Science and Research Committee on June 6th, 2024

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you to both witnesses.

I'm going to continue with Dr. Brunet.

You talked about capacity in the north and a situation that we see throughout a lot of rural Canada—not just in the north, but it's especially acute in the north—in the capacity do work, especially science and research.

This committee did a study a few months ago on citizen science, which uses the talents, enthusiasm and, in some cases, the direction of local people who are not trained scientists but are doing projects that were scientifically designed by trained scientists. The data was gathered in a proper way and analyzed.

I'm wondering if that model could be used, combined with having small institutes across the Arctic that could be service centres for this, which would help us get around that capacity issue.

What are your thoughts on that?

[Nicolas Brunet]

The concept of citizen science is one that's definitely not easily applicable in the Arctic. Even the term “citizen” is a bit fraught in these contexts.

The problem with the model of citizen science.... Citizen science goes from folks like myself, who might be looking at blue jays in the backyard and not knowing anything about ornithology, to people who could be experts in that area.

Within the indigenous context, it sort of undervalues the idea of indigenous knowledge and that level of expertise, which is multi-generational. I'm sure you've heard of indigenous knowledge over the last few weeks. It tends to have some form of resistance.

I would say that within indigenous communities, there are people who are known experts who have the knowledge, can contribute to these types of projects and are already engaged in science tremendously. In fact, those are some of the people who are kind of burning out because of our demands on their time—our increasing demands on their time—because we're talking about these things now and they are important, so we are drawing on those experts.

I work with youth a lot—Inuit youth—and we are trying to develop these types of programs. We're trying to value their knowledge. There's the fact that they have a foot in a more Western perspective. They use cellphones and they're very tech savvy.

We're trying to find ways to apply that sort of model. We tend to call it community-led monitoring or community-based monitoring programs. I do work a lot with DFO and ECCC to establish that capacity from the ground up, mostly with youth.

Yes, it's good model, but maybe it could be a different name within this context.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I totally appreciate that slant. It's an important one. Thank you for bringing that up.

I'm wondering how we can build up that capacity without burning out the few people who have that capacity right now.

It's an issue I encountered—

[Nicolas Brunet]

I agree. It's a big one.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I spent my previous life working with indigenous communities in the south. I've encountered that same exact issue.

How do we support those communities and carry out the research that they want to see carried out and that's important to them and their lives without overtaxing them? How can the federal government help?

[Nicolas Brunet]

I think it comes back what the other witness said here, that communities are heterogeneous. The wants and desires of communities, quote-unquote, are difficult to understand. I tend to work with certain leadership groups to understand that. I tend to talk to people. That's kind of what I do, right? I talk to people about what they want in research. These are exactly the kinds of things I do.

Once you have established that, you have a whole bunch of different things, as I'm doing right now, around what you need to do good research in town. I have an active research project right now around research infrastructure in communities and what that means. One of them, as I said earlier, is community space. There's nowhere to do anything. I work in Pond Inlet, for instance, which is a relatively big hamlet in Nunavut. There's an Environment Canada research station that's pretty small, and there's no real physical space for community research to happen.

That's the point I was trying to drive home earlier. We tend to think of Arctic research as being outside, on the land, but what about writing grants? What about analyzing data? What about lab space for communities?

Some are doing it. They are partnering with Université Laval, for instance, and we talked earlier about the Centre d'études nordiques. These are places that are building research stations actively and trying to establish good partnerships in designing those. I do think that will really help.

As I said earlier, I think the idea would be to have something more than Arctic College. It's wonderful, but there are not very many people there in Iqaluit. Having a degree-granting university in Nunavut would be tremendous, because people could train there instead of coming south. I have had a few students and colleagues in Nunavut try to come south to do a degree, and it often didn't lead to any good outcome for them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you, Dr. Brunet.

[Nicolas Brunet]

I will stop there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

I'm afraid that's our time. Thank you.

Now we will turn to our second round of questions. Kicking that off will be MP Lobb, for five minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thanks very much, Madam Chair.

I appreciate the comments from both our witnesses who are here this hour.

Professor Shadian, I noticed in your bio that you state that you spent 20 years living and working throughout the Nordic and North American Arctic as a researcher, professor and consultant. I don't mean any offence to any of the other witnesses who have appeared through all of the very many meetings we've had on this topic, but few can say that they have lived and worked and researched in the area for 20 years.

Do you have any thoughts on the advantage that gives? Also, is that something that we should be looking at more? Is it feasible?

[Dr. Jessica M. Shadian]

I want to clarify. I have been doing Arctic research, and as an Arctic researcher for 20 years, I have lived in the Arctic for six of those, let's say. I wanted to be clear on that, because I don't live in the north right now.

I think that spending time in the north is absolutely necessary to have any sort of perception, understanding, context or appreciation. If you want to do research there or focus on there, let's say in Canada, Canadians should go to our own north. For me personally, though, living in the north in Norway gave me so much of a contrast between living at 72° north there and what our 72° north looks like in terms of prosperity, economic development and people's quality of life. That has given me a lot of insight. Why is it we think that everything's so impossible here, that it's just too cold, and we can't do anything? I think there's a problem with a national will and these ideas about the north. When I lived there, I had amazing Internet connectivity. I could be in a tunnel or over a bridge, and it didn't matter; I was still talking on the phone.

If you want to be doing research in the north, absolutely, you need to spend time there, and not just two weeks—fly in, fly out, and that type of thing—and on the ground.

I also think we need more opportunities. This goes back to having institutions, full academic institutions, in the north. We need more opportunities for people who do research of all sorts to go and want to do research in the north and be able to stay there and live there.

I was approached by a professor of mechanical engineering at U of T, who wanted to be part of this last call with this NordForsk-led international joint initiative for sustainable development of the Arctic. He's part of this advanced coating technology centre. He approached me and said that he knew that we do innovation in and out of the Arctic and that our executive team is 54% indigenous. He wanted to know if we'd be interested. I said, “This is interesting”. He thought they had this technology that could work for the north, even though his partners are in Norway and in Finland. I said, “Well, I don't know. We don't know. Let's make a research project around learning what's needed in the north.” It's about infrastructure and this cold-weather technology that could be applied to infrastructure.

I thought we would partner with an indigenous group in the north, Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated, because they're trying to build a road. I thought that this would be a nice merger of the two, because they can learn from one another about what kind of technologies and road infrastructure needs there are, and what their technology does. Who knows what the outcome of that collaboration would be? For some reason, Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated was not eligible for the co-PI, the co-principal investigator, on this partnership, so we didn't. There was no application put forward.

Yes, you have to be in the north, you have to go to the north, and you have to spend time, but it shouldn't be like going to the moon. We should be able to go to the north, do research and be an academic there.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Do I have any time left here?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

You have 30 seconds.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Just to build on that, where I am in southwestern Ontario, I think sometimes people from Toronto think it's like going to the moon where I am. The point is that Bruce Power nuclear plant is a nuclear plant in my riding. The CEO, Mike Rencheck, mandated that anybody who wanted to do business with Bruce Power for their multi-billion-dollar refurbishment project had to set up an office in Bruce, Grey or Huron counties and establish a workforce there if they wanted to do business.

During the last meeting, we had Warwick Vincent talking about 40 different organizations doing research in the Arctic. It's a problem, but we have to have these organizations setting up and making commitments in infrastructure and human resources to continue on with this, because there is a gap here.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much.

We'll now turn to MP Chen for five minutes.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing before the committee today.

To Mr. Brunet, it sounds very promising that infrastructure is improving in the north. You mentioned now being able to get on a Zoom call, whereas having a phone connection in the past was challenging.

With respect to big research, which requires not only infrastructure and meaningful Inuit collaboration but also time, you've led multi-year projects in the north. How did the pandemic impact the progress of multi-year research?

[Nicolas Brunet]

That's a wonderful question.

I actually received a grant a couple of years ago to study how the pandemic influenced research and research innovation in the north during the pandemic, because we couldn't go any more. It's been a really interesting adventure, I'd say, in research, because we have this bizarre natural experiment that happened where suddenly.... I know that my federal colleagues, for instance, flat out couldn't go for almost a year and a half or so. At one point, I had a colleague at Environment Canada. I went to the research station because he hadn't been there in so long—and he was running it—and I had a bit more flexibility to go up.

I'd say that, regrettably, I didn't find that a lot of these multi-year research programs were able to keep going as normal while the southern folks were not there. I do think, though—and this comes back to leadership in the north—that some programs were able to keep going. I think this comes back to what Dr. Shadian said earlier around having the remote sensing type of equipment. Some of this equipment kept running and data could be collected. The ones that were the most successful had people actually collecting and looking at data locally as well. They were trained and had that capacity within towns.

I'm thinking that I'm going to talk about one that you may have heard about, which is called SmartICE. SmartICE has become a kind of a social enterprise now. They've got operators in a bunch of different.... I don't know the number, but I'd say that in Inuit Nunangat as a whole and in I think Nunatsiavut and Nunavut at least, in the eastern Canadian Arctic and moving west, those programs did fine. They didn't need us to come up north any more.

That's sort of my endgame, perhaps: to research myself out of a job and to really to build that. It took many years to build those partnerships and build in that training element to have that level of independence.

There are shining examples of this that we can look at for solutions.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

Speaking of building partnerships, you said in your testimony earlier that local engagement has increased only slightly and that there are few—or negligible—Arctic-led studies. In coming out of the pandemic, I suspect that it would be an opportunity to further the goals of enabling Inuit self-determination, which you have talked about, and incorporating indigenous knowledge in the work that researchers do, as well as building capacity within Inuit communities to lead or govern northern research.

Has there been progress made, in coming out of a situation of multi-year projects being impacted, to re-envision how work is done up in the north?

[Nicolas Brunet]

I think the quick answer is that I don't know yet what the output of the pandemic specifically has been.

The work I've done was to use published outputs, which may seem funny; obviously, it's a flawed tool, but it's a tool to try to measure that level of engagement and how meaningful it has been. The rationale was to look at various different factors in research articles to understand how engagement has changed since the sixties. I could send you this instead of talking about it, but...that work up to 2020 ended. I haven't really looked at what the implications will be or are of the last four or five years or so, since the pandemic started, on those trends.

I'd say that the type of huge increase that we think we're going to see in engagement is a reflection of the fact that Arctic science is huge. It's vast. There's so much work being done. We tend to hear a lot about the work that's amazing, that's community led, community engaged—whatever—and we like to talk about it as academics, so sometimes we forget that about 99% of the research doesn't do that, and that's a lot of what this work tried to shine a light on.

I'll stop there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you. If you do want to send that additional information you referred to, we would appreciate it.

[Nicolas Brunet]

I will, absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That would be great.

Now we're going to turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ms. Shadian, I really appreciated your opening remarks, which were quite informative. Thanks to your global expertise, we can compare ourselves to other countries and see how we can improve northern research in Canada. In her most recent report, Canada's chief science adviser reviewed the polar continental shelf program and said that Canada was not a leader in northern research. However, given that 40% of Canada's landmass is considered Arctic, Canada should aspire to be a leader.

In practical terms, what are other countries doing better? How can Canada learn from them?

[Dr. Jessica M. Shadian]

I think it comes back to our need to have an Arctic strategy. Within that is where the science component comes in.

I think I've listened to every session for this study. We have amazing researchers in this country. I've learned so much just by listening. They've made massive contributions.

However, what I've also heard—and it's what I absolutely believe—is that while all of these people are doing all this amazing stuff, it's all over the place. We're not ever saying, “Here are the four goals we are going to do as Canada, and we'll be the best in the world at that” so that everything somehow feeds into that. The research, then, could be realized and acknowledged. It would come together and have strategic purpose. That's what I was saying. It's the intersection between new knowledge and applied science. We have the ability to take in all of what's going on and gear it towards a purpose. It's in the applied research that you have very obvious outcomes.

I think the bigger issue—

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Sorry to interrupt, Ms. Shadian, but I have to—