Sure. There are a couple of things I'd like to comment on there. The deterrent effect may or may not be there on actually smuggling goods into Canada, whether or not the guards are armed. But it would only make sense that it might deter any aggressive action being taken against the customs officers, although not always, because people take aggressive action against police officers who are armed too.
For some time, because of some violence issues around the territory of Akwesasne and Cornwall, the RCMP actually assigned uniformed officers to stand at that bridge with customs officers, as they were then called, 24 hours a day. It was not an assignment any of the officers wanted to get. They found it extremely boring. It did nothing to train young officers on how to do police work. At a lot of airports years ago we used to see RCMP special constables, and after seven or eight years doing that sort of work they didn't have any real experience. They just stood there waiting for something to happen. At times they had to assist, make arrests, etc., but generally speaking, they weren't investigating crimes and dealing with the public in a way that a normal police officer would.
So it wasn't a good thing for morale amongst the officers. It wasn't a cherished assignment in the slightest. That in itself could lead to problems in terms of those officers not wanting that type of work. There's the potential for idle hands and idle minds to cause grief.
So that has been done in the past. The RCMP could comment on it a lot more effectively, but when I spent two years in Cornwall with the task force, we were doing it.
If we have advance notice that there's a load of guns coming through, by all means, we could put even a tactical team in there to try to deal with that. But the advantage of dealing with it in a more controlled environment is that it has less impact on public safety than if a chase erupts in the city of Cornwall, or if ultimately a gun fight erupts as you pull these people over in a parking lot at a mall or something.
So there really is some advantage, safety-wise, to handling them right there at that funnel as they come through customs.