Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Strickland, Mr. Dias, Mr. DiCaro, Mr. Neumann and Ms. Gingrich, thank you for being here. I really do appreciate it.
Mr. Dias, I'm very interested in talking to you in a second about purchasing, but before we do that, I have a question about buy America for Mr. Neumann and Mr. Strickland.
I was listening to a lot of what you said, and I completely agree that we're very much aligned with the Biden administration. We have in common a lot of values and environmental and labour standards, etc., and we have allies in Congress on those issues in terms of finding a way, I think, to work with the Americans to look at what we do well and where we can find common ground to create that type of North American framework.
As you mentioned in terms of the Trump administration, Trump won in 2016 by convincing a lot of people in labour, a lot of blue-collar people, that free trade with Canada and the world was bad. Instead of trying to correct that impression, it seems to me that the Biden administration and a lot of politicians in the U.S. seem to believe that it's better to just go along and reinforce that theory and to just show that they're even better than Trump at buy American. I looked at the statements of the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, which saluted Biden when he went ahead with the buy America policies.
Could you just give me an idea of what you're finding when you're talking to your American counterparts in your unions as to what they're seeing on the floor of Congress, and whether or not they really believe that there is a way to educate the American lawmakers so that we actually would get such an exemption? Or should we turn toward a Canadian strategy, as Mr. Dias was suggesting? I know that's a long-winded question, but if you could just speak to that, I'd like to know.