Mr. Speaker, I will handle the last question first, the point on the arming of border guards. We are asking our border agency and our border guards, the men and women under service to Canada who are protecting our borders, to work alone and to work in isolated areas. They have been asking, for their own protection, for the arming of the border guards.
We are talking not so much about the free flow of goods but the free flow of people, and from a terrorist threat point of view, this may have accelerated the request by the border guards that this happen.
In the first part of his question, the member talked about the free flow of goods. We certainly have seen instances of this, specifically in southwestern Ontario,. Two weekends ago, a substance was spilled on the Rainbow bridge in Niagara which closed the bridge for six hours and created an absolute mess at all of the border crossings in the Niagara-Fort Erie area because of the diversion of products that way.
In the House this morning, a member mentioned how four lanes of traffic crossing the Ambassador bridge in Detroit is about half of the volume of Canada-U.S. trade. The member opposite mentioned economic terrorism. It gets to be exactly that. I have parts plants in southern Ontario faced with economic terrorism. Their ability to do business is gone simply because the border is clogged. Their ability to do business with American firms has been taken away from them.
That is economic terrorism as far as the small businesses and major employers of southwestern Ontario are concerned. We also need to be able to unclog that bottleneck with infrastructure changes.