Thank you, sir.
Welcome to our panel.
In our most recent meeting, we had other representatives. One was Mr. Grenier. He too said, almost verbatim, that it was a bad deal, that the government sent them there to do a deal at any cost.
We did use the argument—I know I brought the argument forward—about using our energy resources as leverage, and so on, and we will always use them. But sometimes we neglect or we forget about the logistics of how we move our energy products and our energy resources to the U.S. and how that plays into why we can't or we can. Maybe I'd ask the committee to sometimes think about that when we're huffing and puffing about wanting to deal with our cousins to the south.
Mr. Ross, you said earlier that it was the Canadian dollar that affected your business, that it was a downturn in the economy, etc. Not too long ago there was another downturn in the economy overall, and the rhetoric coming out of the United States of America was to not buy any imported cars, to forget the Japanese cars, and so on, and buy strictly American. It was not too long ago, actually, if you will recall. We know that it had a political overtone to it because of the elections, etc., and then it faded away. We're getting that kind of messaging now as well with the buy American proposal.
Hopefully the economy will start to turn around. Economics 101 has taught us that we're going to go through peaks and valleys, and we are hopeful that at some point in time this economy globally will turn itself around. Once that turnaround occurs in a steady healthy way, do you feel that this will be forgotten? If the dollar is where it is today, will that still have an impact, or will you be making adjustments between now and then to help you be competitive, as you say?
