I understand the word “politics”, Mr. Rae. I understand it entirely, but there are two separate issues here. So it may go on as a basket, but you raise a lot of questions that are important, questions in which history is important to us.
We went through these agonizing decisions 40-plus years ago, when it came to issues surrounding Canada's capacity to maintain its own private- or public-owned defence industrial capacity. The decision made then, the famous Avro Arrow decision, and that was followed by others, was that Canada cannot afford to do it, as it does not have the market to sustain it; that Canadian industry can only sustain by access to foreign markets; and that the key access for Canada, as a function of geostrategic interests, simply location, common values, cultures, and the business community was the American market. With questions of access and maintaining access to the market, numerous agreements were reached between Washington and Ottawa that facilitated this close working relationship, which was highly integrated. That gave Canadian firms access to the American market with constraints, which gave American firms prime access to the Canadian market with constraints that we put on them. So it was never a free trade arrangement. It always was a managed trade arrangement, and that has been fairly successful.
Are there new issues that the relationship faces? Of course there are, and the central one is the issue of ITARs when it comes to this question. It seems to me that if we're going to look at the past and what that record is, relative to the current issues of where we're going in the future, we have to ask ourselves very simply whether the Government of Canada, Parliament, the people of Canada, are willing to invest the massive amount of capital for this one critical capability, sustain it, make it dependent on Canada, and probably undermine its ability to access foreign markets because of the dynamic of the international marketplace when it comes to these things. How much are we going to invest? How long are we going to invest before the government comes to the conclusion, which happened 40 years ago, that in fact this is not a wise investment of national capital?
I think we have to be concerned in terms of recognizing that the public-private partnership has been successful up to now, and the question in my mind becomes: why do we think this is suddenly going to change? That seems to be the critical issue that no one wants to answer.
So that's my perspective on it.