Foreign Affairs committee  I just have one comment, if I am allowed to respond to a point that Mr. Dewar made a little while ago. Boy, do we need a foreign policy that people can get hold of and talk about. It doesn't have to be forever and a day. It's not the gospel truth, but it needs to be articulated

Foreign Affairs committee  Could I make the point here that once CIDA was established as an agency by order in council, it kind of immunized itself from the rest of government? This made it very hard for the rest of government to deal with CIDA, except through either a very high level or maybe at the worki

Foreign Affairs committee  We're a very ad hoc country. We muddle through all the time. When you look at the approaches the people like the Americans, the British, the French, and others take, they're masters at looking at the big picture and the long picture. Quite often, in the face of people dismissing

Foreign Affairs committee  Indeed, I've made this point. Why have we until very recently been running a $30 million to $35 million poverty alleviation program in China? Has anybody been to Shanghai recently or looked at the Chinese military budget? It's $120 billion or something. They don't need $30 millio

Foreign Affairs committee  The short answer is that you need a CIDA minister, a minister for international development. I'd argue that one of the failings of the legislation is that it doesn't leave open the possibility of a lot more ministers. In the British system, they have six or seven or eight in thei

Foreign Affairs committee  If I could just make a comment, there have been some legitimate concerns since the financial crisis that ODA is going down or can go down. This has been a concern for 10 years, and ODA has doubled in the last 10 years, so I think there's a little bit of crying wolf about the need

Foreign Affairs committee  That's not a traditional CIDA operation, but they were slow to ramp up for that thing.

Foreign Affairs committee  I have no doubt about it. First of all, there's one minister instead of two or three, and one institution instead of two or three. They work these things out in-house at the ministerial level, but long before that at the deputy minister level, at the ADM level, at the DG level, a

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll give you a quick response. I don't think there's any “there” there—to quote President Obama in another context a week or two ago. I don't think you should put any weight, time, effort, or concern on that little bit of language. I think that little bit of language was prepare

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly. Let me just tell you that I wrote that article sitting at a kitchen table in a condo in Florida after the Ottawa Citizen had twigged me about it: “There's a debate going on here; you might not have heard. Could you say something about this?” I looked at two examples

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members. It's an honour to be here before you today. My background is 30 years or so in the Department of Foreign Affairs, largely in the international security field, but I've also spent time in other government departments. I was a