approached in a vacuum. Protection of our marine environment starts with the protection of the people who occupy this environment and include safe housing, early childhood education, culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate schooling, food-secure families and concerted investments in trauma-support services.
The path forward, I hope, will get us beyond the notion that conservation is a tradeoff between jobs and the environment. This is not a zero-sum game. Indeed, conservation must be jobs. These jobs in Indigenous communities will have multiplier effects, social wellness multipliers chief among them.
The hope, therefore, is that the vaunted whole-of-government approach really does mean the whole government. In other words, consultation and negotiation processes to achieve conservation targets should not be approached as the price tag for conservation gains but, rather, as a framework for improving environmental — i.e, human — wellness. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Bovey: I want to thank you both. You have touched on many things. I feel a little bit like a mosquito: Which one am I going to light on for a first question?
You both mentioned Mary Simon, a wonderful Canadian whom many of us have had the opportunity to work with, and her conservation economy.
Conservation needs and knowledge in this time of rapidly changing climate change, in my view, makes conservation that much more complex, as we have changing species, some less abundant and some new. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that. What are the needs going forward in terms of conservation in this vastly changing climate?
With our work, what would your recommendations be for federal policies to build that capacity, to balance — I’m going to use a phrase I have used before — empirical science and the depth of Indigenous knowledge and making sure that the two are linked in a constructive, forward-looking way? What do we need to do from the federal perspective?
Ms. Inutiq: In terms of conservation needs, I think the first thing that comes to mind is to listen to the people who live there. There are a lot of emerging conservation efforts — Sanikiluaq comes to mind — that are community-driven. We have to especially support those. Also, keep in mind the regional, territorial and national Inuit governance structures, because you don’t want to just approach it from just pigeonholing: How do we define conservation from an Inuit perspective? That immediately comes to mind.
We have experienced environmental organizations, not so great relationships with non-government organizations, our history with Greenpeace, and anti-seal movements. I think less reliance on environmental organizations and their agendas, and more reliance on the people who live there to define what needs to be protected and how those protective measures are to be implemented, because there is that historical, empirical approach to conservation. We need to get away from that.
As Inuit, it’s an area where we need to rebuild some of that trust with some of the environmental organizations. We’re probably on our way. I don’t know if we’re there yet. Hopefully, I have answered your question.
On the capacity, on Indigenous knowledge, the model that we’re working on is to have the research priorities set by the communities and then capacity building within Inuit to do that research or to partner with whom we want to partner with on research. That includes Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the conception of what needs to be researched from an Inuit perspective and how Inuit knowledge can be the basis in terms of defining priorities and doing research.
One of the examples we use is ice knowledge. Inuit have huge amounts of knowledge on ice. There are also scientific studies on ice. Those two can really complement each other. Just imagine how much more the knowledge base would be if we actually worked together on those fronts.
I’ll leave it there for now.
Senator Bovey: I wonder if we could have Mr. Debicki speak as well.
Mr. Debicki: Thank you, senator. Speaking on behalf of my own conservation organization and many of the others with which we occasionally partner, we hope that we are part of a paradigm shift in which we seek to really distance ourselves from a past approach which really sought to preserve and protect a pristine Arctic, with images of polar bears and very few images of human beings, and downplayed the connection and the importance of humans in this environment.
To your earlier question in terms of how to balance empirical science and the depth of Indigenous knowledge, I have always been of the view that it isn’t really a binary. My sense, having worked with many wonderful Indigenous knowledge holders, is that knowledge is empirical. This isn’t a question of science versus some kind of other magical understanding of the natural environment. It’s an empirical understanding.
The ice expertise that Sandra referred to is one that has been built up over years of cumulative and collective observation, but it’s empirical nonetheless. It just isn’t packaged in the same way.
My hope is that we’ll come to understand and appreciate ways of listening, learning and building that knowledge into our more traditional science categories.
In addition, senator, I think you asked about how conservation — I’m paraphrasing now — approaches the issue of change that is occurring. One of the ways that is critical is significant investment, not simply in protecting areas and defining them as such on the map, but with that stewardship and monitoring. Significant investment in monitoring and locally led monitoring is critical in this time.
The Chair: Thank you. In that connection, I might draw to the attention of the committee that we are hearing, on this issue of traditional knowledge — Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit — we are hearing from Theo Ikummaq, who has been involved with ice studies as a traditional hunter, and Professor Claudio Aporta from Dalhousie University, who has worked with Indigenous people in connection with sea ice, documenting Inuit knowledge. We will explore that further in the committee.
Senator Eaton: Thank you both very much. I have a question for each of you, very different questions.
Mr. Debicki, who funds Oceans North?
Mr. Debicki: We typically get funding from a number of foundations. We are in the process of becoming a registered charity such that we can then seek — yes, go ahead.
Senator Eaton: That’s a lovely answer. Are you getting funding from American foundations?
Mr. Debicki: We are.
Senator Eaton: Do you think an American foundation would have the same agenda as, perhaps, the local Inuit or the Canadian government?
How do you play that? It is interesting; I am getting money from China, but China has no influence on me, in terms of Canadia, and the U.S. and I think, specifically, it is the Pew foundation that gives you money. Am I correct?
Mr. Debicki: Some funding comes from the Pew Foundation. It has historically, yes.
Senator Eaton: They obviously have a lovely agenda. The last I read about the Pew Foundation was a couple of years ago, when I was doing a Senate investigation, is that they would love Canada to be a lovely wildlife park in the North. But that not might be the local people’s idea of a great time or even the Canadian government. I’m interested, because I know you don’t sit on the Pew Foundation’s board and you’re not making decisions, but how do you cross the line of getting money from a foreign country?
Mr. Debicki: Senator, I think our record at this point speaks for itself. We have a mission statement consistent with what I described to you at the outset of my presentation. We don’t accept funding conditional on outside agendas, be they the Pew Charitable Trusts’ agenda or any other.
Senator Eaton: The money is given to you completely without strings. You don’t have to discuss with them what your plans are. You just get a lovely check.
Mr. Debicki: Senator, it’s hard to have a conversation about funding arrangements in the abstract. We have all kinds of funding arrangements, some of which are project-based, where we will outline a particular project, campaign or objectives, and then seek funding. I should also note that we get funding from many sources, and that is one that you mentioned, yes.
Senator Eaton: I was sympathetic to what you were saying, Ms. Inutiq, about Inuit having their say in their own land. Does the Northwest Passage go through your land, what we call now the Northwest Passage?
Ms. Inutiq: Yes, it would go through Tallurutiup Imanga.
Senator Eaton: What we have discovered in our little journey is that the Northwest Passage has few shipping and environmental regulations. How do you feel about that? How do you see the ongoing development of that important shipping route? The Chinese want to sit on the Arctic Council, Singapore wants observer status. It’s at play now. How do you see your role in that?
Ms. Inutiq: The conservation area would create zones, in terms of trying to regulate some activities. But first and foremost is the right to navigate through the international agreement between countries. As long as ships are not anchoring anywhere then they can pass through. Some of the work we’ll be doing is to define routes and —
Senator Eaton: You are going to define routes?
Ms. Inutiq: In order to create a marine conservation area, you need a management plan and that’s under legislation. We are creating a management plan that will outline zones in terms of what activities can take place, where. Part of that exercise will be to create routes that we would like followed.
Senator Eaton: In other words, because we’ve heard over the last couple of years about people deciding they are going to sail through the Northwest Passage, ending up on the rock, the Coast Guard had to save them, cruise ships going through and getting stuck because they decided to take another route. When you have your management plan up in place, that will all be carefully monitored. In other words, I won’t be able to get into a canoe, get into some rocks and have to call the Coast Guard, and cruise ships won’t be able to go through wherever they want?
Ms. Inutiq: I think that the cruise ships need lots of permits for different activities, so to permit where they can go would be part of that permitting process.
One of the major concerns we heard from the communities was that the fjords or the inlets where the wildlife are, they don’t want them disturbed. One of the tensions right now, with tourism, is those ships going into those inlets or fjords, disturbing wildlife. The other thing we heard during the community tour that we’re considering as we go is the number of sailboats that are going into the area. Sometimes they don’t notify anyone that they’re going there. We had an incident out one of the communities where a sailboat was crushed by ice and because they had no instruments to locate them, it took a bit more effort. It is trying to promote more responsible boating for visitors, because after a certain size of a vessel, there are regulations if you’re large enough that you need instruments to identify where you’re going. But if they’re smaller than that, then it has to be more of a promotion of safer practices. That’s one of the considerations that we’re making as we work.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Coyle: Thank you both for being with us today. Those were very important presentations.
Ms. Inutiq, when we’re talking about research in the Arctic, you said we are the ones who need to determine what should be researched and also who we would like to work with in accomplishing those research goals.
I think these are very important statements.
Could you elaborate a little on some of the research priorities as you have seen them enunciated by the people in your association? What are the big research priorities that the people in QIA are enunciating? Who do you see as key partners in accomplishing your research goals?
Ms. Inutiq: On the first question, we haven’t gone through the exercise of priority setting with the communities, so it would be answering before that process.
So far, we have heard that communities want to know vessel traffic information and who is in our waters. There is a lot of suspicion on who is in Arctic waters and that there might be gaps in information, in terms of who is there and what they’re there for.
There has been, for example, suspicion that some of the animal rights activists are going into our waters and emitting sounds to drive wildlife away. Is that true, for example? Those are the kinds of examples that we’ve heard from the communities, but we would have to go through that exercise of really hearing from the communities in terms of what their priorities are.
Your second question was?
Senator Coyle: Who your preferred research partners might be.
Ms. Inutiq: Again, that would be prejudgment of a process that hasn’t taken place and once the priorities are set, it would be up to the communities to define what, who they would want to partner with. For example, DFO already has ships that go to the North to do research.
Is that something that the communities are interested in, to add that Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit to the research already going on? We don’t know at this point.
Senator Coyle: All of us at this table are interested in the Arctic Policy Framework and the development of the new Arctic Policy Framework.
Can you speak to the involvement of your association in the development of the new Arctic Policy Framework? What has the process been to date and where does it sit at this moment in terms of the relationship?
Ms. Inutiq: Yes, we made submissions. The latest one was the QIA’s response to “Stronger Together: An Arctic and Northern Policy Framework for Canada.” That has been shared. Even previous to this, we submitted a new economic model which focused on the conservation economy. We have been very much engaged in the process.
Senator Coyle: How has the process been working for you?
Ms. Inutiq: I’ve been more on the periphery so I wouldn’t know the details. I have taken part in drafting as our work is informing the process because the conservation economy is part of this write-up. I wouldn’t be able to answer that question in terms of how it has worked for our organization.
The Chair: Ms. Inutiq, we would be grateful if you could share those documents with the committee clerk. I am familiar with them but I think if you could kindly table them with the clerk, that would be very useful.
While we’re on that, I wonder, Mr. Debicki, could your organization make available the work you mentioned which was commissioned from the University of Manitoba? Is it publicly available?
Mr. Debicki: It is. It would be my great pleasure.
The Chair: If you make that available through our clerk, it would be well received.
Ms. Inutiq: The other document I was hoping to share is the “Food Sovereignty and Harvesting” document that our organization released. I will leave those two documents here for you.
The Chair: That is very much appreciated.
Senator Anderson: Thank you for your information. Ms. Inutiq, you spoke about the Inuit’s reliance on marine life and hunting for food and the correlation between marine communities and the stewardship model. Recognizing the various priorities of government and economic development and the inherent right of the Inuit, what is vital in your opinion to maintain Inuit way of life? That is a loaded question.
Ms. Inutiq: What a question. How much time do I have?
The Chair: No one told you this would be easy, did they?
Ms. Inutiq: I think there is so much research that is coming out in terms of the connection, for example, between access to land, hunting, mental health, food and our mental health. We’re seeing the impact of settlement living and the assimilation that has gone with the settlement way of life. Since Inuit have moved into settlements, we have seen the negative impacts.
We’re seeing research now that really ties in the health impacts of not just obtaining food but eating traditional food and how much of an impact that has on somebody’s health. I would go further and say that it impacts our sense of self, spiritually and socially.
Just imagine a child having their first catch of a marine mammal. I will use a seal as an example. That catch is celebrated. It brings the community together to eat the seal, to celebrate with the child and to thank the animal. That brings community cohesion. It’s not just about food on a plate — or on cardboard, for us, because we eat frozen food on cardboard. It is not just food on a plate but the meaning behind the knowledge of hunting, the celebration of the catch, and how it brings people together. All of that is encompassed by hunting. Hopefully, for your million-dollar question, I’ve done it justice.
Senator Anderson: I think you have. There’s a lot of discussion about the value of Indigenous traditional knowledge. In your opinion, do you think that Indigenous traditional knowledge is given the same weight as scientific knowledge?
Ms. Inutiq: The short answer is no. There are two ways that we can work on elevating this. One is to support the communities to use Indigenous knowledge. For example, in order to create the boundary of Tallurutiup Imanga, there was a community tour to speak to knowledge holders on where the wildlife migrate, where they live, where people hunt, where the important places are that we need to protect. That was then mapped out, using traditional knowledge and then hot spots were identified.
This is my favourite map in the whole, wide world because it shows traditional knowledge in pictures. That was then used to create the boundary of Tallurutiup Imanga. That just goes to show how much value there is. We need to foster that within our communities.
On the other side, the western or academic community has to make space for that traditional knowledge. Those are two avenues we need to work on to really support the value of Indigenous knowledge.
The Chair: Thank you. Ms. Inutiq, I know that the IIBA on Tallurutiup Imanga is in the final stages of negotiation and has not been announced. It’s soon to be finalized; I think you mentioned June. Could you give us an idea of the themes being pursued in the negotiations? I’m particularly interested in the Inuit guardians process. Am I using the correct term there?
Ms. Inutiq: We chose not to use “guardians” because it has a somewhat limiting definition within the Government of Canada programming.
The Chair: I’m not using the correct term. Sorry.
Ms. Inutiq: We have used the term Inuktitut term “uattijiit.” We actually have a pilot project in Arctic Bay where we have hired four uattijiit, one program coordinator and a manager; so six positions. We wanted to do this pilot project while we’re negotiating to prove it can be done and also to learn lessons as it would be used as a model for the other four communities.
This program has existed as a pilot since August. We’ve rented equipment, a boat and snowmobiles. In partnership with the RCMP, they’ve allowed us the use of snowmobiles. There has been kamik-making courses and there was a parka-making course run by an elder to make them parkas. There will be a caribou skin parka course, igloo-building and firearms training and training in things like the inReach devices that they use for safety. That is some of the training that we’ve carried out.
They’re allowed to hunt while out on the land while they are monitoring. They hold monthly feasts, and they try to time the feast for when it’s at the end of the social assistance period, and when they know that it’s the most difficult time for some families that rely on social assistance. It has been empowering to watch this process unfold as the uattijiit take on the role, defining where they want to go and what they want to do. For example, they scoped out the sea ice for the upcoming North Baffin dog-team race that is going to take place between Pond Inlet and Arctic Bay. They checked out the sea ice conditions for that, and they report to the community on ice conditions and sighting of wildlife. They’re out on the land frequently. They’ve assisted people. The last time I was in Arctic Bay, an elder came up to me and said, “I see them out there all the time,” and just complementing on how well it’s going.
Of course, we have a lot of lessons to still learn. Some of the wave-finding skills need to be fine-tuned working with elders. It has been life-changing for one of the participants where he has even taken on hunting outside the uattijiit program. That actually gives me chills because it has given him the confidence to go out by himself.
That’s the model that we’re hoping to replicate for all the five communities. Does that answer your question?
The Chair: Yes, thank you.
I’d like to ask Mr. Debicki a question in that vein.
You talked about the Pikialasorsuaq Commission, and this is what is also known as the North Water Polynya. You said this project of the Inuit Circumpolar Council is recommending joint management of the area by the Inuit in North Baffin and Greenland.
This may be a naive question, but I’ll ask it because I’ve heard it asked elsewhere. Inuit, at least at the moment, don’t have ships, don’t have satellites and don’t have aircraft to monitor this remote region. Can you tell us how you would see Inuit taking a role — Inuit-led, I think, was how you described it — how would it actually happen in practice, given that the ICC doesn’t have the human resource capacity at the moment? How do you see this unfolding, going forward in the way you envisage?
Mr. Debicki: First, Greenlanders have access to greater infrastructure than do many of the communities in the eastern Arctic. Most Greenlandic communities have port facilities. There is more extensive local involvement in the fishery, including many Greenlandic boat captains of large vessels. There is a more developed maritime culture for historical reasons as well as some geographic and climatic advantages. Greenlanders are probably in a better position to participate sooner in more active physical management of the North Water.
Until this point, I think it would be fair to say that Canadian official interactions in the North Water have largely been icebreaker-based and mostly via research ships like the CCGS Amundsen, the Coast Guard vessel. One of the ways that co-management and regional participation might unfold is through greater involvement, regional and Inuit involvement, in the Coast Guard itself. I know there are conversations and steps being taken to open opportunities to northerners in the Coast Guard.
The Chair: Like the Coast Guard Auxiliary?
Mr. Debicki: For example, yes.
Of course, more can be done. While it’s true that our official efforts, research and monitoring of the North Water has been icebreaker-based, I don’t think it needs to be the case. Inuit have long travelled this ice arch between Ellesmere Island and northwest Greenland. They did it by dog team as recently as in the last few decades. Indeed, on Ellesmere Island there are many Greenlandic names for natural features that are known to the people of Qaanaaq because it’s there that until even within our lifetime they were hunting Musk Ox.
It’s our view that a good deal of this monitoring can be done using small boats and more traditional methods.
The Chair: Thank you. You both talked about the conservation economy. You mentioned the Baffinland project, which I believe was employing in the range of 900 to 1,000 people. You mentioned that they are still not doing so well in terms of Inuit employment.
What kinds of jobs would be created in the conservation economy? What would people do who work in connection with the marine protected area? What are these jobs? What volume would there be compared to mining companies that are potentially employing many hundreds of people?
Mr. Debicki: I wish to make clear, and perhaps I didn’t, that it’s certainly my view that this is not an either/or. This is not a conservation job versus a mining job question. There are 100 good North Baffin jobs at the Mary River Mine. Unfortunately, that’s about 12 per cent of the employment at the mine, and if you look at the quality of the jobs, even less. Agnico Eagle is probably in the range of 30 per cent; Voisey’s Bay is much higher.
What we’re seeing and when we look at the labour market analyses is there is a limit on those natural resource jobs in terms of the labour market as it exists in North Baffin, for example. More training has to occur. Massive investment in education and in making those jobs more culturally desirable has to happen. I think it probably will happen. Nevertheless, by the company’s own forecasting, they’re not going to be able to expand that labour market to be able to fill all of those jobs in the North.
That mine is proposing a 600-per-cent increase in output. That will exhaust that mine by 2035.
This is a mine on Inuit-owned land that was chosen by negotiators for its resource potential that should flow to the rights holders. We’re simply stating that if we recognize that you can’t fill all of those mining jobs with people from the region because the labour market just won’t allow for it, then if one expands that quickly, it necessarily means more 737s with Southerners flying up and coming in for two- to three-week stints and flying back down.
That isn’t a conservation economy by any imagination.
What I see for the conservation economy in terms of jobs — again, it’s not a replacement for those 100 good jobs at a very good mine. They’re jobs in monitoring and stewardship along the lines Sandra was describing. These are conservation jobs we would envision through such things as the Tallurutiup Imanga NMCA. These are jobs that fit very well with traditional practices, lifestyles and harvesting — a harvesting economy.
I’m not in a position to talk numbers, but again, it’s not a zero-sum game where we’re talking about limiting natural resource jobs in favour of conservation jobs. They can both coexist in a thriving economy.
The Chair: All right. Thank you very much.
That wraps up this interesting panel. I thank you both for being here. I know Ms. Inutiq journeyed from Iqaluit yesterday; we travelled on the same flight. It’s appreciated that you would both be here in person.
We are getting a lot done this morning.
I’m very pleased to now welcome our third panel. Appearing as individuals are Lotfollah Shafai, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Manitoba; and Jennifer Provencher, Liber Ero Post-Doctoral Fellow.
Dr. Shafai, I understand we’re going to begin with your opening remarks, followed by Ms. Provencher. You can expect some questions from the senators following that. Please go ahead.
Lotfollah (Lot) Shafai, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba, as an individual: Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come and talk to your committee. I am pleased to be here.
I have 15 years of research in Arctic remote sensing ice aboard the icebreaker Amundsen. I also have 40 years of experience doing research in communications, especially satellite communication; I’ve designed many components and helped my students establish successful businesses.
One of the items your committee is interested in is communication technology and its usefulness for economic development in the North and the environmental issues. I will concentrate on that.
The topic of my presentation is Leapfrogging the Canadian North to Build Wealth and Prosperity with Virtual Highways and e-Commerce.
Basically, it’s the Internet. I chose that topic just to encourage discussion.
Now, the picture on the right corner basically shows our team in the Arctic in front of an icebreaker, we took that one when Peter Mansbridge came to make a commentary for CBC.
The first few pages are common information about the North and isolation. I will skip that. I’m going to concentrate on the type of business that can make northern business global and not influenced by isolation and difficulty of the North.
Just to make a point, I have put on page 5 the challenge of the land connection in the North. That’s a picture of the rail connection to Churchill which was damaged in May 2017. It took 17 months to correct. That shows the challenge of physical connection in the North. If that’s the case, we can leapfrog and jump over this and use the communication technology and basically the radio wave, which is not restricted by roads and bridges.
Just to make a point that how the successful that can be, I am here providing two examples of a successful business that almost anybody knows. One is Amazon and the other is eBay. Amazon was established by Jeff Bezos, an unemployed engineer, in 1994 in his garage, and on his computer. He didn’t need start-up funds, he didn’t need roads and bridges. He selected business models where his warehouses and his clients were. By 2017, he was the wealthiest person in the world. Now he is worth more than $150 billion.
Now he established that in Seattle. He could have done it in Churchill, Inuvik or any other community in the North. The only thing he needed was reliable broadband access to Internet.
Now the second example is eBay, which is much more relevant for the North because it doesn’t require warehouses. It was established by a young foreign student in the U.S. at his computer in his room. He set up a website so they connect businesses to each other. He set it up in 1995. By 1998, three years later, he was a billionaire. Now he didn’t need start-up funds, roads or warehouses or any delivery network. He only needed his computer.
He could have launched it again in Churchill, Inuvik, Grise Fiord or anywhere in the North. The only thing he required was reliable connection to the Internet. Surveys have been done in the North and consensus is that communication infrastructure is not strong or reliable enough to set up a business like that. But that can be corrected very easily and at low cost with satellite communication. Now, I use satellite communication because it provides a connectivity anywhere in the North, in the mountains, in the communities, and because the population is small, it’s easy and low cost.
What is needed to leapfrog the business in the North is basically two small satellites to provide initial broadband connectivity to the North, develop the virtual highway, and then set up a broadband Internet access to make the business in the community’s global business. And set up distance education to provide this education on the business and the start-ups for the communities and youngsters, and set up a voluntary group to organize essentially setting up the Internet-based businesses.
Now, who will be the partners for this? Of course the leaders in the community up north are the ones that have to decide what type of business they like, and cultural and political issues.
The Government of Canada and the Canadian Space Agency are more or less tied together, because I have been talking about this issue with Canadian Space Agency for a number of years. They have looked and agreed this is a good idea. They have designed, built and tested these satellites. They actually exist. They didn’t have funding to launch them. If the government provides some funding, it will be launched and it will be local business.
The other partner could be the Department of National Defence. They have very similar requirements in the North. They can either join in or help in setting up such a network.
The next step will be to solicit some financial help from various sources to set up this distance education and business and recruit institutional help and the private sector to establish the businesses.
Now why do this? Why care? The region in the North is very large, but the population is small. However, they have done their share of establishing Canadian sovereignty in the North. In the South, we have access to basic communication services in looking at the next generation 5G communication, and they are part of the country. They deserve the same access to good communication. Thank you.
The Chair: Hear, hear. Thank you.
Jennifer Provencher, Liber Ero Post-Doctoral Fellow, as an individual: Good morning, my name is Jennifer Provencher, I am speaking to you today in my capacity as a Liber Ero postdoctoral fellow at Acadia University. It is a great honour and privilege to speak with you today. I have had the privilege of working in the Arctic since 2007 when I started my master’s working at the University of Victoria on a project under the latest International Polar Year project with Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Since this time, I have gone on to work with my team throughout the Arctic region and have led research projects with Indigenous and northern partners. In addition to holding a PhD in science, I also have a bachelor of education and have been active over the last 15 years in educational programs, both in the North and the South. The main goal of this work is that science is taught to students using a place-based approach so that they are interested in the ideas and can see themselves in the science. This work includes educational programs in Inuit Nunangat.
I have learned a great deal from working with elders and researchers that have mentored me over the years, as well as engaging non-traditional partners in science efforts to explore emerging issues of concern in the Arctic.
The focus of my work has included both education and wildlife health. I will provide two examples of the work that I have led with northern and southern partners since 2007.
The first theme from my work that I will touch upon is plastic pollution. As I stated a moment ago, I started work as a master’s student under the last International Polar Year. One of the projects that Canada supported was an examination of how the diet of Arctic sea birds has changed with the reduction of summer sea ice over the last 30 years.
In collaboration with Inuit harvesters, we collected thick-billed murres or akpa to look inside their stomachs and see what they had been eating, compare this to historical data and the extent of summer sea ice near the breeding colonies. While I examined the stomach contents, we found that the diet of the more southern colonies had shifted in relation to warm and climatic continues conditions. It was the small plastic bits I found in these stomachs and the concerns local hunters had about this pollution that has directed my research ever since.
Since this time, when I found little bits of plastic in the birds, I have gone on to work with a number of communities to assess the impacts of plastic pollution on sea birds in the Arctic, and beyond. This is based on opportunistic sampling, community collaboration and funding mostly from Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Northern Contaminants Program. I have also worked with international partners to make sure that the sea-bird stomachs we collect in Canada are processed in the same way to make sure we are in line with the modern standards being used in Europe.
After 10 years, we can see that while the levels of plastic pollution in the Arctic are relatively low, the sea birds and thus the food webs are vulnerable to plastic pollution. Based on our work in the Canadian Arctic with Indigenous communities, we are now working with the Arctic Council to monitor plastic ingestion across the Arctic region.
We have also expanded on this work based on discussions with northerners about plastic pollution in seabirds and in the environment. The first expansion of this work has been to examine how ingested plastic pollution may lead to the transfer of contaminants to animals.
In collaboration with hunters and other researchers, we have now expanded this work, looking at plastic ingestion and plastic-derived contaminants in char and ringed seals. These species are particularly important because they are harvested for food, as well as cultural importance.
Most recently, I have been leading some community-based work in Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, examining how birds with accumulated plastics in their stomachs are actually pooping out microplastics and how this may be concentrating microplastics in the environment around seabird colonies.
This work is done with community members who help determine where to look for plastics around the colonies, and where to look where they would not expect microplastics pooped out by the birds in the nearby environment. By using both Indigenous knowledge and science to study this emerging pollutant, the goal is to increase our understanding and thus inform policy as effectively and efficiently as possible.
In addition to this microplastic work, we have also carried out counting the nearby sea bird colonies in relation to the expansion of fisheries and their associated bycatch in nearby waters, and collections to assess the levels of oil-related contaminants in the region. These were all research areas that the community expressed interest in during our consultation and project planning phase.
Of particular note, given that research in the Canadian Arctic can be four to 10 times more expensive than the same work in Southern Canada, we always work to maximize the work that is being done and address as many questions as possible with our partners.
The second aspect of my work is a program that I have been involved in over the last 12 years at the Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Again, starting during the International Polar Year with large collections of seabirds with Inuit hunters, we partnered with the Environmental Technology Program to provide a hands-on learning experience for the students on an active research project.
Since this initial year, where we offered a workshop that was a few hours long and showed the students how to dissect a bird, it has morphed into a week-long Wildlife Contaminants Research Training Program that is part of the annual curriculum. This workshop has expanded to teach the students not only to dissect the wildlife but also prepare tissues for contaminant analysis, operate the machinery to detect contaminants or PCBs in the tissue, and how the results get used to inform policies.
I believe that this program, as well as others we do with students of all ages, are a critical aspect of science in the North in particular, as up to 41 per cent of the population is under the age of 20. While knowledge holders and elders are very important to engage in research, it is equally important to ensure opportunities for community members to be active participants in research programs.
While the wildlife contaminants workshop has been annually held since 2007, we still apply for year-to-year funding. It was first supported under the International Polar Year via Environment and Climate Change Canada. It then was supported by the Nasivvik centre, and since 2013 has been funded by the northern contaminants program under Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.
In summary, I continue to work in the Arctic in a number of ways, both in terms of research and science communication. I am involved in projects based in Canada, but also involved in several Arctic Council projects that involve collaborations throughout the Arctic Region, as I believe both local and global actions are important to the conservation of the Arctic.
I strive to continue to adapt my science to take into account emerging needs and the desires of Arctic residents, as I want to ensure that the work I am doing will positively influence the people, places and wildlife of the North.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Bovey: Thank you both, on two key topics that have been central to what we have been talking about.
Mr. Shafai, I want to say how much I enjoyed meeting with the engineering students at the University of Manitoba about 10 days ago. We had a lively time talking about the railway to Churchill and about connectivity to the North. Your very clear and simple examples of Amazon and eBay, and your bottom line: but he needed a good connectivity to the Internet. I appreciate what you have said about satellites and opportunities for satellite connections.
What do we, as a federal committee coming out in the next couple of months with a report for the government to, we hope, take action on many of these questions, need to recommend to make sure that our citizens in the Arctic have equal access to what those of us in the South have on a daily basis?
Mr. Shafai: The model that I am proposing is that an Internet-based business, it instantly makes it a global business. It’s not just in one city or one location; it becomes global. That’s importance of it, how it brings Northern Canada global.
Now, I mention satellites because the Canadian Space Agency actually has this program. They have designed, built and tested these satellites. They actually exist. They only need some money to launch them.
Without those satellites, there is no connectivity in the North, this type of business will never start, and no one will even think about it. Once you have the satellite up there, you just set up the broadband Internet service, then in no time, especially the younger generation, they will start using it.
To give you an example, a young person in Winnipeg has done this. She has basically a set up an Internet-based business. She has some products showing there. She has made an agreement with Amazon to deliver her products. When somebody connects to her website and orders a cup or t-shirts, Amazon receives that and, the next day, delivers it. The person doesn’t do anything, because everything is Web-based.
Anyone in the North can do this. The thing is, we need satellites and Internet connectivity. Then business will start.
I mentioned eBay because it was set up by a young student in his room. He only had one room and his computer. In three years, he became a billionaire. Why not in the North?
Senator Bovey: If everything exists, what is the cost to make it happen?
Mr. Shafai: I cannot give you the exact figure because these are small satellites. They already exist. The Canadian Space Agency has them. It’s just a matter of launching them. It depends on who launches it. The price could be between $2 million to maybe $20 million per program.
What your committee can do — and I’ll be happy to help out — is basically convince the government — one thing that they had, they cancelled it — to have the funding so the Canadian Space Agency can launch them. That’s all that is needed, you see.
Senator Bovey: On the basis that we’re all better off when we’re all better off, which is a statement I use a lot.
Ms. Provencher, I’ve been following your work, as you know. I was pleased to hear how you’re taking it, certainly in the last little bit. You talked about the place-based approach. I wonder if you can dig a little deeper into that for us so that our report can have substance on what you mean by “place-based approach” to the work you’re doing.
Ms. Provencher: The place-based approach, it comes from the education side of my brain. When we’re talking about place-based approaches, either in science or education, it’s about fitting something in so that people can see themselves.
I’ll unpack that a little bit. You can imagine textbooks about things like evolution or ecosystems. For a long time, the classic example for evolution was with moss in London and the bark of the tree changing. Even in lots of places in Canada, that didn’t resonate with people.
A lot of what we have tried to do is if we’re going to talk about adaptation of animals or education examples, we’re using Arctic themes and examples so people can actually see themselves, that this is not a distant or remote aspect of their lives.
I try to bring that into the science perspective from a plastics perspective. We know plastic pollution is a global problem. Many people are working on how we examine this in different ecosystems and monitor it over time. If we’re doing here, in Canada, are we doing it in the same way as they’re doing it in Europe so we can compare? There are a lot of people working on that, but the Arctic, as we know, is a unique place. As an example, there are litter surveys for beaches but what happens when there is ice on your beach for eight months of the year if not more? We tried to take these global questions like pollution and plastic pollution to work with the communities and Indigenous knowledge holders to try to understand how we do it here, in this place, so they can see themselves in that science and the results moving forward. We use the science to understand that we need to look at things like polymer types and different fabric sizes or fibres. We then use the Indigenous knowledge for where do we look for this, what are the times of year and where the eddies are going to show it up? I think of not only Indigenous science and knowledge but also all these different threads that come together as a fabric or a weave. There may be questions for which you do a weave that is woven together tightly from the beginning.
Specifically with plastics, I think of the weave as a loose weave, more like a give and go in sports. It was Indigenous hunters who were first finding plastics in their wildlife. They had that knowledge but they passed the ball a bit to science. They asked, “What does this mean? Where does it come from?” When we want to go back to monitoring systems, we can pass it back and work together. We’re like players working together. I think the place-based part of that is understanding what knowledge in science we can do in this place that the people themselves, old and young, can see in themselves and, thus, contribute and value the results that are coming out of it.
Senator Coyle: Thank you, Mr. Shafai and Ms. Provencher, for being with us here today. My question is for Ms. Provencher. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate your very straight to the point presentation and recommendation, Mr. Shafai, on the importance of broadband access to the future economic development of Canada’s North and Arctic in particular. I think of the idea of the leapfrog; that is, why make this economy go through the various steps that we’ve seen other southern economies go through. That doesn’t make sense in today’s day and age. I really appreciate your perspective.
Ms. Provencher, it’s nice to see you again. Thank you for a wonderful presentation also. It is fascinating, actually, that you are an educator by training as well as a scientist because —
The Chair: It takes one to know one.
Senator Coyle: Those are important traits. We have been talking on this committee with different witnesses on the issue of research, knowledge generation and the interweave, if you like, of Indigenous knowledge, scientific knowledge and research.
You raised, as we heard from some others, the importance of the transfer of that knowledge into education. You spoke about these programs through inserting them in the environmental technology program through Nunavut Arctic College. That’s an important part of that ecosystem of knowledge creation, transformation and dissemination.
Could you tell us a bit about the graduates, for instance, of that program? Where do they end up? What do they do with these skills and this expertise that they are gaining through your program and through others? What are the other sorts of entry points? You alluded to other entry points in the educational system for the kind of interface with the research that you’re doing and research techniques, et cetera. Could you speak about that?
Ms. Provencher: I will touch on the graduates from the environmental technology program at the Nunavut Arctic College. That program is now about 27 years old. We started our program about 12 years ago. It has a very good track record. We thought about this a few years ago as we were doing an evaluation. From my education perspective, I’m a firm believer in both science and education programs having an evaluation or a reflection to understand what to do better. We did this two years ago. I was enjoying listening to Sandra from QIA speak. Some of the graduates from that program are the Uattijiit that she spoke of, which is exciting to see.
We have graduates now working for Environment and Climate Change Canada, in the Iqaluit office; for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, also in the Iqaluit office; and graduates who have gone to consulting companies in both the North and the South. The biggest challenge I’ve heard from the main instructors of that program is poaching because the students are of such high calibre. I provide a one-week module in a two-year program, but the students often have jobs before the program is finished. My colleagues there work hard to ensure that those students finish their diplomas before they go on to take those jobs. The students are of extremely high quality because I think the college has found, in the ETP program, an excellent balance of, again, local knowledge holders, allowing the students to live in the North and participate as they need, combined with special attention to young women and parents. We teach our module over the week and on the weekend we try to offer students short-term employment on a Saturday or a Sunday so they can continue to come in and do dissections. It helps us because we can get our samples done, and it helps them because we pay them a fairly generous rate based on their training. In recent years, we have had young moms tell us they can’t come in on weekends. We welcomed them and their children. In fact, I have these wonderful pictures of young students, who are school age, helping mom and dad, being present in the building, making it an open space for all people to come in. I think those types of things have worked well for the program and allowed students to continue and therefore be successful. I think that’s an important aspect.
In terms of other avenues, there are a number of other programs that we do. Again, I do a lot of work funded by the Northern Contaminants Program. We have a history in Canada of not necessarily always getting our contaminants communication appropriate with Indigenous peoples. We work with a series of researchers, as well as traditional knowledge experts, to do community workshops. To name a few, we have one on ring seal Indigenous knowledge and science. We’ve done one on Resolute Bay, one in Sachs Harbour and we just had a successful one in Arviat this past year where we paired with the local conservation organization to provide a space for teachers, students, hunters and elders — anyone, really — to come in and interact with people one on one. There aren’t many PowerPoint presentations, but hands-on examples, tables and people in very informal environments where people can come in and talk to them. These are some of the conversations that are the most important because the researchers can both learn and listen. That’s a paradigm shift I’ve seen even in my 10 years. The older generations of researchers were very good at what they did but weren’t necessarily trained to listen.
As early researchers, we have learned and been trained a lot more, I think, to listen and take in multiple perspectives from all stakeholders.
We’re moving towards not having opportunities for one-way conversations, but increasing opportunities for multiple-way conversations and dialogue.
Senator Coyle: I’m very curious about your plastics research. It’s really disturbing to hear what you’re finding. I think the world is now aware of this issue.
I’m curious about what sorts of trends you might be finding over time and what you might attribute those trends to.
You’re an academic. What sort of relationship do you and your cohort of researchers in the plastics in the environment area have with government departments, with Inuit organizations, with environmental organizations? It would be good for us to understand that.
Ms. Provencher: The first question I will address is the trends information. Unfortunately, plastic sampling in Canada has been only opportunistic to this point. We can’t talk about trends because the data is patchy. I can talk about spatial trends. In Europe, they have been monitoring plastic pollution in sea birds as an indicator species since the 1980s. For my masters I went to Europe to learn what they were doing and would apply those same standards at every opportunity. What we know is that the highest level of plastic ingestion in sea birds — in the northern fulmar, or Fulmarus glacialis which is an indicator species they use in Europe, the highest levels we have are in Nova Scotia on Sable Island which is in the Gulf Stream on our southern borders.
Our second highest is on Vancouver Island, which people often find more shocking because they expect that one to be the biggest. Then we find lower levels in the North. We have a third site, Labrador Sea, with lower levels. Then near Resolute Bay and Prince Leopold Island has our lowest levels. Even the birds in the Northwest Passage have plastic in their stomachs. About 80 per cent of those birds have at least one piece of plastic in it.
It’s a pan-Canadian problem. We do sampling on all three coasts whenever possible. We’re moving forward on that by working with colleagues from Environment and Climate Change Canada on this file. We have put forth ideas of what a pan-Canadian plastic monitoring program could look like. There are options to use sea birds as monitors in the oceans and fresh water because plastic is not an ocean problem, it’s an aquatic problem. We have worked closely with our colleagues to consider this as Canada forms its policy and policy framework on plastics.
In terms of NGOs, I think there are a lot of people doing a lot of great work. At the beach cleanup phase of things there is excellent work.
The Vancouver Aquarium does the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, the Ocean Conservancy does the International Coastal Cleanup. That data is really important. As we move down the plastics spectrum into micro plastics, we work closely with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board and that board listed plastics as a priority this last year in all three of their regions in the North. At Acadia we partnered with the community of Qikiqtarjuaq to apply for funding from the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board. The funding went directly to the community, which then hired the local boat captains and helpers that worked collaboratively with us to do the environmental samples.
It’s complex in the North because of the funding. We did analysis a few years ago that the same work in the Arctic is four to 10 times more expensive than the exact same work we do in the South. We can do this because there are sea birds in the South and in the North. We have to bring a lot of players to the table to bring knowledge, but also to bring the funding and resources together.
We have a lot of history and really great relationships. We’re going back to Qikiqtarjuaq to report on our results in a couple of weeks. Those are great relationships. As we move into micro plastics, small plastic sizes, I think those relationships are still developing. When we’re talking about really small plastics, we’re all shedding those micro plastics right now. You have to be very particular and careful, you can’t have citizen scientists collecting for those micro or nano-plastics because you have to be completely covered up. You have to wear a specific colour so that when you find those fibres you can discount them. My lab has lots of pink Ziploc bags so if we find pink fibres we can discount them because they are not common in the environment. They’re very specific.
It is very interesting to work on science and Indigenous knowledge in plastics because there is not a lot of science on plastics or a lot of Indigenous knowledge on it. We’re working together to figure it out and understand it. The science is bringing in some of this chemical quantitative information and the Indigenous knowledge is bringing in where we’re finding it, what we are looking for and what is important for people to understand. There are great groups doing that, but because we’re exploring it together there are some caveats that need to come along with it as well.
Senator Coyle: Did you say it was four to 10 times more expensive to do the same type of research in the Arctic? Okay. That’s what I thought you said. Thank you.
Senator Eaton: Reading in your research, I’m currently leading a team that is undertaking the assessment of incidental bycatch levels in Northern fisheries in Canada, and the potential demographic and genetic impacts the fisheries may have on sea bird populations.
Importantly, this project is a priority under the Arctic Council’s Arctic Migratory Birds Initiative. Could you talk to us about that?
Ms. Provencher: The Arctic Migratory Birds Initiative was a project led when Canada was the chair on the working group on the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna.
We have led some initial assessments of bycatch —
Senator Eaton: What is bycatch?
Ms. Provencher: When you catch fish, which is your target fishery — when you order that fish on your plate it doesn’t come with a side of dead sea bird.
Senator Eaton: Not yet anyway.
Ms. Provencher: You order fish, they cast their nets and they are a target species.
Senator Eaton: This is big commercial fishing boats?
Ms. Provencher: It could be either. In this particular case it is commercial fishing. Bycatches, whatever your target is, that is your target, but you can catch other fish, which is your bycatch, but you can also catch sea birds, which would also be bycatch.
In the Baffin Bay, Davis Strait region, we have a fishery for Greenland halibut and shrimp and they have incidental bycatch of both fish and sea birds. The sea-bird component had never been addressed before. We didn’t know how much or if it was a problem. At the end of the day, we work with hunters. We’re not opposed to dead sea birds, but we want to know: Does it matter? If you take a few birds out it probably doesn’t have a population impact. My work is understanding that if we have these bycatch birds coming from the fisheries does it matter from a conservation perspective for the birds?
Senator Eaton: And how many per tonne you are taking in.
Ms. Provencher: Exactly. We have partnered with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and, most importantly, the Nunavut Fisheries Association on this work because they are going for Marine Stewardship Council sustainable certification for their fisheries to increase the economics of that fishery and the sustainable fisheries. They’re one of our key partners and we have applied with the Nunavut Fisheries Association for funding through a my tax grant to get a full-time PhD working on this for the next four years. We have tackled this question — are there birds being taken and does it matter — with the partners. The question we’re dedicated to is how do we best explore Nunavut’s fisheries in a sustainable way to make sure those ecosystems and fisheries are beneficial and available to the people?
Senator Eaton: We all saw the huge amounts of plastic crossing to the West Coast from the tsunami and the latest efforts in Southeast Asia and some of the islands to pick up plastic. Where does the plastic come from in the Northwest Passage?
Ms. Provencher: We have ideas, but we don’t necessarily have answers.
We know that it comes at least on ocean currents. We find nurdles — industrial pellets — in the birds in the Arctic. Considering that we don’t have shipping lanes for boats carrying nurdles — which are raw plastics — to enter through the Arctic and no plastic factories in the Arctic, we know those nurdles are being brought up by the ocean currents.
We also know that there are a lot of local sources of plastic. I’m involved in a few projects where we are assessing — we call it a plastic or garbage audit. We figure out how much plastic is washing up from the ocean versus coming down from land. We know that there are local sources and waste management in many remote communities, but in particular the Arctic, where there are no roads. It’s a challenge.
Senator Eaton: The Arctic itself could be putting plastic garbage into the water.
Ms. Provencher: Arctic communities are putting in plastic, but the proportion is the question. In the work that I do, we also know that migratory species are bringing plastics into the Arctic. We have migratory birds feeding in the garbage patches in the southern areas all winter, and then they fly to the North. I apologize, but we have looked at the poop of these birds, and the poop has plastics in it. They are pooping around the colony and are concentrating plastics as well.
There are many vectors. I would say there are both local and distant vectors of plastics to the Arctic.
Senator Eaton: Professor, if you had one question at Question Period to ask the leader of the government in the Senate or the Prime Minister about broadband, what would it be? Why aren’t you, sir, doing such an obvious thing?
Mr. Shafai: A troubling issue is that it seems, to me, the solution connecting the North to the rest of the world is so simple. We are ignoring them. I think that’s the problem.
I have spent a lot of time talking to my colleagues at the Canadian Space Agency and in industry, and they are all for it. Then suddenly we hear they want to spend money to send a man to the moon. What about our countrymen in the North? The same money can be spent.
Senator Eaton: The latest news on Google this morning is they want to spend $6.2 billion rebuilding the United Nations in Toronto. We could get a lot of broadband and do a lot up north with that.
Mr. Shafai: Basically, if something we discuss today becomes forgotten tomorrow, we really haven’t achieved anything. If we can have a mechanism that this can be brought to the public, the government up north or the industry people in the South, they can get together and say, “This is a simple problem. Why don’t we do it?” It’s low cost because the satellites exist. It’s just a matter of launching them.
Senator Bovey: Let’s say an answer came today that the money will be spent. How long will it take for the connection? How long will it take to give the people of the North what they deserve?
Mr. Shafai: Well, they have to book a time for launching. That could be a year. If they go to countries like India and China, it would be faster. There are political issues here that affect the timing.
If the satellite is there for the northern communities, there will be a lot of business there. They will establish these Internet services because the satellite will be available on the top of a mountain, in the tundra, in the communities, everywhere. It’s just a matter of having them there so people will say, “Okay. I want to use it.”
The main issue is let’s not make it a dead end and forget about it. Let’s have a mechanism so people can talk about it. Then it will happen.
Senator Bovey: When we were in the North last fall, this issue came up a great deal, which is why I raised it with the engineering students at the university last week. Thank you.
The Chair: Mr. Shafai, your presentation has most intrigued me. I will state the viewpoint I have heard, that satellite connectivity — by the way, that is the priority of the Government of Canada, the Connect to Innovate Program it’s called — depends on satellite broadband as a vehicle for expanding the Internet. But people say that putting money into satellites is a black hole, because you pay for the time, but you don’t get any permanent infrastructure, and the satellites have a limited lifetime. The way to go is fibre optics. It’s a longer term, higher quality, sustainable solution.
You’ve chosen satellites and made a compelling case. If it was a Canadian government satellite, the costs wouldn’t be so high for using that satellite.
Could you give us your thoughts on fibre-optic versus satellites, please?
Mr. Shafai: In this business, you don’t reject anything. There was a study done a few years ago by a company in Winnipeg to provide connectivity to Nunavut with the fibre optics. They’ve estimated in the order of $4 billion.
Now, if that’s there, there are a lot of environmental issues. The environmental people will say, “No, you cannot do that. You’re going to affect this or that.” It takes a long time to get the permit and spend so much money.
That may happen eventually. The satellite is very low-cost. It already exists. It’s a kind of let’s do it now, and that will give time for people to solve the issue of the broadband fibre optics. That may be the eventual solution, but it’s not tomorrow.
I will give an example of what happened after the Soviet Union. All these republics wanted to have broadband networks. The choice was put in fibre optics or wireless. One of my students had developed a broadband wireless system, and he could go the next day and put in an antenna and hardware and establish the network. It was almost an instant solution.
That’s what satellite provides, a quick solution. It may not be a permanent solution, but it is a quick solution. Let’s do it now instead of waiting 10 years down the line.
Several years ago, this study was done. They estimated $4 billion just for Nunavut. Today it might be $10 billion; tomorrow it might be $15 billion. We’re talking about something in the order of $100 million to launch the satellite and get going.
If it’s established there, people know the need, and they’re not going to go back. They will say, “I want a permanent solution.”
It’s really making the case, because it’s low-cost, fast and makes it as soon as possible. It has no environmental problems, because the waves don’t affect the ice, roads and bridges. You put up the satellite, and you make the connection.
The Chair: You say that the Canadian Space Agency has designed a satellite. Is the idea that a government-funded satellite program could cost the users less than a privately funded satellite such as we’re relying on now, particularly Telesat?
Mr. Shafai: The SARSAT does different things than provide Internet service. It’s only a remote-sensing satellite.
The Chair: Yes, but I mean the one you envision as the Canadian Space Agency satellite. It would be provided at a lower cost?
Mr. Shafai: The world communication Internet service?
The Chair: Yes.
Mr. Shafai: I am saying it is low-cost because they already exist. They have been designed, built, tested. It’s just a matter of launching them. If they had to start from scratch and design, build and test it, that would take time and money; but they have already done that. They just didn’t get the money to launch them. They said, well, the defence department is in on this; maybe the defence department should pay for it. It got lost between the departments.
The Chair: You have intrigued me, and probably us, with your comments on the readiness of the Canadian Space Agency to assist with this huge challenge that we have all heard about and reviving their polar satellite program. You have connections there with the Canadian Space Agency. Is there a person or a division to whom you would recommend the committee refer?
Mr. Shafai: I can actually recommend Guy Séguin, now retired from the space agency. He knows everybody at the space agency. He knows all the programs and he knows what happened. I can work with him because we are always in contact with each other and we know what is happening. That connection can be established. You can go to Montreal and see the space agency. Guy Séguin is in Montreal. He can help you with all the information you need.
The Chair: Thank you very much for that reference. Thank you, both, for a most stimulating, informative discussion.
(The committee adjourned.)