Thank you, Chair.
And thank you, Jim and Jean-Paul. It's good to see you here this afternoon.
First, the OECD came out with a pretty bad report card on CIDA today or yesterday, talking about the cutbacks, the sense of not much direction and really eliminating a lot of work with NGOs. There's a movement afoot, of course, to let especially the mining companies do a lot of that work for the Canadian taxpayer—do aid work. With your report, that's very concerning.
I might be a shareholder, I guess, with one of these mining companies, because we all have mutual funds and it's on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and sometimes you don't even know. But assuming I was a shareholder, I would be very concerned that the board of directors would ensure that when they go into these countries, they would be doing the proper due diligence. Unless we have a lot of Mother Teresas on these boards, I don't know how that's going to happen, because at the end of the day they're looking for profits.
The other night on the CBC, The National, they had quite an article. I don't know if you've seen it. The reality is these mines are getting bigger and bigger and they're going into more remote parts of the world. They're disrupting a lot of environments and indigenous people.
That being said, where are we going here? Some suggest that the mining companies should have a process similar to the Kimberley process in diamond mining, and in your report here, Jean-Paul, you said “resource curse”, and you talked about the inefficient investment in human resources, lack of democracy and human rights, and also about how it is all leading to low growth and a worsening level of poverty.
So where does that all bring us, as Canadians? Yes, we want to be a prosperous nation. We want to help other countries extract their minerals in a proper way, but I have a feeling that there's a gap here, and I don't know if there have to be more things done to hold our mining companies accountable. That's my first question.
The second question would be, Jean-Paul, do you agree that we should have our mining companies going in and delivering our aid? Will the next thing be that when a mining company goes to Mongolia, they're going to have an assistant from CIDA go with them? What are your thoughts on where we're going here?