Okay, thank you.
You talk about training people, the use of guns, and police officers. I had the occasion as a university student to work as a constable with the CPR police on the docks in Montreal. There were a lot of longshoremen there who probably hadn't been Boy Scouts all their lives. I went to Windsor Station, down in the basement, where they fingerprinted me. I shot maybe 25 rounds and then got my gun. Hopefully things have progressed since then. That was a private police force that may have had different standards.
Police officers have a lot of experience with firearms, and it's more than just training; a lot of it is experience. If you look at Canada and our borders, there are about eight or nine border crossings that probably take up about 80% to 90% of the goods and trade that come through. Why not look at a model where, in lieu of arming guards, we just make sure those borders have 24/7 access to the RCMP?
I'm not sure what's going to happen if people are apprised--it's called a watch list or a notice--that there might be some gun runners coming to the border, or some people smuggling people, drugs, or whatever. So now you have an officer at the border with a gun. I'm not sure if that will have a deterrent effect. Will people who are going to commit this kind of act really say, oh, we'd better not head up to Canada because their border guards are armed now? I'm not sure the deterrent effect is there, and I don't think it's appropriate for these officers to be pulling out their firearms at the border where there are many people. This is where law enforcement people like yourself, sir, have the experience to know how to deal with this. You can train for a lot of things, but you can't train for experience.
So have they looked at that sort of model, and would that work? Maybe you could just comment on that.