Thank you, Madam Chair.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak with the committee today and present some perspectives from a northern educational institution. I work for Aurora College, the public community college of the Northwest Territories, and we thank you for including our perspectives in these discussions.

As you have been hearing through these sessions, the north has always generated a tremendous amount of research interest, and it continues to attract increasing research attention, particularly with the significant changes resulting from climate change and the disproportionately high impacts on northern and Arctic ecosystems and people. However, historically, northern residents have not been resourced to lead the science and research in the region, with the majority of this work in the Northwest Territories being led by researchers located outside of the region, typically positioned in federal government departments and universities across southern Canada. National research funds for science and infrastructure are mainly accessible to university researchers and federal government scientists. Without a university in the Northwest Territories to anchor these funds, northern communities and organizations have been largely excluded, creating a sense of inequity.

When I first began working in the Northwest Territories 25 years ago, much time was spent advocating for northern research priorities since funds were inaccessible to residents of the territory and this prevented the region from establishing and maintaining research capacity in the north.

Although much Northwest Territories research has made significant contributions to science and is valuable nationally, regionally and internationally, there remains a disconnect between the large-scale Arctic science and regional research concerns and priorities. Times have certainly changed while I've been working in the NWT, and there are many new national and regional initiatives to empower and strengthen both indigenous and northern research leadership and capacity building. However, this gap in research leadership and access to resources persists in the Northwest Territories.

As the public college of the Northwest Territories, Aurora College has research staff on all of its campuses, and it maintained minimal in-house research capacity until the last decade, when the institution became eligible to access tri-agency funds. Since then, the research capacity has really started to grow and realize the opportunity to develop applied, community-partnered research programs that benefit northern communities and focus on Northwest Territories questions.

We have also been able to anchor access to research funds for our indigenous and regional partners and to increase collaborative engagements with universities, allowing the region to access new funds, mentorships and partnerships.

Aurora College is currently transforming into a polytechnic university, and part of this vision is to expand on this applied-research focus. Access to the national research funds has positioned the college in a meaningful role for the region and has opened new funding opportunities to support and expand northern research and research leadership.

From an infrastructure perspective, Aurora College operates the Western Arctic Research Centre, which is a purpose-built research centre in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. This facility is the logistics hub for research across the western Arctic. It serves the community, the college and the external research community, which includes over 300 regional, national and international researchers annually.

However, there is no other research infrastructure like this at the college or in the territory, and there's a desperate need for a similar shared research infrastructure to support research activities across the southern and central Northwest Territories, most notably at the Yellowknife campus. The absence of infrastructure of this type presents a barrier to research programs and research partnership development for the college and the northern research community beyond the college.

In terms of collaboration, the Northwest Territories does have a research licensing process to review, track and monitor regional research activity. This process is intended to mitigate the risk of harm from research and to promote best practices and communication between researchers and northern residents. Unfortunately, the act is antiquated and insufficient to ensure that researchers engage with northern and indigenous residents to develop meaningful collaborations and research relationships.

More robust mechanisms are required to ensure that northern people are appropriately engaged in ways that lead to meaningful research collaborations, that generate community benefits, that appropriately share knowledge, that respect indigenous self-determination in research and that build northern research capacity.

In saying that, we are seeing increasing examples of opportunities to empower northern research leadership through northern reviews of research, engagement of advisory boards, meaningful investment in capacity development and strong, demonstrated research collaborations. Still, there remains significant room for improvement to grow northern research capacity meaningfully.

I thank you for allowing me to speak with you today, and I welcome all questions to help support the work of the standing committee.

Thank you.