Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for joining us, to our guests, and thank you for your presentation.
Has your department been asked to provide any assistance or lend any expertise to the Government of Afghanistan to help them with technical assistance or to assist in developing a mineral regime for their country? I did hear you say that you were asked—or somebody was here in 2008 and asked—and the only response seems to be that you've had some dialogue. I'm not criticizing you for that, but when you were asked by Mr. Obhrai about what particularly you could do, it seemed to be more of the same. I don't want to make too strong an analogy here, but we could tell the Afghan people, for example, that having a good education system will help them with economic and social progress, but that's not what they need. Are there any programs that you have? Are there any projects that you're undertaking here? Are there any hands-on things that you're doing or could do? I'm not saying that you haven't been asked to do them, that you don't have the mandate to do them, but we're looking at what it is that Canada could do to help the Afghans in the governance issues. For example, the Minister of Agriculture in Afghanistan happens to be an Afghan Canadian who develops a fair bit of his own expertise here in Canada, and he's actively working to help build a good agriculture system and whatnot.
We could suggest, for example, that the Government of Canada could help by having some expertise from your department or that you could bring together from other governments in Canada—because there's a lot of expertise around this country—to provide assistance to Afghanistan. I'll just give one example from the World Bank, which notes the long lead time for the development of a mine, the lack of support infrastructure, and the need for the Afghan government to develop effective revenue management and benefit-sharing policy: they are identifying the problem that they need to have a policy development. They need to work out some of these issues that you're talking about in terms of revenue and benefit sharing in order for this economic development to take place. And this is not old news; this is September 2010, so it's relatively current.
Is it possible that your department would be able to or be in a position to provide more than just the dialogue you're having with the ambassador and so on, to actually develop a program or project and say, okay, we have some people who are prepared to work in Afghanistan with you to help develop these policies, identify some of the roadblocks, etc.? Is that something that you think, if given the request from the Government of Canada, you would be able to provide?