Thank you very much. You've really raised the $64 million question that I've been grappling with in the last 30 years that I've been dealing with Canada-U.S. relations, and that is, how do we get ourselves on their radar scope? The old story is that good news is no news, and very rarely do we have a bad news story from the United States.
An incident in Georgia or something in the Ukraine hits a lot of newspapers, but the fact that we have this enormous trading relationship never makes the U.S. press. The only time in my five years in Washington as an ambassador that Canada appeared above the fold on the front page of The New York Times was when the Alberta Minister of Energy dared to suggest that possibly energy might flow to China rather than coming south to the United States. That, from the American perspective, was a bad news story and we therefore got on the front page of the The New York Times.
I'm not suggesting that as an approach, obviously. It does explain a little bit, to some extent, that good news just doesn't really carry in the media very often.
I'll come back to the question. This actually ties in with a question that Mr. Ménard had. It's glib to say, “Well, you try to influence Americans one American at a time.” There are 300 million of them, so that's a bit of a tall order. There is a bit of truth to that, in the sense that I found that the best way to start to get the Americans' attention is from the grassroots up. It's working at the subnational level, province to state. There are incredibly good relationships that exist across border towns and so on.
When we have a problem on a lumber issue, for example, or we have a problem on a border issue, very often we can use our subnational authorities and our consuls to work on the state governments, who then will start to work on their federal representatives to get things to change. The best example I can think of, you might recall, is that of the U.S ambassador to Canada, at the outset, when we were starting to think about enhanced drivers' licences for British Columbia. It was a British Columbia initiative, then Ontario and Michigan.... He said, “Not a chance. It's never going to happen. Homeland Security will never buy the idea of an enhanced driver's licence.” Some of us who knew Washington—and I argue maybe a little better than he did, frankly—recognized that if we worked on Senator Schumer in New York, if we worked on the Michigan senators, and if we worked on the Washington State senators, we might be able to push that back and get something like another alternative to the pass card or to the western hemisphere travel initiative, like the enhanced driver's licence.
I don't think one should ever underestimate the ability of working cross-border with our immediate, proximate neighbours. Have them put pressure on their representatives in Washington to roll back some of the legislation or some of the perceptions that the inner beltway, in its ignorance--and in many cases its ignorance of Canada--has come up with and hurt us, without wanting to hurt us but just unknowingly has hurt us.