Evidence of meeting #14 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was haiti.
Latin America Regional Officer, Rights and Democracy
No, this is the one you mentioned, which is supporting....
Latin America Regional Officer, Rights and Democracy
No, it's the one that's on our website.
Conservative
Latin America Regional Officer, Rights and Democracy
These are projects that we're in the process of reflecting on whether to continue in the future. The one we're currently working on is what you mentioned.
The crux of the project or what we see as essential, given that our mandate is to work on the promotion of democratic development and human rights, is the participation of different sectors of society in the democratic process. In Haiti there have been instances of marginalized sectors of society or groups of individuals coming together and attempting to participate, but it has never been at a level where the impact has been noticeable. Certainly there are examples of that, but a lot of the time we'll see NGOs and civil society groups protesting and denouncing. When it comes to making propositions and engaging with government officials and those who are deciding on public policy, the connection between the government and civil society is not as strong.
So what we propose to do is to work to train civil society organizations on conducting advocacy campaigns, including how to do research on a particular issue, whether it's on the right to water or the right to education, or civil and political rights, judicial reform, or women's rights; and to find out who are the deciders in government who will make decisions on these public policies; and to know how to engage them in a constructive dialogue; and then basically to lobby for these public policies to come forth. This is basically the project that we're working on. It's very much centred on training NGOs to negotiate and dialogue with their counterparts in government.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
All right. My perception is that it's not a very strong civil society to begin with, so I don't know if you're working in a vacuum in trying to train a very small group of people on what to do.
I'll go back to a reference that Mr. Roy made. You talked about a 100% result or whether or not we can get 100% results at the end of the day, and I'm beginning to come to the conclusion, the further we get into this study, that one of the problems is that we don't ever measure anything. We don't measure the results of any of our interventions. We have no way of knowing whether we're getting anywhere or getting success. Perhaps we should be using or should have, in the "techno-lingual" metrics, some sort of goals and objectives and have a way of knowing how many police officers we've trained and whether they result in the rule of law, and whether things are relevant.
Is there anything you're going to be doing that would...? Let me ask first, in setting up this project—and presumably you got funding from the government—were you asked to establish measurable results and to report back on those? And how would you measure success?
Finally, since you do say security is the number one priority, objectively speaking, would it make more sense for us to be funding more efforts on that front, rather than the kind of stuff you're talking about doing?
I know that may create a bit of a conflict of interest for you, but—
Conservative
President, Rights and Democracy
If we don't have security, the rest will not stand.
How do we measure success? Even in human rights, we have to be able at some point to know how many people, how many women, how many kids, how many Haitians have been protected because of the mechanism that we hope the high commission will put in place. This we can measure. How many people in jail today in Haiti will have a decent trial and will be in a position to say at the end of it that it was a fair trial? We can measure that at some point, if you want to measure things.
Conservative
NDP
Alexa McDonough NDP Halifax, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I very much apologize for having been late. I had to be in the House until I made my way over here. I apologize if I'm backtracking on some issues that you've dealt with.
I'd like to pick up on two things quickly. One is the reference to democracy building through strengthening the participation of civil society, which means learning skills advocacy and the working of the democratic process.
My recent trip to Haiti was a fabulous exposure to much of what was going on. I came away with the sense that there is genuine optimism and some basis for optimism that some things could really get on track and stay on track. But I was actually quite distressed by the sense that I got, at least in the limited time we were there, that those representatives of civil society with whom we were meeting really seemed to be there more as the eyes and ears, or the spokespersons, for either American commercial interests or the American notion of what would be acceptable in Haiti to keep the U.S. from pulling the plug.
That's a bit of an overstatement, and I don't want to characterize everyone that way. But I was really distressed that when one asked why in any of the gatherings, given the rural agricultural predominance on which the economy is based--about 90% of it, I think--there were no representatives of, say, agricultural workers or small cooperatives that might be involved in agricultural marketing, or production, or whatever. There were no representatives of teachers, or of health personnel, or of anyone you could remotely call workers, whether they would be factory workers or jail workers.
I'm just trying to get a sense of how you identify with whom you're going to be connecting and working. And I'm wondering if in your run-up to launching this project you have some comments you could share with us about the existing nature of the civil society on the scene.
President, Rights and Democracy
I will ask Nicholas to give a substantive answer to the question, but I'll just make a general remark.
Of course, the civil society has, in the last decades, been dispersed. Four million Haitians have left the country, many of them because they were fighting for rights, and they were forced to go. But we still find in Haiti women's groups, student groups, agricultural workers, people working in coopératives d'épargne et de crédit, who have stayed there and who want things changed.
As I mentioned earlier, we have been able to help them in the past--and by "we", I mean Canada and CIDA--but I think we have to ask whether we can rebuild the women's movement in the larger sense, whether we can help rebuild the student movement in Haiti. I think we have to answer yes to those questions and start in the new context. When 63% of Haitians have voted, have exercised their political rights, this is a new context, and we have to give our trust to those who have stayed in Haiti to rebuild, and there are a lot of them.
Latin America Regional Officer, Rights and Democracy
Your question is very important because there is a tendency in Haiti to focus on the groups in Port-au-Prince and not to see all the groups that are working all over the country.
Maybe I can answer a bit of your concern, too, Mr. Van Loan, at the same time.
The first thing we did when we went to start this project was to see what groups had done positive things already, things that we could build on, use as examples for other groups. We so often go to a country and take examples from across the world and say, "Look, it worked in Morocco, and it can work here," and that's a complete disconnect. We wanted to find very good Haitian examples of success. And there are many. It's just a matter of taking those and really systematizing them and getting some lessons learned from them.
Monsieur Roy mentioned the women's movement. There are a lot of women's rights groups who have worked very hard to get a decree law to criminalized abortion. That was a huge success. It took them a long time to do that. They worked a long time to create a ministry for la condition féminine, which is a ministry specifically charged with working on women's rights and the gender issues in Haiti and to mainstream that across the government. It's a very big success. In fact, the new minister comes from civil society.
There are also groups that have worked on justice that have done national consultations. We've tried to take these groups and say, "Okay, what have you done that's been a success? Let's try to show that to other groups." We've done that.
We are currently identifying other groups that may not have been traditionally the groups we hear about all the time, the ones you may have met with, that have had partners in the U.S. and so on. One of the networks we plan to work with on giving this advocacy training is a network of handicapped people. Blind patients--nobody thinks of handicapped people in Haiti because there are so many other problems. How do we deal with that issue? There is the right to water, and groups that are fighting for that. There are a lot peasant groups and labour groups in the north and in all of the different regions that are working very hard to bring their proposals to government. Because everything is centred in Port-au-Prince, it's very hard for them to get their voice heard. We want to give them the tool.
Conservative
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chairman,
Mr. Roy, on your comments earlier, where you suggested that certainly security is one of the things that must come about first before many other issues can, I think it would follow through with the interim cooperation framework that was set out as a master plan some three years ago. It was very specific in outcomes. It had 25,000 homes to be renovated; it had some 600 schools to be renovated. These are hard numbers that I think it would be very easy to account for now. It would be easy to give some measurable listing of successes and outcomes on it, as well as many of the other initiatives that are on here. I think it would be helpful for us if we could have some kind of countering update on each and every one of these sections, as to who is working on it and what organization, and what their success has been to date; and then maybe try to work from that same framework on a continuation of what successes you would have in the future.
It would seem to me that one of the major reasons we're hearing for why so many of these initiatives weren't brought to fruition is security. Would you agree that the first and foremost place would be to start...? And this is the Prime Minister himself who in his speech said we must maintain order and security, ensure the safety of people and property, number one, and then possibly we can look at all of the other initiatives in the order of their priorities.
President, Rights and Democracy
The Prime Minister, in his discours de politique générale, said that the most significant aspiration of the Haitians today was the security question. At least it was like that prior to the election. When you were with new friends in Haiti, people who you didn't know except that you were with them the day before, working together, and then you had a chance to have lunch or a beer with them, were always talking about security. Everyone was talking about how they would return to their home that day, about what happened to their friends and to their neighbours in other parts of the city. People were fearful. How can you behave normally? How can you do what you have to do when you're really fearful?
I'm sure that some members of the committee have seen people going for groceries with arms, people going to get gas at the gas station with arms, people going to buy drugs in small shops taking arms along because of the looters. I think it's very difficult to understand.
I'm sure you don't understand what I'm talking about. It's in another context, another experience.
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
But would you not say that one of the reasons they still live in fear is that there have been ten police officers killed since May, two of them decapitated? I would certainly say there's still terror, in the public's eyes, in many of these situations. It was clearly delineated here in the report three years ago, under security and police, that there were thousands and thousands of police officers to be trained. Disarmament hasn't happened. Work in the justice penitentiary institutions that was supposed to take place didn't happen either. Should we not have an update on why these things didn't happen?
I think there would have been organizations earmarked to apply for and to look after these projects. Would the project that you're proposing be a duplication of somebody else's effort that might just be stalled for now?
President, Rights and Democracy
I think you're right to say that we have to evaluate what happens and who is in charge, and why in some instances we have had limited results or in other instances no results at all. I certainly believe we have to do that.
But we have also to take into account that this period of transition is over. There was an election. It was a very costly experience, in all senses. It was a success, and 63% of the Haitians went to vote. Sixty-three per cent of them went to vote: that's quite a message for me.
That's why I used the expression "severe", and I know people did not like that very much. At this time, we are not in the nineties; we are in the first decade of this century. We'll not do that for a third time. We have to succeed. We have to measure, and we have to be sure that we progress. If we don't progress after 18 months or 24 months, maybe we should return to the program itself and change it. We have to succeed this time.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Roy.
Certainly I think that's what a lot of people are suggesting here: we need to go back to the programs, take a look, re-evaluate, and put in some methodology to be able to assess what's working and what isn't. We've had people come before our committee who have said, "We have been involved for two years there. We've spent lots of money there, but we can't show one step of improvement since we started." That is problematic for most members of this committee.
Mr. Wilfert, go ahead, please.
Liberal
Bryon Wilfert Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Mr. Chairman, very briefly, in a society where democracy is alien, in a society where the culture has not known a real, true democracy, we seem to have, from all the reports of the witnesses, in my view, a failure to understand the situation. We have a failure to plan properly, we have a failure to evaluate properly, and the results have confirmed that. It's like putting people of goodwill in a row boat and giving each of them an oar. They're all rowing in all sorts of directions, and they're going absolutely nowhere.
After all of the time and all of the money and all of the different governments--we started at the top, and I won't bore the committee with my thoughts on that—we haven't really, at the local level, dealt with trying to empower people, whether it's with clean water or it's with employment. We haven't done the basics. At the same time, we have another government, which we had hoped for, as we did before.
Why is it that we, along with the international community, have had, in my view, such a very bad record on this subject? I haven't heard one witness come forth to say they understand what's gone wrong and that here is the kind of solution with which we, along with the right partners, can correct the situation.
Is it correctable?
Conservative
President, Rights and Democracy
I share the question. I'm not sure whether I have an answer, except to say, as I think I mentioned earlier, we maybe also have to try to build a little more balanced view.
Elections Canada succeeded in the last 18 months in Haiti. They started from nothing, and there were two elections with quite decent results. People who know the media in Latin America will tell you that the coverage of the presidential and legislative campaign in Haiti was one of the best done in the Americas by national television. I think we have spent money to help this television rebuild itself, etc.
I quote the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who said we'll be there for the long run. Maybe it will take more than four or five years to turn over such a situation, and we will have to be there longer than that. It may be less costly to be there for 12 or 15 years than to return four times over five years and start from scratch each time.
Liberal
Bryon Wilfert Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
In order to be there for the long run we would have to plan effectively with other governments, the Government of Haiti, NGOs, and different organizations, but I don't hear that. I don't hear that there is in fact any real sense of coordination. We understand these mistakes have occurred, but we haven't been able to see the political will to deal with it, either there or elsewhere.
President, Rights and Democracy
It may look like that, but to be fair to all, I can say that in the last months we have been in many meetings in this country with CIDA and others. Rights and Democracy have had meetings with 40 groups that work in Haiti and came from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick--all over the place. There is a sense that we have to do that more and plan together.
I mentioned earlier that we have this project trying to organize the younger generation in Haiti around the democracy culture question. We do it with many partners--Canadians, Americans, and others who are in Haiti and can help us because they have their connections, their networking.
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
Monsieur Roy, one of the concerns of the committee is what has been happening and whether there is any accountability for the money that's spent. But the other question might be that if we've seen no improvements on the ground and we're not seeing any changes over the period of time.... In this case there's an allotment of $90 million for security and police, and another allotment of $22 million for the justice system--justice and penitentiary.
Would that indicate that the money simply hasn't been spent or that those projects didn't go ahead? Are you offering to start a project that would not have been instituted, and perhaps that money and commitment might still be there, earmarked for your project?