Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  CIDA is not involved with that in Burma as we don't have and are not now opening a bilateral program. With respect to other donor countries and the multilateral agencies, we understand that what these other agencies are doing in development assistance, given the very weak capac

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you. First, as an addendum to my colleague's answer on the question of NGO access, we have, through our CIDA border areas programming, just a very small window on a slice of life in Burma as seen from the border, and we work indirectly with over 50 NGOs based in border are

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's correct.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, honourable members. Thank you for the invitation to appear this afternoon. I'm pleased to be here. As the regional director general for Asia in the geographic programs branch, I am responsible for CIDA's bilateral development programming in Asia—with the ex

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  We will have to get back to you in terms of a definition of what projects that would include. In terms of our governance programming--writ large, human rights, democratic development and good governance programming--last year 45.5% of our overall disbursements were in that sector

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I can't comment on that specific experience. I think that the kinds of programs we support are about long-term engagement, where the same players on each side are involved with each other over an extended period. I really think the committee would need to talk with the Canadian

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You asked the question about evaluation. The answer is no, we have not had an external evaluation of our human rights programming taken as a whole. We have had numerous evaluations, and it's something we do regularly on individual projects. We've had at least 15 evaluations or ma

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  To answer your question about the big picture in terms of the CIDA program, we keep an eye on the larger indicators and larger progress, but in practical terms we do our work in particular sectors. China is a huge and complex country. Any country is complex, but China is particul

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I can help out here. In terms of the international standard, a dollar a day, it would be more than 100 million people in China. In terms of a two-dollar-a-day standard, which is not a lot of money, it would be more than 200 million people in China, and a substantial proportion

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I would like to add a few words in response to the second question. I want to clarify that no resources are provided to the Chinese government that could be used for purposes other than implementing our joint projects. When we send Canadian experts to China, the Chinese cannot us

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's neither a yes nor a no. First of all, what we have been doing in recent years has not involved the provision of money to China. It's the provision of Canadian expertise and it's paying the cost of bringing Chinese to Canada to engage with Canadians for training and discussio

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The percentage of those projects vetted by the Chinese government would be very close to, but not up to, 100%.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In terms of mandate, the guiding mandate that we have presently for the CIDA programming in China is a country development programming framework that was defined in 2004 and revised in 2005. That has given us our two main priority areas, which are, number one, in human rights, de