Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much, everybody, for being here.
I have two questions. One has to do with the security perimeter and trade, and what we can do on the trade side.
The second one, if we have enough time, will have to do with the number of people we have on the ground. Maybe Ms. Watson can answer that, in terms of what we are doing in Washington, what we are doing at the state level, what we are doing with our consulates in different cities, and how many people we have on the ground. How has that changed, if at all, in the last number of years? If we can and have time, I would like to pursue that a bit.
But my first question—and it's no secret to anybody around the room—is that I have some real concerns about the security perimeter announcement, not because of our enthusiasm to thin the border from a trade perspective; I actually am worried that the security piece may in fact cloud what we want to accomplish from a trade perspective.
There's an awful lot of things that have thickened the border that are not related to security. I appreciate the value of seeing the President and the Prime Minister doing this, in the sense that it will clearly—Don, as you said—motivate people in both countries at lower levels to pursue this; that's good. I am worried that the security piece is going to end up being very political; it's going to cloud some of the things that I think everybody wants to see in terms of trade.
My question is, can we separate them out? Is there a way to effectively take out the pieces that are aspects of thickening the border—compliance requirements, some of the regulations, some of the parts in...that half of this agreement? Can we isolate those more effectively, away from the security piece, so that regardless of what's happening on the political side in terms of security and sovereignty, we can move forward as a committee, as a country even, on those issues?
I understand that this might be a bit challenging, but I want to make sure that we do proceed with those aspects, regardless of how cloudy the other piece might get. I just too often hear people saying that 9/11 has created a thickened border. I don't buy it, to be honest. I see an awful lot of protectionist policies; I see an awful lot of things happening at the border that are perhaps done in the guise of security because “oh well, we have to”, but I'm not really sure they're necessarily security-related.
I'm asking for your help, in effect, to separate those out so that we can focus on those we can move forward on.
You're shaking your head.