We would certainly take the position that no country should be exempt. The same concerns that we are highlighting with respect to the Canada-U.S. relationship we would have with respect to the Luxembourg-Belgium relationship. The fact that this may be how Belgium and Luxembourg decide to handle their ratification—which we would say is in violation of the spirit of the treaty, the scope of the treaty, and the non-discriminatory provisions of the treaty—does not in any way justify that we, too, should follow in that path and similarly limit the scope of the treaty in terms of how we are implementing it.
I would also argue that the United States, as a global arms power, is hardly comparable to Belgium. Canada is hardly comparable to Luxembourg. Not that this makes a difference—the fact that we are talking about a hugely different scale, nature, and severity of weaponry—but it is a background factor.
It has to be universal. With a country like the United States, whether or not the United States had some good approaches last year or some excellent approaches five years ago, who knows what their approaches will be three months from now, a year from now, or two years from now. The reason we need firm, clear, predictable, binding law around this is that the world changes. Other governments change. Three years from now, it could be disastrous in terms of how the U.S. is handling its arms transfers. We would probably say it's near disastrous right now, but it could get even worse. If we have set up a legislative framework that's not going to apply to that context, then we've started off on the wrong foot.