Again, that's an excellent and complicated question. I believe this should be a really prominent focus for us in the coming year, because I do believe that this thickening of the border, which is a term the Americans don't like, has not been particularly healthy.
Our research shows that there will be sizeable portions of both the American public and the Canadian public who are simply not going to travel as a consequence of WHTI. It's more focused on those people who are not particularly affluent, on people who are going to be crossing the border in their vehicles. With air travel, the effects largely have already been dealt with and 95% of people got their passports.
The numbers would be very, very large in terms of the economic consequences of people who would have travelled but aren't going to do so now because of this.
My optimistic scenario is that in terms of sheer risk analysis, there are better ways to deal with this with less economic cost, and there might be some receptivity to that, given some of the shift in both the public mood in the United States and the administration as well.
There are also other interesting ideas that we see emerging from some of the research that we've been doing on security and borders. For example, Canadians and Americans both seem to favour a shift to using electronic technology, information technology, as a method for reducing the intrusiveness and costs, time, and inconvenience of the border. If they acknowledge that this stuff is a necessary evil, then there is a sense that perhaps it could be dealt with, that rather than being patted down or asked to take off your belt and remove your shoes, maybe there would be technologies. In an ideal world we find that Canadians in growing numbers support the notion of a national identity card with a biometric. It sounds like something that would be very scary. In fact, we find the vast majority of Canadians now say that would be a good idea. I found as well when I polled the United States, which supposedly would be completely allergic to national identity, given their libertarian traditions, that a slim but significant majority of Americans would support a national identity card.
Ideally, in Canadians' best world, they would have a system of virtual passports that would be triggered by facial biometrics, and bad guys would be ferreted out by machines, and I wouldn't have to be annoyed by the nuisance of all the bells and removing my shoes and so forth. I think there's reason to believe that in the absence of achieving the more obvious goal of trying to soften or eliminate some of the WHTI initiatives, progress on the technology front will help to at least provide a more manageable and convenient world. There is growing resistance in consumers.
The other interesting area is that Canadians would like the idea of a unified approach to managing security so they would go along with the idea of a North American no-fly list. They don't like the idea of an American no-fly list being imposed, particularly in travelling in Canada, but they would be in fact supportive of one that was managed jointly. This is an area where Canadians and Americans would support shared approaches to dealing with the intelligence information. The solutions for Canadians more and more lie in the merger of intelligence and technology.
