Thank you very much. I would like to thank this committee for inviting me to speak to you. I tremendously appreciate this opportunity.
I will speak to only a small section of Bill C-38, and this is division 33 of part 4, the decision to close out the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. That is my concern as the former chair of what was commonly known as Rights and Democracy.
I must say that at one level this has been a difficult process for me, because I spent much of my adult life engaged in trying to protect human rights, to promote democracy. It had certainly been a key part of my life for three years, but eventually I had to come to the conclusion that Rights and Democracy, as an organization, had some fundamental structural and process problems that went back all the way to its original drafted legislation.
It had an inadequately defined structure. It turned out to have been a recipe for problems. For two decades, contrary to certain urban legends, Rights and Democracy lurched from crisis to crisis. We did our best to fix it, but it involved misunderstandings and distortions from the very beginning of its foundation in 1988.
There were particularly two myths that developed. One was that Rights and Democracy was an independent organization. I think it's very important for us to understand that Rights and Democracy was not an independent organization. It was taxpayer funded. It was, from the beginning, a shared governance agency, a “short-arm” agency. It had to operate within the parameters of the policies laid down by the government of the day, and it was responsible to Parliament. It was not an NGO.
Second, throughout its history, there was the myth that it was some non-partisan organization. It was meant to be. This was what was shocking when I came in. In fact, what I and others found with Rights and Democracy when we came in three years ago was that it was an organization run, wrongly, as an independent NGO, with private ideological philanthropy representing a narrow ideological perspective. Using public funds was pursued as if it were an entitlement.
I have no objection to anyone privately funding or privately speaking up for any particular cause, but it's something else when taxpayer money is used for particular private political and ideological philanthropy.
The result was that you had a distorted and hopelessly contradictory organization that functioned very poorly in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was certainly the wrong vehicle at the wrong time to deal with the crucial issues of human rights and promotion of democracy in the 21st century.