Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses. I think this has been a very informative session.
I'll pick up perhaps on the points that have been made. When I was down at a meeting with congressional officials and congressmen and congresswomen, governors, the 9/11 myth came up many times. It seems some people who are corrected, a year later will forget it, probably because it serves a convenient political purpose.
Someone mentioned the fact that if you run a campaign for razors, you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars. We spent very little. But the reality is, even if we spent tens of millions of dollars, our message is infinitely more complicated than whether the razor gives you a good shave, so it's difficult to condense into a sound bite.
I want to bring up two possible points on that. One is your thought, Ambassador Kergin, to the adequacy or perhaps how well resourced we are to deliver our message. Perhaps the most effective way we can do it is as legislators, through connection between our members of Parliament and Congress and our senators, their senators, etc.
Secondly, I don't mean this in a threatening, ominous way, but the United States is talking about energy independence, and it's a central plank of Obama's platform. Perhaps to Mr. Beatty on this point, it strikes me that there's a point to be made here, really, which is that if you're interested in energy independence, it isn't achievable unless you have the cooperation of Canada. Maybe the message we need to be saying is, “We want to work with you. We're interested in moving toward things like energy independence, but if you're shutting down trade and putting up large fences at our border, either through non-tariff barriers or, if we get that far, through tariff barriers, it's going to be very hard to work with you on things like energy independence.” In other words, an open and free trading relationship simply doesn't work on the things you selectively pick and choose.
So quickly on those two points, and then I have a question on the western hemisphere travel initiative.