With all due respect, sir, when you were in Alberta you had complete control and you were able to do that with the stroke of a pen.
Take the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission. It was formed in 1939 by a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress. It has board members appointed by the Premier of Ontario and appointed by the Governor of New York. It's an international entity. It operates under the auspices of the United States government under the rules of the United States government, and under the Ontario Extra-Provincial Corporations Act. The Peace Bridge was formed by Canada and it's an international compact, and it's New York state on the U.S. side. To make a change just to join the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission and the Peace Bridge you would need agreement from the federal government of the United States, New York state, the Province of Ontario, and Canada.
The other bridge commissions along the border have their own charters. I am not too familiar with the seaway's but I would assume that they're under the same thing. The fact of the matter is that these bridge commissions are extremely well run. They have the bare minimum of staff and they run very efficiently. The issue has been dealing with customs on both sides of the border. For the bridges across the international border, without customs on each side the traffic would flow smoothly. There are billions of dollars of trade across the river every day.
As for what the situation is like, for example, when the western hemisphere travel initiative was implemented, before that you could cross the bridge in about 30 seconds, the average processing time. People would go across for dinner. They'd go across for pizza and wings. They would go across for any reason that you would want to think of. It was a big community. That all changed with the western hemisphere travel initiative, and if you want to talk to the Niagara Parks Commission their traffic dropped like a stone.
When 9/11 occurred the average processing time jumped to two minutes. The border came to a grinding halt effectively, and now it's down to about a minute on average, and if you got NEXUS you could probably get it down to about 27 seconds.
The issue here is not the number of organizations. The issue here is simply having the border community, meaning the customs officials on both sides of the border, working in harmony to allow for the processing of traffic in a very effective way. That's what all this is about.