Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to our guests.
I'm going to start off with some numbers, because we had a bit of confusion in the House today on what we've actually done. There have been some concerns raised since the government decided to extend the military mission and cut back on the civilian mission. In fact, there was a plan being put forward to the government up until two weeks ago that would have put the emphasis on the civilian mission over the military one. It was worked on for two years, they have a copy of it, and it's available to anyone who wants to see it.
The numbers are interesting: the government is going to reduce the development budget from what the bureaucracy had proposed. The bureaucracy had proposed a civilian-only mission of $550 million over three years, and now that is going to be cut to $300 million. Now, of course, we are going to have $1.5 billion for the military.
Today in the House we had the minister initially say that we had trained 3,000 teachers. According to the government's own report, it's actually half that. She then said we trained only 158. We don't know how many people have been trained. Mr. Obhrai is now the new parliamentary secretary for CIDA, so maybe he can mop this up for us. What we do know is that the government is going to cut the budget for the civilian mission drastically.
The interesting point here is that there is a focus on training troops. We will have 134,000 troops trained—we know that—up until this fall. That's the number that has been thrown around. The original goal back in 2006 was to train 134,000. The new number that has been floated around is 171,000, which the Pentagon said—before Canada chipped in to help—it was going to have trained within a year. You don't have to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner in mathematics to figure this out. We will have a sufficient number of troops trained already, 134,000, the 2006 number. Even if you agreed that you needed another 40,000 troops, these troops, according to the Pentagon, would have been trained already by the United States.
If we need more “guns and butter”, as the economists say, do we need more training of troops? If so, where does that come from, or do we need more civilian resources, diplomacy, transitional justice, and development?
I'm asking a bit of a rhetorical question here. But according to your brief and your read on the government's own report card, they haven't made headway on reconciliation. However, you're saying that there is a way to do this.
How much money do you think should be invested in reconciliation? If you don't have a specific number, you could provide us with some of the initiatives on the ground that could be costed in the near future. Most of us want to debate this in the House, and we would have liked to vote. Alas, we're left with this forum to substitute for that one. Do you have some intelligence on how much we can do on reconciliation, or any numbers associated with it?