I do want to try to put things in perspective today relative to the U.S.-Canada relationship. I would like to start by talking about how important this relationship is to the people of the United States.

We are at war to liberate Iraq, to protect the people of the United States and other countries from the devastating impact of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being used by terrorists or the Iraqi government to kill thousands of innocent civilians.

Let me close as I did in Gander on September 11, 2002 when I went to that community to thank the people of Gander and the people of Canada for the overwhelming support and help that was given to us in the wake of those attacks on September 11, 2001.

Ironically, the Canadian naval vessels, aircraft and personnel in the Persian Gulf I mentioned earlier who are fighting terrorism will provide more support indirectly to this war in Iraq than most of the 46 countries that are fully supporting our efforts there.

Like Canada, we very much wanted the United Nations to be a relevant and effective body. But once those efforts failed, we no longer saw things from a multilateral perspective. For us, now, it is much more basic than that. It is about family.

We know that if al Queda or one of these terrorist organizations were to get a weapon of mass destruction from Iraq, that they would have no hesitation about using it to catastrophic consequences; the potential is for hundreds of thousands of casualties.

There is $1.4 billion a day in trade that goes back and forth across the border. That means millions of jobs and livelihoods for families here in Canada and for families in the United States.