There are a number of things that make us nervous, on both sides of the border. I met with their so-called drug czar last week when he was in Canada, and he spoke at a number of public venues, also. He talked about their concerns about high-potency marijuana that comes across from the Canadian side to the American side. I talked about high-potency firearms that come from the U.S. to the Canadian side and the smuggling end. We have shared concerns.
You mentioned the whole issue of crystal meth and the labs that are involved. There were some provisions that were put in place. I'll give some credit to the former government in terms of precursors: how they have to be identified; when manufacturers are purchasing those precursors, how they have to register those amounts; and where they are allowed to manufacture them. There have been considerable steps taken.
Here's what it's done. It's reduced the potential for large-scale manufacturing in these laboratories. Both on the U.S. side and on the Canadian side, it has forced the manufacturers of that product to go to considerably smaller venues. That's good in terms of mass production, but it's limited. It makes it a little more difficult, then, on the detection side, because people are literally making this stuff in their basements or in rooms in their homes, at very high risk, because we're talking about highly incendiary and explosive elements. But there has been progress on that, and we share the concern.
I can tell you that they very much appreciated the fact that the new government of Canada did not pursue the wholesale decriminalization of marijuana. And we did that for Canadian interests, though, obviously, there were concerns in the United States. Intercepting at the border is very important to dissuade people from getting into that business at all. We can talk about the devastating effects of very low-cost, highly addictive crystal meth, but the marijuana that's manufactured or grown today--as I look around the table, there would be a few of us who would recall our friends in those days--is not like what was a different business altogether. It was nowhere near the potency, nowhere near the addictive quality, nowhere near the physiologically destructive nature of the high-potency marijuana that's grown today.
So we are aggressively concerned about our citizens. They are about theirs. We put Canada's interests first. That also helps our neighbours, because we want to go after them, whether it's crystal meth labs or grow operations. And we've recently committed increased resources and special teams dedicated just to the grow operations in Canada itself.