Government Operations committee  As I've stated before, the decrease in fragile countries is due to two factors. Mainly due to Afghanistan, the $6 million of funding, there is a small portion...when we have personnel abroad, we pay the Department of Foreign Affairs a certain amount because we don't have personne

Government Operations committee  Our budget has a provision for international humanitarian assistance on an ongoing basis. The difficulty with a humanitarian crisis is that the extent is unpredictable and the extent of the response is unpredictable, so there are two mechanisms. This government has used the match

Government Operations committee  The challenge with any ODA/GNI figure is that it requires a multiple of variables. One is the actual level of aid. When we do that calculation, we adjust for currency rate, currency fluctuations, the rate of growth of the Canadian economy. It is very difficult to predict what the

Government Operations committee  Those numbers are not cumulative. The ongoing impact is the $319.2 million. Those reductions are phased in, so in 2012-13 it's $152.7 million; in 2013-14 it's $191.6 million, and $319.2 million ongoing. And that is the total.

Government Operations committee  The $319 million is the going forward number, yes.

Government Operations committee  Yes, she has.

Government Operations committee  Yes, to the extent that those projects are funded by CIDA, they would be in our Partnerships with Canadians branch, and they would be included in the estimates.

Government Operations committee  It has. The government has committed to increase the international assistance envelope, and that's why you see the growth in that number. As a result, CIDA received an increment on an annual basis up until a couple of fiscal years ago that increased the size of its budget. In a

Government Operations committee  As I said earlier, that realignment was due to an analysis of our programming. As our programming flows through multilateral channels, we have realigned internally the spending toward multilateral. As to what it does, it allows us to more quickly respond to situations that develo

Government Operations committee  The $4.5 million decrease in grants and contributions was due to several factors, as Mrs. Bossenmaier indicated—the end of a $12 million three-year program for rural water sanitation, a transfer to DFAIT for the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. There were also net transfers fro

Government Operations committee  It is a reduction in our overall—

Government Operations committee  That's correct.

Government Operations committee  The $9.2 million represents the portion of our IT budget that relates to telecommunications, data centres, and networks. We do retain a portion of our budget that deals with certain elements of our IT infrastructure and systems development, for example. So it's only a portion o

Government Operations committee  The reduction that you see for the fragile countries program activity of $8 million is largely due to the reduction that was stated earlier for Afghanistan. There are always in-year adjustments that occur in response to situations in fragile countries through our humanitarian ass

Government Operations committee  That's a reflection of an internal reallocation of, again, our estimate, based on last year's expenditures and our expenditure pattern and how we do our programming. Based on that analysis, and, for example, when we respond to international crises, we have reallocated money from