That's an excellent question.
I'm going to disregard the present situation, in which people can't hug each other, and imagine we're living in a normal situation in which a man and a woman love and adore each other. When they see each other, they say they love and adore each other, but they don't embrace. Why? Because there's a barrier between them.
Take SMEs, for example. Most of the economic fabric of Quebec consists of SMEs. In Africa, 98% of businesses are SMEs. Here's a simple example. In the present situation in which governments of rich countries can afford to inject money into their economies, agreeing to a moratorium on African countries and thus condemning them to two, three or six months of indebtedness means that those countries are completely shut down and can't do anything.
So, it if we want to establish a new Canada-Africa partnership or to do business, I would emphasize that it's to our advantage that our client be in good financial health. That's why we say that helping African countries to recover, to establish their own sovereign funds and to relaunch their economies really works to the advantage of the Canadian economy, which aims to diversify. That's why we recommend two additional measures.
The federal government itself said it wanted to increase its aid to African countries slightly. I think it wanted to raise it by 50%. The first measure is to step up that increase, which will help those countries get themselves out of the rut I just described.
The second measure is to create a Canadian investment fund that would enable Canadian businesses to benefit from it. I've heard about infrastructure projects in which Canadian companies wanted to take part. However, since there was no support mechanism, those projects were abandoned. France and Germany have banks, such as Société Générale and Deutsche Bank, that work with European companies in Africa. In the United States, Citibank and J.P. Morgan work with American businesses in Africa…