I have something to say on both, but I'll save you time, Tony.
The WHTI is a big hit on our industry, as you have heard. We're anticipating to lose, in North America—travel between Canada and the United States—$2.5 billion before the law even takes effect. It's already had an effect on bookings, conventions, and meetings across Canada, because nobody is going to book a convention in Las Vegas when they don't know what the law of the land will be. It's not only passports; it's other secure documents. They've still not been defined. So there's a lot of confusion out there right now. Some 33% of Americans believe they need a passport to enter Canada. Well, that's wrong on a number of fronts: it's not to enter Canada, it's to go home, and it hasn't started yet. So you understand, there's a whole bunch of issues there.
There is a solution. The solution is we have to communicate to Americans that Canada has something to offer. We need to promote, because other countries are stepping up their marketing effort in the United States, and we're falling behind, as I said in my remarks. It is going to hurt us badly; it's going to hurt us in the long term. We need to off-set that with increased promotion. It will take effect.... The update for you, Mr. McCallum, is that the passports will become law, and other secure documents. They're on a track, and they will put this into effect. We can't tell the Americans not to do this, unfortunately; it's going to become law. It's going to become a new reality at our border.
When you were speaking, I was anticipating questions. I had written down two things: WHTI, which is the western hemisphere travel initiative in passports, and China and ADS status. Those are two issues that are global in nature, impacting our trade with those foreign countries.
When we had a beef dispute, the federal government stepped up and tried for many years to resolve the BSE problem with beef. We had a softwood lumber dispute. We stepped up and we negotiated softwood lumber. Tourism is bigger than those two industries combined, and we've done nothing on China ADS. In 1997, Australia became the first country in the world to get China ADS. Now, if we got China ADS today, we'd be 80th in the world to get China ADS status. It represents 100,000 Chinese to us now; it grew by 17% last year, to 117,000. But it could mean half a million, which is 500,000, if we had China ADS.
So there are those two issues. We need increased investment, and more attention on the China ADS, such as softwood lumber and BSE got.