Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much for your interesting presentations. I want to pick up a couple of threads and take the opportunity at the outset to say how really genuinely appreciative and impressed I was by the arrangements through the Parliamentary Centre to visit Haiti during not the presidential election but the follow-up election. I was very, very impressed by the whole operation.
I have one observation and one question. Reference was made to possible vulnerability when things don't turn out ideally—and one can never guarantee that they will—if a country tends to be a solo operator in the international observation role and the technical assistance. My observation, rightly or wrongly—and I'd appreciate any correction of this impression if in fact it's not correct—is that Canada might have been pretty exposed in that sense in Haiti, because there didn't seem to be much sign of other major international observers. I guess the other thing related to that is that it's a pretty costly undertaking for one country when we have a lot of different commitments. I don't say that to take away from the incredibly good job done and the importance of it.
The second one is that you couldn't be anything but utterly, totally overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, the challenges that lay ahead, whether in terms of economic development, environmental remediation, basic infrastructure, human infrastructure, all of those things. How would you envision the kind of process that needs to flow through from that actual election process and clearly raising people's aspirations and expectations, and the follow-through on those many, many challenges?
Everything we've heard and observed was that it was just utterly unimaginable that it was going to be possible to eliminate corruption, for example, when the police were hardly ever paid, health workers were hardly ever paid, and prison guards were not paid. I'm asking, really, whether you have recommendations to put forward about how to ensure that there is some kind of appropriate magnitude of follow-through in what is such a herculean task.