The Centre for the North was established in 2009. It's a five-year initiative. That's the mandate of the centre. The Conference Board of Canada is a not-for-profit, independent institution. Everything the Conference Board of Canada does needs to be funded. It has no endowments, and it has no government funding.

When we do big initiatives such as this one—we also have a centre for food and we have other centres—we basically put together a group of investors, because the research needs to be funded. When it comes to Canada's north, who are the main stakeholders? That's the first question you need to ask yourself. We have what I would consider around our table, around our centre, the only balanced matrix of dialogue in Canada on northern issues.

So what does that mean? We have the federal government represented, so of course we have CanNor and AANDC; we have the Privy Council Office, HRSDC, Health Canada, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and PHAC. We have all the provincial and territorial governments that have northern jurisdictions. So of course it wouldn't be P.E.I. It wouldn't be Nova Scotia. But it would be Labrador or Quebec. It would be Ontario. You can carry on from there.

We have industry at the table, so we have mining companies. We have GE Canada. We have Cisco. We have people from private industry and a lot of the banks investing in this initiative through corporate social responsibility measures. We have academia at the table—Greg Poelzer, who is unfortunately not able to be here today, is a very close friend of mine. He and I are writing a report at the moment with Ken Coates and researchers that he has at his disposal on the role of the public sector in northern governance. We are able to do that only because we formed those partnerships with academia. We have people who are experts in the field, and we have those types of networks do the research. I might fund it, but they go out and they do it.

We have aboriginal organizations, for obvious reasons, at the table. I just had the Assembly of First Nations join, so I have all three national aboriginal organizations at the table. We have the Métis National Council, ITK, and the Assembly of First Nations. On top of that, we have a number of the regional first nations organizations at the table. In Saskatchewan, we have the Prince Albert Grand Council, etc.

We have not-for-profits, including the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Having this body of 50 members come together really creates an interesting dialogue on northern issues in Canada. I would like to have more members at the table, but I'm always looking for a good fit. Not everybody pays. First Air is a member of the centre, and they will give me free tickets, so I can go wherever they fly—to Nunavut very often. There are other in-kind contributors as well as cash contributors. So I have about $1 million a year to pay my staff and do the research I do.

To me, it's extremely important that the Conference Board of Canada, as a convener in this space—as neither government nor industry nor anything else—can actually come forward, in a balanced way, and, based of course on data that we collect, put the types of things out there that nobody else is able to put out there.

Is that carrying over into my next question?

Transcript

Discussions (0)