Madam Speaker, I want to ask the member to consider for a moment that there could have been some common ground in these negotiations. It would have been a much tougher approach by the Canadian government to say to the Americans that 100 flights a day from Canada fly in United States airspace but there are 2,000 flights a day from the U.S. flying in Canadian airspace, that Canada will provide that information but the U.S. will have to provide Canada with the same information. Immediately American airlines and consumers would have become very agitated and would have started calling their representatives in Congress and there would have been a pullback on this issue.
The government told me the other day that Canada could not afford the computer system to process all of this information and the Americans have the half a billion dollars to dedicate to that.
The other issue is that in terms of the agreement itself, Canada has an agreement on PNR use with the European Union. It deals with the PNR totally differently. Unlike this agreement where we are going to give the Americans the information and they can keep it for 40 years, the PNR agreement with the EU requires a very limited time period for the disposal of the data. It makes sure that the information is rendered anonymously so it is not tied to an individual. There is—