That's the key question: what do we mean by participation? Certainly if Canada went to the United States and said that we think the effective defence of the United States can be enhanced if we provide them with territory or if we allow certain.... This is the issue of the third site, if or when it develops. Then, I think, the whole negotiating process changes.
But remember, in the context of the negotiations of 2003-04, they partially failed because, one, we were not going to get a guarantee from the United States that Canadian cities would be defended, and I can understand from an American perspective why they couldn't give you that guarantee. Also, command and control was not going to go to NORAD. That was out. Specifically what access Canada would have relative to the system—information-planning filtered by the United States—remained an open and ill-defined question until the negotiations stopped.
The United States has left that open for Canada. The United States position on this is that if you want to consider participation, involvement, they're open to discussing this.
But before Canada goes to discuss this, this is something that I think was part of the reasons negotiations failed: there were unrealistic expectations that the nation, the government, or the department had in the time of 2003-04 about what we were going to get, and there was this idea that we were going to get it for free.
Canada—the government, the Department of National Defence, and this committee—has to decide exactly what we want out of this. Then you can start to consider what Canada will need to invest in order to get what we want. It's relative to all the competing demands on resources and investments, which have a greater priority within the military in Canada, for example, than ballistic missile defence will have.