Let me make the case very quickly. When we use the terms “bank” and “infrastructure”, people automatically go to financing, but the term “bank” is used more in the sense of the Inter-American Development Bank or the World Bank. The bank has a financing function, but it also has an intelligence function and a political function.
I'll make the case for the bank first in terms of financing. The U.S. highway trust fund is broke. I think everyone here is familiar with what happened with the Detroit-Windsor bridge and how badly the Americans cleaned us out on that. That's an issue we're facing across the northern border. The United States simply don't have the money. It's not a financing problem on our side; it's a financing problem on the American side, and we can help them.
On information, we talk about integrated supply and production chains in North America. I've yet to see evidence of this. If you go to any of the trade blocs—the Pacific Alliance, the Asians, the EU—they have information about how they make products together, how they ship, where the critical links in the infrastructure are in these banks. We don't. It's a huge, huge competitive advantage. What's worse, we finance a lot of these other banks. We finance the Inter-American Development Bank. We finance the Asian banks. We're financing our competitors to have this information, and we don't even have it here in North America. The bank would solve this problem.
At the political end, it also would create a permanent structure staffed by Americans, with administration appointees, beavering away quietly in the background on the second most important aspect of North American competitiveness, which is our ability to make products together and to move goods together. It would solve those three issues.
It could work two ways: it could fund things only along the border, a set limit from the border, or it could fund the entire critical chain, all the assets linked to moving products from Canada down through Mexico and back and forth. It would require a great deal of research, which we don't have, to identify how these supply chains work, where the critical links are, and to set up the criteria for how this would work.
What we've created are some ideas of how this could work, and we leave the specifics to the negotiations. I would just add that now is the time to do this. The Americans are talking about ramping up infrastructure. They need help along the northern border, and we can step up. It's not just money. It's our superior credit rating that would also help the Americans. We can also help deal with security issues and other things. When the Americans step up on infrastructure, I think we have a response for them. If they're going to do what they did to us with Detroit-Windsor, we might as well get some regulation and order into the process. If that's going to be the future of our co-operative endeavours to build infrastructure together, let's bring some sanity, some predictability, and some intelligence to it.