Mr. Williamson, if I could just quickly add, one of the things that I think has been lost in the debate is the way in which Congress set up the sequestration mechanism. It redefined the national defence portion of the budget, and then there was a budget that was sort of the domestic entitlement spending. It divided that in half.
Instead of defence being defined as the Pentagon only, the traditional defence, they also put the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the same basket.
The defence department obviously did a good job of protecting soldiers in the field, salaries, and key programs. The state department didn't have a lot of money to go after so it didn't take as big a hit. But the Department of Homeland Security slowed a lot of pilot project cooperation under the beyond the border agreement. They were unable to purchase equipment and they had to slow down recruitment and training.
So in an area of vital importance to Canada, our border security and our ability to cooperate in making trade facilitation work, I think we did some damage to that process. Because of sequestration DHS was simply not in as good a position to defend its turf.