Canada is preparing to play a major role in the continued stability and security of Afghanistan through ISAF.

We already get more energy from Canada than from any other foreign country.

This war in Iraq is part of a larger effort to remove this terrorist threat from the planet.

Canada and the United States are also working at the World Trade Organization and in our own hemisphere with negotiations for a Trade Area of the Americas to try to help countries create a positive climate for investment and trade.

The agreement to place the binational planning group at our new Northern Command was also signed in December.

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.