Foreign Affairs committee  Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it's a great pleasure to be asked to come to testify here. There is one part of my career you didn't mention, and maybe you don't know. I spent the middle year of my graduate education at Queen's University in Kingston. It was actually

Foreign Affairs committee  That is a very good question, and it's one that comes up in the U.S. context as well. There are several elements in play here. One is the notion of autonomy, and giving some geographic space an autonomous system of government. We see things that more or less are like that with

Foreign Affairs committee  We see all of those problems in both high-density and low-density environments. To be sure, we should always respect traditions and individual preferences that can lead to many different choices. But the challenge I see when I look around the world is that something like three bi

Foreign Affairs committee  Mauritius is a country few people know. I first started studying Mauritius because they used a zone like this to get out of the trap of extremely high barriers to trade and to open the economy up. The way they did it was that they created something they called a zone. All you had

Foreign Affairs committee  What's happened is that the success that happened first in the special zones quickly migrated to other parts of China. They kept adding more zones, and then even some of the interior cities started to copy the arrangements in the zones. So now we've seen rapid growth throughout a

Foreign Affairs committee  They've quickly expanded to 14, and now it's hard to count.

Foreign Affairs committee  Sure. I think one of the reasons why it would be good if Canada or nations like Canada, like other nations, participate in this is that they could set some standards and expectations. One that I would argue very strongly for is the notion of inclusion in the sense of equal treat

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the initiative should always come from the developing economy, not from Canada or anyone like Canada or Mauritius. It has to be under conditions where this is a voluntary act by the developing economy, because again, the legitimacy is the central element in this strategy.

Foreign Affairs committee  Like it or not, Canada is still a beacon of good governance and trust around the world. A sign of what's so admirable is the self-criticism and the investigations. Complacency about good governance would be a very bad sign, but rigorous attention to this is what it takes to maint

Foreign Affairs committee  On the question of how, this arrangement was imagined, proposed, and put forward by Hondurans themselves. They sought me out because they could see I had been thinking about something similar, so they asked me to help them. But they saw this as a way out of the kind of trap they

Foreign Affairs committee  Importing government services, so to speak, is not the same as granting sovereign status of Mauritius within this zone. It's just leveraging the credibility of their courts to help them solve problems in their judicial system. It is possible that a similar arrangement could be

Foreign Affairs committee  One of the sad things about being a poor country is that the worldwide press never bothers to get the facts right about anything that happens in a poor country. In Madagascar, Daewoo gave a statement to the Financial Times saying they had a deal to lease large tracts of land in

Foreign Affairs committee  I had conversations with President Ravalomanana about this idea. We both agreed that it offered a promising future for Madagascar, but there was never any agreement, and this was never the source of any popular protest because it was never publicly disclosed. The popular protest

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the best way to capture the essence is that if one could create in Honduras the conditions that Hondurans seek out in Canada and the United States—the infrastructure, employment opportunities, educational opportunities, the physical safety for their children—it would be a

Foreign Affairs committee  When you say legislation, do you mean rule-making in Honduras?