There are obviously a lot of Europeans with friends and family in Canada. It's true in Quebec and it's true elsewhere too. Europeans travel to Canada, Canadians travel to Europe, and we have many ties between us. Those who have to get a visa have to pay for it. It's not an enormous sum of money, but for some of our poorer countries and some of the poorer people in them, it's still a burden. While I understand that you can't have consulates and embassies absolutely everywhere, if you don't happen to have one in your country you're in real trouble, particularly if you're called to an interview. You just have to go there physically.
I mentioned Estonia and Poland, because just this morning somebody told us the anecdote about an Estonian who had to go all the way to Warsaw for a 30-second interview, essentially, to get the visa, and got the visa, but had to pay the trip to Warsaw and back, with the delay and so on.
Now, that's fine. If you require a visa, it's because you want to interview people; it's because you don't trust the citizens of that country as much as you trust the citizens of other countries. What we are saying is that we think the relations between the democratic nations of the European Union and democratic Canada are such today--in the new Europe, the new world in which we live--that we should have sufficient trust in each other.
One of the differences--and I've discussed this with the Americans down the road and with your administration here--is that in the United States there is an act of Congress that sets out a whole set of criteria, and they say that once you've met these you join. We've argued with them about whether they're applying them properly, whether the criteria are fair and so on. In this country there is not a legislative set of criteria.
We understand from the Canadian administration that there is a risk assessment applied to a country, and I respect that. Again, I'd like to have reciprocity overnight, but we're not going to get that; we haven't got it. We live in the real world. So the Canadian administration looks at each country and says, what risk am I taking if I allow the citizens of this country to enter Canada without a visa? Our submission is that for our countries the risk is a minimal one, just as we think the risk is a minimal one in allowing Canadians to visit our countries without visas.