I think when it comes to defence issues there's actually very little space between us. I think the Northwest Passage is really the one big issue on the table. I think ballistic missile defence is something that we have a squabble over in terms of what to commit.
But I think Canada's performance in Afghanistan and in Libya speaks to a strong relationship with the United States. When push comes to shove, the two countries fight well together. I have a book that came out about the challenges of NATO. “Fighting Together, Fighting Alone” is the subtitle because countries fought their own individual wars in Afghanistan, but Canada was one of the few exceptions to that with the United States. They actually had Canadians commanding Americans in Kandahar with no friction at all compared with lots of other friction that was in place in Afghanistan.
In terms of the security relationship, we don't have a lot of news coming out of NORAD and Canada often is frustrated by not being mentioned in the state of the union address. These are examples of actual success. Who gets attention in the state of the union address? North Korea and Iran. These are countries that Canada does not want to be associated with.
A lot of the challenge is that there are bad news stories like Keystone, but the Canadian defence relationship with the United States is a success story. We don't hear bad news about it, because it's going along very well on any given day.