Your question is an excellent one. I fully subscribe to Ambassador Kergin's analysis, but I suppose I would take it further as well.
Your question, in which you mentioned that Canadians tend to see the border in terms of our cultural and political identity, is particularly helpful in that it drives you back to ask the fundamental question of what the border is in the 21st century. Is it just a line on a map, or is it something far different?
I look upon the border as any place where two sovereignties intersect. It could be in cyberspace. The American border with Frankfurt, Germany, failed on 9/11. It's not simply a line on a map. And I believe the committee needs to take that much broader view of what constitutes the border. What is its significance, and what are we trying to achieve?
I was part of border protection, in a sense, when I was president of the CBC, which is part of the cultural bulwark that we'd established simply to avoid being overwhelmed by American content.
So I would strongly counsel you to go back to first principles and ask what the border is, what it is we're trying to achieve, and how we set that in the bilateral context with the United States.
The other important thing you did was to raise the question of physical security along the border. You correctly talked about whether there's a security threat, and you correctly talked about criminal activity coming north.
One of the concerns I have about the current construction of the border is that we are being driven into paralleling what the Americans are doing.
The Canada Border Services Agency has a massive unfunded mandate, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, over the course of the next several years. It will not have the money to do what it is being tasked to do if we continue on the current track. And yet if you were to ask authorities what the greatest threat coming north across the border is, they would not say terrorism, but illicit tobacco, guns, drugs, and organized gangs. This is distorting our priorities and making Canadians less safe in the process.