Thank you very much. I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak on science and research needs in Canada's Arctic and in relation to climate change in particular.

I'm the executive director of the Arctic Institute of North America, a role I've held for 10 years. The Arctic Institute was established at the first session of the 20th Parliament via Bill H., an act to incorporate the Arctic Institute of North America, which was passed by the Senate of Canada on November 1, 1945. Our institute has a long history of studying change in the north.

I'm also a full professor at the University of Calgary, with my personal research focused on climate change impacts, human and environmental history in the Arctic and ways to improve Arctic observation for societal benefit. In addition, I represent the Arctic Institute as the head of delegation to the Arctic Council, where the institute holds non-state observer status.

I'm very pleased to be speaking to you today from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

As we've heard from Dr. Vincent and Dr. Kutz, climate change is having a profound impact across the Arctic. Changes in phenomena such as temperature, sea ice dynamics, precipitation and others are having cascading effects through the ecosystems to people and to the wider global system. Changes to the cryosphere—snow, sea ice, river ice, lake ice, permafrost—are unprecedented and present significant challenges to adaptation and sustaining civic infrastructure and supporting people, fisheries and wildlife. For example, as the glaciers thin and retreat, regional hydrology is impacted by freshwater flow to streams, rivers and lakes potentially resulting in dramatic lowering of lake levels or drying of streams, or alternatively rapid melt of glaciers leading to flooding and landslides.

In the case of the Greenland ice sheet, during the melt season we're seeing increasingly vast quantities of fresh water discharged into the marine environment, contributing not only to sea level rise in regions far removed from Greenland, but also leading to the freshening of the North Atlantic Ocean, with not yet well understood impacts on marine productivity, the marine food web and the carbon cycle. The consequences are too many to enumerate here, but suffice to say that research infrastructure, investments and capacity can help us to ameliorate impacts in Canada and to better understand present change and the trajectory of change going forward, and most importantly, inform solutions to adaptation and mitigation.

Over the past 60 years, Canada has made significant, but sometimes sporadic, investments in Arctic research infrastructure. We have many small facilities across the north that are operated by universities, the northern colleges, northern research institutes, indigenous organizations and communities. We also have a patchwork of federal and territorial facilities. All of these facilities serve one or more functions in support of research on land and in the coastal areas, and we have research vessels that facilitate marine science and community-based research programs and monitoring activities. There are Arctic researchers, I would venture to guess, in nearly every institution of higher learning in our country and in many federal and territorial departments and indigenous organizations. There are indigenous-led programs and established indigenous strategies on research and the management of indigenous data and information. Our research relationships with northern and indigenous people, including support for self-determination research, is slowly improving, and Canada is leading the way among Arctic countries in this area.

On the surface, then, we—Canada—seem well-equipped as a nation to provide scientific leadership for the Arctic and to understand and tackle climate change and the consequences of climate change going forward, along with leading across a whole range of other forms of scientific inquiry.

Individuals and coalitions of partners can drive important initiatives like the Arctic pulse initiative, which Dr. Jackie Dawson brought to the attention of this committee earlier, and the Canadian Consortium for Arctic Data, which is an ongoing movement to build interoperability across Arctic data centres in the country. Individuals can and do build collaborations with our colleagues across sectors and cultures to improve Arctic observation, such as this understanding of muskox and population dynamics that Dr. Kutz talked about.

However, these individual and coalition efforts are necessary, but not sufficient for pushing research where it needs to go and for leveraging our research infrastructures to best effect. For that, Canada needs a national plan that clearly identifies our science priorities—and I would include indigenous priorities for research here, obviously. This plan also needs to have an implementation strategy so that it can be realized. It needs to be developed with all parties at the table—indigenous, academic, territorial, provincial, federal, relevant NGOs and others. Also, they need to be at the table in sufficient numbers to reflect the diversity of expertise and experience across the community of Arctic researchers.

Canada—