Well, you don't do it on the basis of an incremental approach that puts civil servants together to talk about the problems they're experiencing. That does some good, but it really isn't going to change the fundamentals. In order to change the fundamentals, you have to capture imagination in Washington. In order to capture imagination in Washington, you have to have a big initiative.
The nature of the U.S. decision-making process, where power is widely dispersed and there are a lot of people who have a role in it, is that you must think big. If you have a big initiative, you can get Americans excited about it and move the agenda forward. We did that with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement; the Mexicans did it with the NAFTA. There have been similar kinds of initiatives in earlier eras. NATO and the NORAD zone were major initiatives that captured imagination in the United States. They overcame the multitude of smaller interests in the United States that are always ready to point out, “If you do this, I will be affected.” So if you think big, you can overcome that.
Do I think if we do that we can overcome the many problems we have on the security front? No. But we have to start. We have to build a higher level of concern in Washington, at the highest levels, that the continued health and prosperity of the North American economy means we must deal with the border differently. That means a willingness on our part, for example, to strengthen the perimeter around North America in order to deal with security issues that are uppermost in Americans' minds, and that should also be of concern to us.
Similarly, we need to be prepared to sit down with the Americans and be a good partner. I think over the last 10 or so years we have not been as good a partner as we might have been. That has raised suspicion in Washington as to whether we continue to be the kind of partner they're looking for. In the end, these are political choices. You make the political choices and you reap the results.
We have made a political choice that we wanted a more deeply integrated North American economy. We have benefited greatly from that, despite what some of the witnesses are saying. We must now decide if we want to make that work, or do we want to put various kinds of obstacles in its way, including allowing the Americans to build up the security framework they're pursuing?