My first point, sir, maybe just to clarify, is that no one sees Panama as a drug-producing country. Its geography makes it a transit country for drug trafficking; that may be true. And also, as has been mentioned, there is a risk that drug moneys move through the financial system, but that's not unique to Panama in Latin America nor the Caribbean. Panama shares a common geographic border with Colombia, and the Andean region—Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia—are the primary producers of the coca leaf, which is turned into cocaine. So by virtue of geography, Panama faces that challenge on its borders, and it's a problem endemic to Central America, which has become a major transit zone for cocaine moving north to North America and to Europe.
Our view, certainly in the Department of Foreign Affairs and with our other government department colleagues, is to try to work with these countries. We've got quite an extensive range of programs now to strengthen capacity, judicial enforcement, and oversight in these countries in Central America and the Caribbean, and Panama is benefiting from that.
We've been very active with them, including with a very important container program, by which we look at the containers transiting the ports of Panama, and this has now been extended throughout Central America. It's about a $3 million project that allows us to monitor containers going to Canadian ports and to try to intercept drugs. In the case of Panama, we've now got figures of some 2,500 kilos of cocaine and a smaller amount of heroin that have been seized in Panamanian ports in containers that were destined for Canada. These are the kinds of programs that we're funding, and our effort is to try to reduce the impact and ensure that these drugs do not make it to Canadian streets.