Thank you, ma'am.
I'm going to start by saying that I think you have tapped into one of the most important issues the United States is going to have to face, and that is personnel. There need to be some 4,000 people appointed politically to run the administration. The President has made a very slow start in getting those people named. Of those 4,000, some 500 require Senate confirmation, and that includes an ambassador to Ottawa. That is going to take time.
Let me add something further. The majority of the American civil service is of the baby boom generation nearing retirement. Many of them carried on through the Obama administration and are now beginning to think, well, there's a hiring freeze that might keep me in Washington a bit longer, but I'd like to retire. As they go, I think we're going to face a real loss of institutional memory.
Canada has invested heavily in good relationships with American officials that have lasted for 20 years and more. As those people retire, who will replace them? Many of the millennial generation of students, the kids of the baby boomers whom I have in class now, don't see a career in public service, or they see it as a brief career—stopping, for example, for four or five years to work for the State Department or USTR before they go to the private sector. This is going to change the way the U.S. deals with Canada, and it's going to make it very challenging for us to get going on negotiations.
The President has been very keen to focus on the symbolic gestures that the presidency can make by way of signalling to people his intentions. I think it's been a sort of hallmark of his leadership style, for better or for worse. In this case, his signals—draining the swamp, freezing the hiring of administration officials, cutting budgets dramatically—have sent all the wrong signals to our civil service, and it's going to make it very hard for us to get going on co-operation in all of the areas you mentioned. This is something that I think the United States will eventually realize, but we have a bad habit of ignoring a problem until it becomes too big, and then we overreact. Renewal of the civil service is one area we've ignored for a long time. We're now overreacting, and it's going to be a bit of a mess.