That's a very good point. We're moving a little bit out of the manufacturing world into the hospitality and tourism world, and in a way, there's a perfect storm brewing: there's the western hemisphere travel initiative; there's also maybe a flu pandemic; and there are fuel prices. Can you imagine? We tend to look at these policies in isolation. We tend to look at the flu pandemic and prepare for that. The WHTI, let's prepare for that. And, oh, we have fuel prices. On these we go to different committees talking about three different things, when actually, if all these elements came together, they could be disastrous.
How should we handle the WHTI? There are two approaches. One approach you would have noticed Premier Charest taking yesterday, or the day before, when he was down visiting some northern state congressmen and senators, who were saying, we should stop this thing. We tend to think that's not the approach that should be taken, because we wouldn't like it if people came up here and told us how we should do our policies, and, quite frankly, the Americans aren't going to listen to us. All we're doing is reinforcing the fact that Canada doesn't care about security. I think we have to accept that this initiative is coming. What we want to see, as quickly as possible, is an understanding of what the rules of the game are going to be—and they're not developed yet.
The problem is the delay. If you talk to the tourism community, they're concerned about the travel initiative and what documents are going to be in place, but right now they're losing business because of the uncertainty. And if we drag this out two, three, or four years and play rope-a-dope, we'll have three to four more years of uncertainty. Already, they're losing up to $1 billion to $2 billion in lost convention and hotel business because of the uncertainty and visitors' view that, “I don't know what the rules are going to be and I'm not going to go to Canada”. That's their own estimate.
So I think the problem is going to be with the details of implementation, and I'm pretty convinced that they're going to have to delay it, because they're not prepared to implement it. They're going to run into problems, but for us to say, stop it, I think we're just causing ourselves problems.