Let me give you an example of concrete collaboration that's very important now and could be built upon going forward, and that is collaboration in building partner capacity in the western hemisphere and beyond for defence and for disaster response.
One of the very first meetings that we had when I came into office in the Permanent Joint Board of Defence included a discussion of how Canada and the United States, with full participation and leadership of DFAIT and our Department of State, could build on each other's comparative advantages in strengthening partner capacity in the western hemisphere, because Canada has some terrific programs under way—for example, in Jamaica, in order to train up Guatemalan helicopter pilots. It would be wasteful for the United States to replicate what Canada is already doing in building partner capacity. By having a dialogue about which country is going to invest where, we can together make sure that those investments are more efficient and more effective.
This dialogue about how we can have a collaborative approach in the western hemisphere has been going forward with great effectiveness, and now it has been expanded to the Asia-Pacific, where our Secretary of Defense and your Minister of National Defence recently agreed to a dialogue on Asia-Pacific engagement, including the ASEAN nations, in order to determine how best to have a coordinated approach to work together with nations of the Asia-Pacific region, in order to not step on each other's toes, in order to spend our scarce engagement resources most effectively, and to be of mutual support in ways that serve the interests of both Canada and the United States. We've gone far down this path in the western hemisphere. Now we're applying it more broadly.