Certainly. Thank you.
Well, there is no formal mechanism for Canadian participation, but there are loads of informal contacts, and this is one of them, in a way. Our delegation here has a whole range of discussions with the Canadian authorities on these issues, as do the countries concerned bilaterally. I am in constant contact with your ambassador in Brussels on these issues and we have been for many years.
It's not an overnight phenomenon, that you join the European Union and the following day you get reciprocity from the rest of the world. That's not the world we live in. We know that. Getting from A to B, or from A to Z, from where we are to the final destination, requires discussion and contacts and taking into account your concerns and our concerns. It is a process.
There are, on our side, various benchmarks, which can be helpful, I think, in your assessment of our situation. First of all, before a country joins the European Union, it goes through years of often agonizing legislation, decisions, assessment, peer reviews, reports, tests, and by the time the country joins the European Union you can be absolutely sure that it is a fully fledged democracy operating under the rule of law, market economy, and it meets the high standards of protection of fundamental rights. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a member of the European Union. It's as simple as that. Also, you can be sure it has a properly functioning administration capable of administering the rules that the European Union brings to it, which are not simple, and are sometimes excessively complicated. So that is true.
The second thing, of immediate relevance to this issue, is it has to have document security and produce passports in accordance with agreed European rules on biometric identifiers, which are, I think, in the vanguard of all that you and we and others are doing to make sure that our documents are 100% safe, using the best of modern technologies so that they can't be falsified, and you really are who you say you are. It's not just a question of a signature and a photograph, but we're going to use fingerprints and digital photographs. Some of our passports have them in already, and by the summer they all will. We'll do this not only to meet what our friends down the road from here in Washington want us to do; I always say that we would do this anyway, even if the United States didn't oblige us to. If the United States didn't exist, I often say, and if King George were still sitting on his throne in Washington, we would still be doing it. Why? Because it's the best application of modern technology to the identity documents that we need.
Most of us, until recently, had the same sorts of passports as our parents and grandparents had. You had a photograph and a signature. Well, that's not very foolproof, and we know that. In the dangerous world in which we live, we couldn't put up with that any more.