Hon. Dennis Glen Patterson: Honourable senators, one of the many tragedies that have resulted from this terrible war in Ukraine has been the loss of cooperation between our country and Russia.

I harken back to the years when delegations from Northwest Territories went to Yakutsk, Chukokta and other Arctic regions, visited and exchanged information and insights into Arctic challenges, being well supported by the circumpolar division of then-Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada. We agreed in those exchanges that we are two great Arctic nations. Though our Arctic coast is longer than the Atlantic and Pacific coasts combined, Russia’s is longer.

We have common problems that only we understand and have struggled to address. We learned from the Russians how to build better ice roads and ice bridges in the Arctic. We visited their permafrost institutes and learned that you can use kerosene instead of expensive chemicals to insulate thermal piles in the permafrost. We can learn from their small modular reactors which are powering towns and their fleets of icebreakers.

One of our then-Northwest Territories companies, Ferguson Simek Clark, led by Stefan Simek, built an airport and an entire village in Yakutia, which was modelled after what our Russian visitors had seen in Dene communities along the Mackenzie Valley built by the Government of the Northwest Territories. There were also rich cultural exchanges between the Indigenous peoples of the Soviet and Canadian Arctic fostered by the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

More importantly, there was solid Arctic cooperation on important issues relating to climate change, search and rescue, circumpolar health and economic development through the Arctic Council, a Canadian creation. All this has been lost in the megalomania of a madman who seeks to restore Russia’s greatness on the backs of the innocent people of Ukraine.

How sad that this peaceful cooperation, cultivated by Russia’s enlightened former president Mikhail Gorbachev, has been put on hold by the actions of an evil man I call “Vlad the Impaler.” Let us hope he can be stopped and we can someday reconnect with our circumpolar friends in the Russian North.

Thank you.