Thank you. That's a very good question.
Certainly members might remember that three days after 9/11 occurred, there was a story--I can't remember if it was in the Boston Herald or The Boston Globe--that indicated three of the hijackers had come from Nova Scotia by ferry into Boston and then picked up the plane in Boston. That was the plane flown by Atta, which brought down one of the towers. That was a completely false story, and as soon as that story came out, we saw how toxic it would be for Canada. We moved very quickly, through the RCMP and others, to work with the FBI to find out where that story came from. Sure enough, it was a misquote by some low-level FBI officer in Boston. We were able to get John Ashcroft, who at that time was the Attorney General, several weeks later to make a public statement of disavowal, that in fact there was no question that any of the hijackers had come through Canada on their way to creating the destruction they did.
The regrettable thing is that once a story is out there, it's almost impossible to eradicate it. I can tell you, for five years I had a little card in my breast pocket, because I heard, at so many dinner parties or from so many representatives on the Hill and so forth, who said, “Gee, you know, it's too bad that you Canadians couldn't have controlled your territory a bit better, and we wouldn't have had one of the Twin Towers go down.” I'd have to trot out my quote from John Ashcroft, who categorically denied that this was the case.
First of all, you have a perception that's out there, or a story that's out there, and it's very hard to correct the record once it's out there in print. Second, there is always a propensity to blame the other fellow, because the dirty little secret with 9/11 is that of the 19 or 20 hijackers, I think 17 or 18 of them had come into the United States legally. Now, they had overstayed their welcome, but it had been a lapse of U.S. immigration security and not any other country's lapse. They had come directly into the United States.
This is something that took a long time for the administration and the media to acknowledge publicly. There was just a disinclination to say that somehow they had dropped the ball.
One other point I would make is concerning Hillary Clinton. I got to know her in the previous job I had, as Mr. Chrétien's foreign defence policy adviser. We met with the Clintons very often. She was very interested in Canada. She knew Canada, and she was very interested in our health care system. When she became the Senator of New York State, she needed to get votes for her campaign in northern New York State, which tends to be a bit Republican. Her way of doing that was to say that the border between upper New York State and Quebec was uncertain, and therefore they needed more resources for Homeland Security agents to establish offices there. That had an immediate impact in the poorer towns along the border. It was that simple.
Regarding her statements about a porous border, a number of us, including John Manley, were able to talk to her, and it became apparent that her statement was really about political economics. Unfortunately, sometimes that's the way politics operates in the United States.
How do you deal with that? You get out there early and often to counter those statements. You take advertisements out in the newspaper. You do op-ed pieces in The New York Times, if they'll accept them. You buttonhole as many congressmen as you can. But as I said, once a perception and a statement are out there, it's very hard to correct the record.
I don't know if that answers your question or not.