That's an absolutely great question. It's a question that I think gets to the very heart of how our two nations need to address a continental, if not a regional—two thirds of the continent—problem or challenge. Yes, we have made tremendous progress over the years—certainly since 9/11—in cooperation and information sharing. ITAC and NCTC both work very closely. You are exactly right. This is that complicated interaction between terrorist information, intelligence, law enforcement information, and relationships between our largest trading partner.
How do we make that all work? I would suggest to you—I'm going to be a little bit cynical here and probably predicate it on only a marginal amount of fact. I would be surprised if we were to say our processes, while evolving, are all predicated on how we protected against rum runners coming across the border during Prohibition. I'm not sure I want to spend a lot of time on bona fide commercial traffic going across the border, so I'm with you. For the legitimate traveller and businessperson, we need to work to solve those relationships. The problem is, we have to have absolute transparency and understanding and the ability to control our borders from the exterior.
I would venture to say the typical resident of Ottawa and the typical resident of Washington, D.C., are not the threat coming across the border. What we have to do is make sure we have the right application of technology and processes that allow us to verify that truck coming from DuPont into Canada contains the materials that are on the bill of lading and that it's driven by a driver who has correct identification. Whatever we can do to make that easy, whether it be RFI technology, biometric technology, as well as sound, protected processes within our individual nations....
I personally believe we should work to the best of our ability to eliminate as many of the controls as possible across the northern border of my country and the southern border of yours, but that means we have to get a number of other things right first. I am not worried about the typical inhabitants of Ottawa. I am worried about people who come up illegally through my country, either to gain access to my country, or to potentially gain access to your country, or people coming in from the north or other points of entry into your country and then trying to come across an unprotected border to the north of mine.
We have to make sure we have the processes and correct interaction between agencies. Again, this gets back to the—intelligence always took place in another part of the world. Now it's law enforcement. I would venture to say—