Thank you.
I believe there is. First of all, with the Americans, it depends very much on what happens next November. As has been pointed out, we don't know what's going to turn up in the White House a year from now, and some of the prospects are quite frightening. As we like to say, the Americans aren't always right, but they're always right there, and we have to manage that. We have to deal with that.
I thought the current government took a wise approach with Trump number one by deploying as many resources as we could to other levels of government—governors and members of the Senate and the House of Representatives—to make sure that Canada's presence was felt and our views were known, without having to confront the man himself. I thought that was an effective strategy. It assisted in softening up the position of the administration in the negotiation of the renewed North American Free Trade Agreement. I think that kind of artful approach, where you pick your spots and you deploy your resources laterally, is a good one.
With respect to China, obviously we have to take steps to thaw before we can actually start to relate to one another. I've always felt that health—health care, public health—is a very good point of entry. I spent almost five years as Canada's minister of health. During that period, I established an annual meeting between the Canadian and the Chinese health ministries. We found that we had an enormous amount in common. They admired our public health care system. The single payer is, for them, the most effective way of deploying health for 1.3 billion people.
Furthermore, they're interested in our model of community care. When I was president of the University of Ottawa, our medical school was chosen to open a medical school at the University of Shanghai—Jiao Tong. They took our curriculum. They sent their professors to our campus to learn how to teach it. They took it home and opened a medical school in Shanghai with our MD curriculum, because they want four-year MDs to practise community care and family practice.
I think that kind of relationship based on common interests in health, something which is a very positive and important subject, can help open the doors, get people to relax and thaw the environment and the atmosphere so that we can make progress on bigger items. I think there are ways we can do it.