Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank you all for being here today.
I want to start out at sort of a high level and then maybe go to some specifics. I have a theory in my head that I'm trying to work on.
It seems that for the Americans, right now the border is primarily a security issue. For Canadians, the border has primarily been an identity issue. They are two different ways of looking at the border. As Canadians, we like to keep a border to keep our minority position in this continent to establish that we're Canadian. For the Americans, it used to be a non-issue. We were Americans or we were Canadians, and the border was porous. After 9/11 it became a security issue.
Mr. Beatty has opened up the thought of revisioning the whole thing. It seems to me that for Canada, the border is really a security issue, not an identity issue. I think we have the biggest threat in terms of contraband, guns, and criminal activity coming from the south into our country. For them, it's really an issue of misunderstanding identity, not understanding Canadian aspirations as compared with Mexican aspirations, or southern border issues.
I'm trying to sort out in my head what we as parliamentarians can recommend to our government about how we reshape this issue. It seems to me that we're at risk, and that the United States is no more at risk from Canada than New York is from Pennsylvania. It doesn't seem to me that they're at risk, yet the perception is that they're at risk.
Mr. Kergin, Mr. Beatty, can you help me on this? How can we actually express that better to the United States? I don't think we're doing a good job at it right now. Am I right in my basic assumption?