I agree with my colleagues that leadership is key to governments making any sort of significant progress on those issues.
For your upcoming visit to Washington, one key message I'd like you to take to legislators in the U.S. is that, really, we make things together. When you think about Canada and the United States, we're talking about integrated economies.
I'll tell you why this matters. There are two types of issues. One is the actual bottleneck at the border, the physical infrastructure and the need to have pre-clearance and other types of measures that will help facilitate trade at the border. What actually impacts Canada-U.S. trade are the new requirements that have been put in place to cross the border. So it's not the physical infrastructure but rather the compliance requirements that are required of companies.
A lot of those are directed toward imports. When U.S. law-makers and the American public look at these measures, they think they have to make sure, for example, that products that come into the U.S. are secure. They're thinking China. They're thinking overseas economies. But these measures always end up affecting Canada more than any other trading partner.
They understand that we do make things together and that there is a pretty good business case for better risk assessment of goods entering the U.S. But let's make sure that the safe stuff from Canada is facilitated and that we direct our energy toward things from other parts of the world. Those are really the goods that American consumers are more concerned with.
I think that would help tremendously in making progress on those issues we've been discussing today.