Over the process of the last four to five years, Canada has actually played a very efficient role as an honest broker in the WTO accession negotiations between Russia and other states. Canada has been recognized as playing that role, and Russia's quite grateful for it.
There remain some big hurdles, and they're big blocks. They require a certain amount of popular movement within Russia. They are changes that, frankly, the president is not prepared to make at this stage, and he is not going to be making them before the presidential elections next year. I may be wrong—I've been wrong many times before—but I see the presidential elections next year as the decision-making fulcrum. The elections are a done deal, but at the same time there doesn't want to be any risk of popular concern that certain big Russian industries may be threatened by the WTO.
That said, on a legislative basis, the Russians have made immense amounts of enabling legislation for the WTO--they've just been pumping it through the system in the last couple of years--and they've done an awful lot of the domestic tidying-up that needed to be done, leaving key issues out there that essentially become political decisions, as opposed to administrative issues related to WTO.
Once the political will is there and the political agreement is there, implementation of accession can be extremely rapid, but I think we missed an opportunity—we collectively, the WTO and Russia—to close it last year. I think if it had been done last year, it would have been sufficiently far ahead of the presidential elections for it not to have a risk of tarnish. I think, though, that now it's going to be difficult before 2008.