You might be interested to know that currently a study is being conducted by the University at Buffalo looking at the issue of how the border is impacting, or potentially impacting, investment decisions. Within, I guess, the last couple of years, the university has conducted the study to try to get a sense of the cost of the delays at the border, the additional security requirements, and so on, and how that was impacting Canadian companies vis-à-vis American companies. Not surprisingly, they found that it was an issue of much greater concern to Canadians. The cost to Canadians was higher than the cost to American companies.
What they're doing now is they're going back and interviewing some of the same companies they interviewed a few years ago to find out how they've adapted to those additional costs. Have they, for example, established distribution facilities on the U.S. side of the border in order to avoid delays and so on?
So that's something that will probably be coming out in the next little while that may be of interest to you.
Just to give you some anecdotal evidence, I was speaking recently with one of our members involved in the food and agricultural sector. They were finding that because of the nature of their product, they were subject to FDA inspections of their product going into the United States. Samples were taken of their product, and the samples were then tested. But because of the delays in terms of getting the test results, they found that their product was spoiling at the border, and they had to re-ship it. As a result of all that, they actually bought a facility in the United States so that they wouldn't have to deal with the border.
It's difficult to know how many Canadian companies have made similar decisions. Certainly other companies have found other ways to address the issues at the border and adjust their practices and so on. Still, I think it might be interesting for the committee to look at how the border is impacting Canadian investment decisions, or investment decisions vis-à-vis investment coming into Canada.