Well, it's interesting. I know that our colleagues at the Canadian Council of Chief Executives are acting as the sort of secretariat within the North American Competitiveness Council that's been created. Having talked with them, they put on the table two issues on the Canadian side, which they reached independently from us, but I think they're right. They pointed to two things on which we have to make progress. One is on non-tariff barriers, which I find insidious. It's quite remarkable how subtle a barrier can be in the design of a regulation or a regulatory process that can keep Canadian businesses out of the United States and vice versa. With non-tariff barriers, it's a swamp, though, I'll tell you, when you get in there, trying to identify what particular things you can touch to make change, and it becomes extremely difficult.
The beauty of the world where protection was provided by tariffs is that it was transparent. You could see the price. You could see you were paying 12% more or 300% more for a particular good, and that was the barrier. But now that we've more or less done away with the tariffs—and they still exist, but they're fairly low for the most part—we're starting to discover really how insidious non-tariff barriers are and how hard it's going to be to actually fix that. So that's the one thing.
The other is the border, and making the border work. We have not invested adequately in the infrastructure at the border, really defined the security systems, or made for easy passage of both goods and people to get across the border. We're doing a study right now with the Conference Board in a centre we've created on trade and international investment, trying to examine wait times at the border pre- and post-9/11, and how businesses had to adapt to that. We'll be publishing that probably sometime this spring. I don't know the results yet, because we're still in the midst of doing it, but my suspicion is that there are all sorts of subtle costs that have been passed back to business on both sides of the border that have really made the trading relationship much more difficult.
So our advice, and it's through our report, is that significantly more investment is required in hard infrastructure, in alignment of security systems, and raising the IQ of the border, making the border a whole lot smarter. Otherwise, we've put yet another barrier in the way to attracting investment to Canada to serve the North American market and making it that much harder for our businesses to compete within North America.