Project Partners and Steering Committee

Welcome to our Interactive Mapping Tool

Objective

Our project will enable strategic short to long-term public, private, and Indigenous investment in green, connected, smart, and climate resilient multi-user and multipurpose infrastructure in the Canadian North. The interactive, visual, and data driven mapping tool will be the first comprehensive tool that helps consolidate and understand what exists currently, short-term needs, and accompanying data required government and private investors. It will identify and enable planning and investment in strategic multipurpose social, economic, and defence infrastructure including economic potential for the Canadian North in key sectors (critical minerals, tourism, fisheries, mining, telecommunications, defence, energy, innovation, blue economy), a roadmap for 2050 (transcending individual election cycles), and investor potential (i.e., multiple projects, pipelines of projects, project templates for replication).

Beginnings

The first Steering Committee Meeting took place 2020. That meeting was built on several years of ongoing discussions, which initially led to the birth of Arctic360 and its Inaugural Annual Conference in 2017. The focus of the Conference then and at the core of Arctic360’s work today is on finding ways to attract private capital investment to Canada’s North and to create public-private-Indigenous equity partnerships to build the North’s much needed infrastructure.

It was in this pursuit that the Interactive Mapping Project was conceived. The Steering committee (which includes those who led the charge in Arctic360’s origins) is comprised of Northerners, Indigenous Northerners, leading Northern Industry, financial institutions, among others, including those Arctic360.

Since its inception, the North’s social, economic, and defence infrastructure needs have grown such that we know investments must be strategic include multi-purpose/multiuser infrastructure solutions.

Today the project is a collaboration with ConvergX® Global Solutions Foundation. ConvergX fosters Canadian competitiveness by accelerating the adaption and adoption of industrial technologies across all major sectors, including and especially aerospace, defence, security, energy, agriculture, construction, mining, health and biotech, ICT and manufacturing.

February 2024 DND Supported Workshop

Thanks to the Department of National Defence Arctic360 and ConvergX hosted a Pre-Conference workshop to update the project plans, bring in new partners, and discuss seeking additional public and private funders that would like to partner and help co-develop the mapping tool.

To learn more and/get involved please contact us. We would love to hear from you!

“We need a comprehensive inventory of existing critical infrastructure with potential multi-use purposes [and] its state of repair/disrepair… We need a vision, so we need to have a sense of where we want to go… Defence-related investments should be complemented by…” “a really fulsome infrastructure investment strategy that pulls in the private sector, from the mines to the investors, the northern and federal governments, and of course our Indigenous communities and peoples, who want to be part of that.”

Dr. Jessica Shadian followed by Madeleine Redfern in (April 2023) ‘A Secure And Sovereign Arctic’, Report by Parliamentary Affairs Standing Committee on National Defence