Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to the witnesses. I want to thank you all for your presentations.
Specifically, Ms. Healy, you started off and you asked, in your preamble, who the SPP is for. I look around the table—and we've been debating this issue for several meetings and have had several discussions over the last few months on where our international trade strategy should be—and I believe everyone around the table, especially when it comes to quality...and we all have access to opportunity to increase our quality of life and find ways to ensure opportunities for all Canadians. I think that's a goal we can all agree on, no matter what your political stripe.
I look at North American opportunities. As I said, we've had several witnesses who've said this is where we should be focusing our energies. Our biggest trading partner has over $2 billion of trade a day going across the border and 37,000 trucks. Approximately 80% of our population lives within 160 kilometres of the border. An average Canadian family relies on small businesses. My riding in the interior of British Columbia and all of us around the table need to ensure we streamline a seamless border crossing, as seamless as possible.
I would like to ask Mr. Lennox in a moment, but I just want to clarify one other statement that was made about where our Canadian families sit, in the past with NAFTA, and where we're heading in the future. Mr. Julian stated how poorly off Canadian families were, but the fact is Canadian families, on the whole, experienced two periods in which income fell, one in the early 1980s and one in the early 1990s, and in both cases the Canadian economy was in a recession. So you can go through the statistics and manipulate them however you want. If you use the benchmark of 1997 or 2004, I can massage and show you all kinds of numbers. Professor Hart can probably do it better than all of us around the table. But the fact is that when it comes to NAFTA, we're a lot better off as Canadians and North Americans, all three of the trading partners, because of the trade that's been generated and the business opportunities. I just need to clarify that and get it on the record.
Specifically, Mr. Lennox, my uncle has a trucking company, and I used to work for him in Alberta, bringing products from Mexico and California through western Canada. I know the importance of the delays at the border. Many times a trucker is calling it a day at the border, and it costs your members tens of thousands of dollars. Can you clarify or expand a little bit if you've had any opportunity to participate in the eManifest program and the pre-clearance and what it will do for helping clients and your moving of goods and services across the border?