Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the President of the Treasury Board for a thoughtful presentation tonight. He was speaking from the heart and speaking with a great deal of realism as well as a sense of idealism that inspires all of us.
I hope the government will look at what I see as an absence in our foreign policy and the whole area of governance which is really what we are talking about. We are talking about applying tests but we have to have the capacity to really assess those tests. Right now the governance area falls in between DFAIT and CIDA. In between the foreign affairs department and CIDA there is a bit of a black hole which used to be filled with some efforts that were made in governance that were paid for on both sides.
The minister talked about how he was prepared to send members of Parliament to Egypt. Many of us are prepared to go. Many of us are interested in engaging with our Egyptian friends and there are other ways in which we can do this.
The government has to understand that the governance revolution is not over, that the process of change in the Middle East, which many people thought would not happen in this way, is clearly under way. What we saw take place in the post-Soviet period, which was different but which also had its governance challenges to which Canada responded, is one which we now still continue to have to respond to.
I know the minister will think of this as being some kind of special pleading but I am really saying that when we look at the area of how we help countries deal with these challenges, and he put it on the table something which I thoroughly agree with, that we should go into these situations with our eyes wide open, with a sense of our own historical experience as he has described it, the experience of appeasement, the experience of Iran, and we can go back further with the experience of other revolutions which have gone awry and have not worked to the benefit of the people. We know that.
There is no room here for a kind of naïveté on our part as we look at the demonstrators on the street. If the government is going to take this approach, which I hope it does, that it realizes it is going to require a modest shift in terms of resources and look at how we can deal more effectively with this challenge of governance at the international level.