Thank you very much for the question.
Quite frankly, I'm a little shocked at the suggestion that we were slow to close the border. I've actually gone back through Hansard, and Hansard keeps an excellent record of all of the questions that were put to the government. I can't find a single incident where anyone in any part of the House recommended closing the border with the United States.
Frankly, we were working really closely at the time primarily with British Columbia, which was very concerned about a high rate of infection in the State of Washington. I can advise that as a direct result of those conversations, the deputy prime minister and I reached out to the Americans and began a conversation with them about restricting non-essential travel. We also engaged with them in a very important discussion about maintaining essential supply lines and the movement of essential workers back and forth across the border. From that first conversation when we reached out to the United States, until the Prime Minister and the President of the United States announced it, it was less than 24 hours.
I believe we moved with incredible alacrity and speed to do that. It is the largest undefended border in the world—some 6,000 kilometres. As well, there are very many points of entry. Our officials were able to respond with remarkable speed in essentially shutting that border down very effectively to non-essential travel. It was done with I think remarkable speed. If one looks at the timing of that and compares it with actions that were taking place in other parts of the world with respect to border closures, you will see that Canada and the United States were at the forefront of that effort.