Mr. Chair, let me say to my friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs that this is almost surreal. We have the President of the United States, after this legislation has gone through, making comments to the effect that it appeared he did not know about it. I forget what the term was that he used; perhaps it was “amounting to stupid”.
We have Senator Clinton, one of the leading Democrats in the Senate, in a border state to Canada, admitting in public that she did not know this provision had become the law.
My colleague from Windsor and I have on several occasions now met with the northern border caucus from the House of Representatives in the U.S. To an individual, that northern caucus is opposed to these provisions.
We see a huge number of elected officials in the United States who are opposed to doing this. They recognize, as the parliamentary secretary just mentioned, that this negative impact will not be on Canada alone, but that it is going to have a major negative impact on those 38 states that see us—and we are—as their major trading partner. It is going to mean huge calamities for cultural exchanges.
We know all that and so do they, but the issue is, and this is where the surreal part comes in, who is running the government over there? Is there any possibility that we are going to get through to the real decision maker, which appears to be someone in Homeland Security as opposed to the elected officials?
I would ask the parliamentary secretary if we are doing anything to identify where the decision making is to see if we can get this decision reversed.