I think that has to be avoided. It's a very important question. What was effective in the relationship between Secretary Shultz and me in fact was the structure that had been put in place, and to give credit where it is due, I inherited the structure. It was put in place by Secretary Shultz and Allan MacEachen when he was minister, but we both made it work. It had the following advantage. A Canadian foreign minister can't avoid being preoccupied with events in the United States, but a United States Secretary of State has to work very hard to pay any attention to Canada. Those regular meetings every quarter meant that there was a period of time when the Secretary of State of the U.S. had to put everything else aside and focus on details, often very precise details, about Canada, and it meant we were constantly getting very high attention.
The office that dealt with the Americas had a lot of Canadian experts in it when I was fortunate enough to be minister. Later, the experts tended to come from elsewhere in the Americas, so there was, on a structural level, a decline in the frequency and the quality, I would say, of the consultation. I think if there were some opportunity to rebuild that kind of structure, it should be seized upon, and I would think it's the sort of thing one would want to act on early to cause the American administration to pick it up as a good idea. It survived personalities; it wasn't personality-dependent. It worked with MacEachen and Shultz, me and Shultz, me and Baker, other ministers and other American counterparts. If that's not the mechanism--and it might not fit current times--something like it should be found.