Foreign Affairs committee  In the area of food and food security, we do quite a bit of food assistance each year. A large proportion of it does go to Africa, probably 50%. We also focus on sustainable agricultural development, particularly in a number of African countries. That's the focus of our work in E

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, he wasn't with me when I signed it.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. At the time, he was the acting vice-president of the branch responsible, and he went through in his branch the assessment process and then it came to me for my decision as to whether to recommend it or not.

Foreign Affairs committee  I can't give you the exact date, but I was told. The minister told me verbally that she wasn't going to approve it. And I think she was quite clear, so there is no dispute on that.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, not to my knowledge, because it left my office and my signature is on the document. I think what matters here is that the department recommended it. As you can tell, the other member indicated that there were comments on the proposal that were not necessarily always in favour

Foreign Affairs committee  I did recommend it, and on balance, the minister didn't accept that.

Foreign Affairs committee  I would agree with you. I think this last year in particular has been hopefully unprecedented, given the two very catastrophic natural disasters, the first being the Haiti earthquake on January 12, and then the extended period of floods in Pakistan. Of course, there were other cr

Foreign Affairs committee  I don't know.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, but I can find out.

Foreign Affairs committee  So if there were 700,000 children in school at that time, very, very few of them were girls, of course. Now we have up to seven million children in school in Afghanistan, and a third of them are girls. Of course, we'd like it to be half of them, but even that is actually really p

Foreign Affairs committee  Your question, sir, is? Could you just put the question exactly to me?

Foreign Affairs committee  In the review of a proposal from any organization, our officers would seek out the advice and analysis from a variety of sources. If it were a project on health, we would look to our health expertise to give us a judgment on the merits from a health perspective. If it has to do w

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I heard three separate questions. The first one was on the number of applications we receive. Particularly in reference to our partnership programming with Canadian organizations, we fund more than 500 or 600 organizations a year, but we get applications f

Foreign Affairs committee  I think, as I said before, the project was recommended to the minister, but it goes to the minister for her consideration and it's her decision. She doesn't have to agree with the advice, and you wouldn't want every minister to agree with the advice all the time.