Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, just very quickly, I think the issue here is vagueness with respect to accountability. If you have the Minister of Finance accountable to provide a report under that agreement, and in this particular provision you have the Minister of International Cooperation also adopting

Foreign Affairs committee  First of all, thank you very much for some very relevant questions and comments. We would be very pleased to provide a written analysis. I must say, in the process of trying to go through the due diligence and rigour you try to apply to legal analysis, that sometimes sounds lik

Foreign Affairs committee  Because I don't have the advantage of a legal background, I can just give you a very general answer. The very general answer is that about half of the OECD countries have different bits and pieces of legislation that look at aspects of a mandate or enabling legislation for develo

Foreign Affairs committee  The Agency has explored several avenues relating to a legislative mandate. In the last few months, the review of aid effectiveness was one of our priorities. We already mentioned that this file has four elements. Some of these elements can clarify others which can be pursued late

Foreign Affairs committee  Parliament has many accountability tools. The Minister of International Cooperation, who appeared before the committee three weeks ago, discussed with you CIDA’s report on plans and priorities that was tabled in Parliament as well as a detailed report on activities and outcomes.

Foreign Affairs committee  Mr. McKay, I'd like to answer that one, because it has to do with the amended proposal. The problem as we see it is that it is textual language drawn from the OECD, and it was never meant as legal language. It was always meant as a guideline, a policy statement that gives the sco

Foreign Affairs committee  From a policy perspective, yes, but not within a legal parameter.

Foreign Affairs committee  It could be interpreted as being very narrow--as excluding over 700 Canadian organizations to whom we provide funding.

Foreign Affairs committee  It would be a more encompassing definition.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for your comments. We would like to take a constructive approach to this bill. The identification of some issues will make it easier to see where it's possible to improve it. We are continuing our analysis of Bill C-293 from a technical perspective. It's up to committe

Foreign Affairs committee  We were taking into account both. We're not quite sure where the amendments are going to go, so we needed to make comments on both aspects.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Sorenson. It really is an honour to be here. It’s a privilege for us to appear before the committee. We're very pleased to continue to support the work of the committee. We've been following closely the progress of Bill C-293 an

Foreign Affairs committee  Whether you do this through policy or through legislative design, you need a clear, transparent, sophisticated, accountable result structure. That's the absolute core of it. I think that taking a look at what is an effective, accountable results structure allows you to make deci

Foreign Affairs committee  Let me, because in fact we spent a lot of time and attention on this particular one, and it actually started in Parliament. The management reporting and results structure that we have goes right down from a sector, to a country, to a project level. And we can actually roll up res

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about a specific document that the committee was interested in, and that was our OECD report on lessons learned in fragile states, so we came with that purpose in mind. Frankly, we would have been far better off to get into a direct discussion