Foreign Affairs committee  The question being cuts to aid across the board, or to our—

Foreign Affairs committee  In fact it hasn't been an issue for Engineers Without Borders. With the greatest respect to the Government of Canada and to CIDA in particular, our interest is in fact to decrease the amount of reliance we have on government aid. From all the trends we've seen globally, it seem

Foreign Affairs committee  First, I apologize, as I don't believe any of you have notes in front of you from me. That's my error in not having prepared them early enough in advance. Yes, a great part of what I was speaking to, Mr. Eyking, was a proposal for an aid financing mechanism that would allow, fi

Foreign Affairs committee  For example, right now the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom is engaging with the Ethiopian government. Essentially, Ethiopia has agreed to graduate x number of girls and boys from secondary school, and they need to pass a standardized test in order t

Foreign Affairs committee  Good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much for fitting me into your busy schedules. My name is James Haga. I have the privilege of working as a senior director with a Canadian organization called Engineers Without Borders. I've been working

Finance committee  One thing is that we're not starting from zero with this idea. The government has already taken a number of steps that have gotten us really quite close to what this standard would achieve. Only two months ago CIDA, for instance, launched its open data portal. Essentially, taki

Finance committee  It means having common definitions. If I am a government line ministry worker in the government of Ghana, I'm not really interested in knowing uniquely what Canada did and uniquely what another donor government did. There are probably 50 donor governments that are operating in my

Finance committee  I can speak to it a little right now if you like. One of the things we find right now is that CIDA, for example, as the biggest foreign aid distributor in Canada, has a project browser in which you can find project information. It is largely incomplete, because it doesn't actual

Finance committee  Great. We currently operate in four countries within Africa. We don't operate anywhere else. We used to be all over the world. We found that we weren't really doing much anywhere. So we tried to focus those resources, not all that dissimilar from what Canada has done in the last

Finance committee  I hope that today is part of the process of moving it forward. We've been in conversations with all parties and with people who work in different departments within the bureaucracy that are involved in delivering Canadian foreign aid. There is a lot of support, quite frankly, fo

Finance committee  First and foremost, as an organization we've been looking at this issue closely for about a year and a half. As I said, we have a strong network of people across the country who are involved in what we are doing, in the professional engineering community as well as in universitie

Finance committee  I think that's excellent. I think there have been many cases where the Government of Canada has been generous, and Canadians have also been generous, which is only going to ramp up the amount of money that ends up going to the cause. It's a great partnership. Just to be clear, we

Finance committee  To be totally honest with you, I feel that I would be making it up a little bit to answer that question right now. But I would love to engage you in a conversation about that more broadly, in terms of incentives.

Finance committee  On the first side of the question, I would adjust the estimate a little bit. Now, to be able to say specifically what this will cost Canada is a little bit outside of our reach. We don't have those internal assessments that I believe are being looked at by the Canadian Internatio

Finance committee  We have a membership of 55,000 people.