Foreign Affairs committee  In both countries--and in a lot of countries--we have Canadian companies that have investments in those countries. They have to abide by the laws of those countries, but the Canadian government gets implicated in them in different kinds of ways. The consulate in Mongolia, for exa

Foreign Affairs committee  Sure. On the economic side, Americans actually export somewhere between $600 million to $800 million worth of agricultural products to Cuba every year. The economic interest of Canada is that a lot of those agricultural products have displaced Canadian exports to Cuba. So if we c

Foreign Affairs committee  Gale is responsible for that area.

Foreign Affairs committee  When I read her testimony, I was thinking that she has a huge organizational problem that her commission probably can't solve for her, because they're not organized to implement international projects. They're organized to do what they do, which is a different mandate. I've see

Foreign Affairs committee  That's interesting. We're developing a project on increasing access to finance for small businesses in the Caribbean, and the question is exactly what you're asking about. The basic problem is there are very few things that people can use as collateral to get credit, whereas in o

Foreign Affairs committee  The question is to get people from the informal economy into the formal economy.

Foreign Affairs committee  There are various ways of doing that, but contracts are part of that, and then there is accounting and there are all kinds of other things. There are a lot of things that governments and donor agencies are doing in order to move that into the formal economy so that it can regular

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, China is a developing country, but also has a lot of money in other areas, so for the trade stuff we do, in my mind they should pay for it, and they do. We finished working in Russia several years ago, but we continue to get contracts, including from the government. I rem

Foreign Affairs committee  We worked for three years talking about trade policy in market economic terms. We worked with the ministry of trade and their training institute. It was very much a question of what I was alluding to in the beginning: they want to understand different models of how things are org

Foreign Affairs committee  They approached us in the context of a programming envelope that CIDA had organized on modernizing the state. That was their term for public sector reform. One of the areas was trade policy. The ambassador called us up and said, “I understand you know something”. That's how it be

Foreign Affairs committee  I was talking about the sustainability of what you're trying to do.

Foreign Affairs committee  I mean, you have to develop a partnership. A lot of times there are some cultural differences that take a little time to organize and understand; you start off with some discrete activities to sort of demonstrate your expertise and to build some relationships. You start knitting

Foreign Affairs committee  We get funding from CIDA. We also get funding from other donor agencies--DFID, the donor agency in the U.K., the European Union, IDB, and different kinds of agencies--and then we have our own professional training programs. To answer your question about Mongolia and how you choo

Foreign Affairs committee  You have to get on the ground to find out what people need. Whether it's CIDA or other donor agencies, they've decentralized the planning and the decision making, so even if you want to work somewhere, you can go and talk to somebody and get to know them, but you really have to g

Foreign Affairs committee  Thanks very much. I'm the director of the Centre for Trade Policy and Law. What we do for a living is help governments and their stakeholders in business and in non-profit sectors around the world design, negotiate, and implement their international trade and economic strategies