Canada Economic Club touts “World Arctic Forum” this fall in Toronto

This photo decorates the new website of a Toronto-based group called the “World Arctic Forum,” which plans to hold a big conference on Arctic business and other issues this November.

A new international group called the World Arctic Forum, which calls itself “the voice of business in the Arctic” says it will bring together business, political leaders and non-governmental organizations from North America, Europe and Asia this November in Toronto “to explore the sustainable development of Arctic opportunities.”

From Nov. 16 to Nov. 18 the forum expects to attract 200 hundred participants to five-star hotel in downtown Toronto to meet and exchange with leading North American, European and Asian political and business leaders, says its new bilingual website whose banner reads “Canada is taking action to unlock the North’s true potential.”

Participants will also have “direct interaction with Arctic Council members.”

But the World Arctic Forum is not an Arctic Council-sponsored group and has no connection with the Arctic Council.

And the World Arctic Forum is not the forum promoted by Leona Aglukkaq, Canada’s minister responsible for the Arctic Council, and Patrick Borbey, the chair of the Arctic Council’s senior Arctic officials and president of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency.

Borbey said in a recent interview the Arctic Council planned to launch its forum early in 2014 at the Northern Lights trade show in Ottawa.

But the World Arctic forum’s founding president and chief executive officer, former MP Patrick C. Gagnon, told Nunatsiaq News “we’re not in the trade show business.” Gagnon is now a managing partner with The Parliamentary Group Inc., an Ottawa-based lobby firm.

The two circumpolar business forums are “two different animals,” Gagnon said.

The June 6 announcement that the World Arctic Forum was setting up shop in Toronto and planning for a big November conference in the city came June 6, the day after Leona Aglukkaq, spoke at the Economic Club of Canada in Ottawa about the business-like bent of the Arctic Council under the Canadian chairmanship and the council’s plans to set up a a circumpolar business forum.

But, unlike the circumpolar business forum touted by Aglukkaq and Borbey, the World Arctic Forum is “a private initiative,” which was in the planning way before Canada took over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council in Kiruna, Sweden, Gagnon said.

Gagnon said his forum endorses aims of the Arctic Council: “we look at ourselves as complementary, but we’re strictly the business sector.”

Gagnon said the recently-established Arctic Circle is closer to the Arctic Council in its goals than the World Arctic Forum, which will be “less government and more business.”

The forum’s November conference in Toronto will be coordinated by the Economic Club of Canada, a non-profit, non-partisan speaker’s forum.

“We want to bring together academia, stakeholders, businesspeople in Toronto to discuss a coherent and sustainable development of the North,” Gagnon said. “We’re there to talk policy and there will be an advocacy role that will spring out of this.”

The forum’s website says any “business in the Arctic requires significant cooperation among multiple stakeholders on environmental, aboriginal and security issues.”

So the forum wants to see leaders in the private and public sectors ”from around the world to better understand the mutual interests, opportunities and risks in the sustainable economic development of the Arctic. “

“The World Arctic Forum promotes responsible commercial activity in the region that will be of benefit to all,” its website states.

Its executive committee is headed by former ambassador David Berger, also a former MP and special advisor on small business to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Its advisory committee includes Dr. John English, a longtime Arctic researcher, and Senator Charlie Watt.

Ontario’s Liberal finance minister Charles Sousa applauded the establishment of the international body in Canada’s financial capital.

“Doing business in the Arctic requires significant cooperation among multiple stakeholders on environmental, aboriginal and security issues,” Sousa said.

“The World Arctic Forum intends to brings together leaders in the private and public sectors from around the world to better understand the mutual interests, opportunities and risks in the sustainable economic development of the Arctic.”