I'd be delighted to respond, although it's a very big menu you gave me. But I thank you for the question.
I don't think Canada has a longer-standing better friend in the United States than I have been for the last 35 years, but I'm also very critical. One of the things I'm critical about is the difficulty Canadians have, in my view, of understanding the United States in a visceral way.
It's a very different political system. It is not a parliamentary system, as someone over here remarked. There are 585 members of Congress, and they all have their own agendas and their own need for money and their own way of running. Our political system is a completely different system. It means needing to see things for advantage from an American perspective.
For example, on this question of the cost of procurement, why not do an analysis that shows what it's costing the United States? You're all inclined, very understandably, to say, “Look at all the mills we're closing, look at all the jobs we're losing.” There are no Canadian votes in Congress. None of those 585 members care that you're closing mills and losing jobs. What they do care about is that the President is now cutting programs, knows he had an overstuffed budget, and has to find some savings.
The buy American provisions are costing money. They're expensive. This 25% provision instead of 6% in the traditional buy American provision is a very, very expensive provision that made its way through the Senate version of the bill and into law. So when you do your analysis, instead of examining what it's costing you, analyze what it's costing us, what it's costing Americans, what it's costing the United States. Put that kind of research forward.
Begin to tell the story as a story of a partner who's trying to help—because you're always going to be the junior partner, you're never going to be senior partner, and no, you're never going to win a trade war. But if you partner, if you use your imagination, you have better financial institutions than the United States has. Where have you been for the last eight years in initiating some imagination so that the United States didn't find itself in the difficulty it was in, and then when this crisis happened there was no North American response?
That is part of my indictment of NAFTA: there are no NAFTA institutions to have facilitated any North American response. We don't have the institutions to take advantage of Canada's strengths; we don't have the institutions to take advantage of strengths together between Canada and the United States. That's why we need new institutions. Those new institutions can come about through a new treaty that focuses on the agenda of the 21st century. I've mentioned what those items are, but in a specific and concrete way, do the research a different way; answer a different set of questions. Answer the questions that Americans are going to care about, not the questions you naturally have to care about but aren't going to have any traction with in the United States.