Thank you for the question. I think there's one clear lesson from this experience and the steep price we paid in this deal for very little relief from the Buy American preferences that have been in place for a long time, although they were intensified under the recovery act. The lesson is that we should be looking at a fresh approach, as Teresa alluded to.
The Buy American policies are extremely popular in the United States. Attacking them and making it a high priority, as opposed to using quiet diplomacy, will not likely win friends in Washington and influence their future policies in a practical way.
We also have to ask ourselves how much policy flexibility we are willing to sacrifice, particularly when we can just look across the border and see our major trading partner using procurement in a very sophisticated and systematic way with a lot of popularity and support from the general population--which I think you would also find in Canada--to enhance local economic development.
In Canada we are using it to get in on the ground floor of new industries like renewable energy, Quebec Hydro's huge procurement for wind, or Ontario's Green Energy Act. Are we prepared to throw away that policy flexibility and other areas in this sort of vain hope of influencing American policy? We should be taking a hard look at what's possible.