Certainly. There has been a sort of rethink about development assistance. We've put close to $1 trillion into it, and the results are not what we intended. So we began to have people ask what's not working.
Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, William Easterly, and others began to say it wasn't good enough to just send money into a place. What you're trying to do is develop skills and what I would call “sustainable jobs”.
The argument is that the private sector has to play a bigger role in this. We have a lot of foreign investment in Canada that creates jobs, and we should be doing the same in Africa. The private sector is now moving in that direction—the jobs that provide the sustainable development that we seek to achieve are largely being driven by foreign investment, working with the government at home. It's not the pure development as we saw it in the past.
That's a philosophical shift in thinking on how we've done aid for the past 50 years. We have a lot of opportunity. Think of our mining companies, which are extremely active. The Prime Minister just announced today in Peru—and he's going on to Colombia—that we have opportunities.
We have an actual place and standing if we choose to use it. This takes us into social corporate responsibility. There are areas like labour, the environment, and respect for women in which we can make a shift in things. It is harder to do, but it is doable.
I want to make one last comment on integration. I have a very practical suggestion. Do not leave CIDA “siloized” on the other side of the river. My view would be to take the African bureaus and put them all together. Take the trade, the policy.... In my experience—and Paul lived through this as well—when you put the two together, cheek by jowl, and we did this in the early 1980s, it means that you lunch together, you walk down the hall and you talk together. The worst thing we can do in this integration is to leave the silos.