I'll use the example of Australia because I think there are some parallels, although there are others I could draw on, but they're the same distance away, the same kind of economy, and so on. I'm not sure what their trade figures were, but they were significantly more than ours. In their approach, there was probably a minister coming through the UAE on a weekly basis, I would say--certainly a trade committee such as your own, or a minister of trade on a semi-annual, or even quarterly basis. I won't say they were in the face of the UAE because they were often there for other reasons, sometimes just in transit to Europe, but it showed a government and business commitment that I think allowed them to leverage enormously.
We have a lot of things at play. Obviously, our operations in Afghanistan are very significant, but a lot of the purchasing we do is done in Dubai. When we responded to the tragedy in Pakistan, we did our purchasing in Dubai. We've been able to leverage some of that, for example, to bring in Canadian meat and food products simply because we had the power of the Canadian military to place these orders.
The interesting thing--and I'm going on too long, and I apologize, Mr. Chairman--in these countries, certainly in Yemen, but also in the UAE and others, is if we're not in the very central core of it, we're in the second ring. You may have Britain, the United States, the European Union, and France in that core, but around the second ring you have Canada. You don't find that in very many places, yet we do not act as though we're in that core position. We just simply don't have that presence. It's an anomaly.