Evidence of meeting #91 for Science and Research in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was north.
A video is available from Parliament.
12:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Arctic360
—I would say, is that we have a lot going on, but we have no way to figure out what we have and what we're doing, in order to make it actually purposeful.
12:50 p.m.
Bloc
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas Bloc Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
That's great.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on a quote from the chief science adviser's report. Here it is: “For Canada to reach its potential, there is a need for better coordination among all the component organizations that support or participate in northern research and a need for greater involvement by local Indigenous populations in the North.”
As far as you know, did the government respond to that? Did it develop a national strategy?
12:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Arctic360
Absolutely. If you've been in the Arctic space as an academic researcher, you co-develop. I mean, you just do. You have to. That's where the good science and production of knowledge come about. There's so much collaboration.
Nicholas, you were talking about indigenous knowledge and western science. You know, when you ask the right research questions together, they complement one another. I think we do really well at that. We have new knowledge, but it needs to be strategic. That new knowledge is producing information for the more applied sciences. Those applied sciences are—should be, absolutely have to be and will be—co-produced with.... This is for housing technologies, infrastructure technologies and energy technologies. These are things we could be leading the world on, and they're things northerners want and need.
There's every reason this should be collaborative. Therefore, we need more partnerships in engineering, architecture, economics and business finance—the whole gamut that was discussed earlier. I don't understand why we don't have more indigenous people in the north who have finance degrees or start-up companies of their own. Is it because we don't have the universities?
It goes back and forth. It's all over the place.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
That's our time. Thank you so much.
For the final question, we turn to MP Cannings for two and a half minutes.
June 6th, 2024 / 12:55 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you.
I'm going to continue with Dr. Shadian.
I want to start off with a little reality check in terms of comparing the Canadian Arctic with the rest of the Arctic, especially in Europe. I appreciate your experience in northern Norway. Yes, Tromsø is on the same latitude as Tuktoyaktuk, but that township has a population of over 60,000. That's twice the size of all of Nunavut in one town, and 20 times the size of Inuvik. It's also much warmer. It has a climate more like Prince Rupert. I'm putting a pin on comparing them. The challenges we have in the Canadian Arctic, I think, are much bigger and vaster. Why would we test EVs in Inuvik when we could do it in Edmonton or Saskatoon in the same conditions?
I really appreciate your mention of housing, because I think that's a critical part of the challenges we have in the Arctic and where we could be leaders. I'm wondering if you could spend the rest of this time on housing—what we should be doing to research housing and build it in the north.
12:55 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Arctic360
Again, it's a bigger holistic picture.
Well, first of all, we don't have a lot of people living in the north, because we can't even house the people who do live there now. We need new technologies for housing, and this goes back to bringing the best and brightest people together—which includes northerners, of course—and figuring out what an appropriate house is, how it should be built and how we are building to ensure that it is resilient to permafrost and cold weather. These technologies should then be scaled out, because climate change is going on everywhere, and there's cold weather in other places besides the Arctic.
I have to ask, though, because our north is so big, why isn't that also an opportunity? We have a massive coastline. We have opportunities to be taking advantage of and making the best out of our north. Our northerners want to have secure, safe, happy and successful lives there.
Over 40% of our landmass is our north, so I have a hard time with writing it off as different, hard and difficult. I feel there's a lot of opportunity, and people in the north want those opportunities. We just need to have some sort of national will, and we have to start somewhere. We need houses, but how are we going to have more houses if we don't have energy or water? So—
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Thank you. That is our time. I'm sorry. There's never enough time.
I do want to thank both of the witnesses, Dr. Brunet and Dr. Shadian, for their testimonies and participation in the committee's study of science and research in Canada's Arctic in relation to climate change. If you do have any additional comments or documents you want to submit, please feel free to submit that to the clerk.
Is it the will of the committee to adjourn our meeting today?
12:55 p.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal