Thank you for the question.
One of the ways to explain that is to take a look at the five states that I am responsible for. Canada is the number one customer for all of those five states. In other words, we buy more from these states than the other three buyers combined—Japan, China, and France and the European Union. We are extraordinarily important to these states, because about 70% of the stuff we send down to the United States also ends up as inputs into American products. We are very closely integrated.
I think the challenge for Canada is to continue to talk to American legislators of either party and say that we have become so integrated trying to separate that would be not only hugely costly and almost impossible to do from a regulatory point of view but also dumb, quite frankly, because it would hurt both Canada and the United States.
We're entering into an era now—and this is what I often say—when the route for the Americans to achieve their goals and what they want to do runs right through Canada, and for Canada to achieve our goals, our road runs through the United States.
It is no longer a question of “buy America” or “buy Canada”; it should be “buy North America”. We have to be thinking in terms of resilient supply chains. We have to be thinking in terms of the next time the world gets knocked down by a pandemic or a war. When all of these things are possible, we need to have supply chains that can be accessed within a couple of hours, because we're literally just up the road. We have in Canada the materials that are so necessary for the next phase of the global economy. We're in a terrific position in this country. It's a question of seizing the opportunities that are there, and that is really the bulk of our work, regardless of the outcome of the American election.