Thank you, Chair; and thank you, witnesses. I feel that I should just pour you a cup of coffee. It's like we're sitting here having coffee as we used to do in the good old days.
Scotty, you're ahead of me.
The first thing I want to do is thank the Governor of North Dakota. He made a gesture of goodwill this week in offering to vaccinate our truck drivers who cross the border back and forth. He's going to vaccinate truck drivers out of Manitoba and North Dakota. That's a good example of a good neighbour. What a great neighbour to do that for us. We're struggling here to get enough vaccines in the arms of our essential workers and our population, and to see him do this is just a really good gesture.
I wish now we could take that gesture and just build upon it. I know we talked about the last negotiations on the USMCA. One of the opportunities lost was to build that North American empire where Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were working together, taking our efficiencies and our knowledge and putting it together and taking on the world. We missed a lot of that, and now with buy America, it seems as though we're going to miss it again.
Ms. Greenwood, one thing you talked about that I thought we did fairly well in the CUSMA negotiations is that we spent a lot of time educating our American colleagues on the importance of the relationship. In COVID times, we can't do it like we did before.
Mr. Doer did it right. He engaged the labour force in the U.S. and did it that way.
Have you seen Canada doing that, at this point in time, and how effective is that?