Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 4th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Welcome. It being 3:30, we will call this meeting to order.

This is the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, meeting 19. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are continuing our study on democratic development.

We're very pleased to have two guests with us today. We have George Perlin, an emeritus professor and fellow in the school of policy studies at Queen's University. His teaching and research are focused on issues of democratic development. He is also a fellow at the Institute for Research on Public Policy, where he is directing a project to assess international assistance policies for the promotion of democratic development. Among his many accomplishments and activities, he directs a project funded by CIDA to provide Ukraine with a comprehensive program of professional and post-secondary education concerning democracy and human rights.

In the first hour we're also pleased to have Dr. Jeffrey Kopstein, director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Munk Centre for International Studies. He is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He has argued that there are differences between European and American approaches to democracy promotion, but that Canada can pursue a distinctive approach that is complementary to both and would strengthen the transatlantic relationship. In his view, democracy promotion should be a leading element of Canada's foreign policy, and Canada should seek to renew interest in the community of democracies created in Warsaw in 2000.

We look forward to hearing from both of you. The way the committee operates is that we give each one of our presenters ten minutes and then there will be questions from our colleagues following that.

I'll turn it over to Mr. Perlin. Welcome.

[Dr. George Perlin, Emeritus Professor and Fellow, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I understand that later today you're to hear from my colleague, Mr. Axworthy, about the Democracy Canada Institute. It is a proposal that I know is important for you to consider. How one ought to deliver democracy assistance is an important question. I'd like to suggest, however, that there is a prior question that needs to be asked. We have to decide first what we're going to do--what kinds of activities Canada should undertake.

The answer to that question is not an easy one, because international assistance to democratic development is a vast and complex enterprise. If you count individual states, multilateral organizations, and private foundations, there are over a hundred separate donors delivering assistance in this field. Collective international effort embraces thousands of projects and annual expenditures in the billions of dollars.

The complexity of that environment is important for you to understand as you look at what Canadian policy may be. We have to establish our role in that context. I want to say a few things about that, but first there are a couple of things I need to clear up.

First, I want to make a distinction between short-term interventions to deal with special situations and those that involve longer-term democracy-building activities. By short-term I mean activities such as election monitoring or policing in unstable situations. These are activities where we send people in on a short-term basis to carry out specific projects, specific kinds of activities. The recipient countries are essentially acted upon. We are there to perform a task, and then we remove ourselves. This is an important kind of activity.

Longer-term interventions involve something quite different. Their essence is knowledge transfer--sharing our experience to assist a state in making the transition to democracy. Democracy-building, by its nature, is a long-term exercise, and I stress the point about knowledge transfer. That's the essence of this kind of activity. It's very different from the kind of activity we undertake when we become involved in election monitoring, for instance.

So to understand the scope of the field we also need to clarify what is meant by democratic development. This may be surprising to you, but this is quite a contentious issue in scholarly literature, and it's a contentious issue among donors. People use different terms to describe political interventions.

I want to stipulate a definition here, because I think there's a convergence among these different definitions that the donors use. This definition is one that I think reflects consensus now among the major donors. Put in a very simple kind of way, I understand democratic development to be activity that is aimed at creating systems of governance organized around the values of freedom, equality, and justice that are embedded in the liberal democratic foundations of our own system.

I stress that we are talking about an entire system of governance. I emphasize this because of these differences about what the components of democratic development may be. If you look, for instance, at CIDA's policy statement, you'll see a definition of a commitment in the area of political intervention that involves something called good governance, something called the promotion of human rights, rule of law, democratization, and civil society.

When I talk about a whole system, I'm making the argument that you have to see all these things as being the components of democratic development. If you define it that way, you'll see that the compass for assistance to democratic development has a very wide scope and a wide array of objectives and types of activities.

In my own research with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and in working with colleagues who are producing papers on that series on democratic development that I'm directing for IRPP, I've identified 50 different kinds of objectives to which democracy assistance has been applied. So you can get some sense of the breadth of this approach. Given the broad scale of the collective international effort and the presence of multilaterals, individual states, and private donors, how can we in Canada be most effective in the forms of assistance we offer? That's a question I posed for my colleagues working on the series at IRPP. I framed it in terms of two questions.

The first question is whether there are particular competencies in Canada that we should emphasize and in which perhaps we should become specialists. In fact, I think there are areas where we have some special competence, but their utility is going to vary from context to context. So I don't think we should become specialists. I think we should draw on our whole experience in building and maintaining democracy.

The second question is whether there are functional areas where other donors are already doing an effective job and where interventions by Canada would, at best, have marginal effect and, at worst, would be redundant. This is a very important question, because there are some activities that have attracted a large number of donors. In answering this, I think we can best respond by dealing with situations on a case-by-case basis. I stress again my point that we need to use a whole-of-governance-system approach in defining what we're prepared to do. We need to make decisions about what we are going to do in a particular country based on a needs assessment for that country, taking account of what other donors are doing. So we'll answer that question about duplicating the efforts of others by taking that kind of approach. I wouldn't rule out us doing anything, but I think we have to see the context and understand the specific context of a particular country before we can make those decisions.

These are two general answers, and perhaps not what you'd like to hear. But having said this, I think as your committee continues its activities--and I know of some others where I hope there will be much more detailed information about specific things that are being done--you'll begin to get to some specifics on this.

I want to add that I think there are some areas where we in Canada can make some distinctive contributions. The first one is that there is a significant need for research on how to maximize the effectiveness of democracy assistance. We don't have effective tools for evaluating democracy assistance. We have tools for evaluating how we manage projects, but we don't have categories of analysis or tools for doing the research we need to deal with and to establish desired outcomes.

What I'm saying is I think we could contribute something by Canada becoming a centre for research. It would serve a vital need of consolidating knowledge on lessons learned and in trying to establish a set of best practices for the delivery of this kind of assistance. That's one area where I think Canada may have a distinctive contribution to make.

Another criticism of work in this field is fragmentation of effort by donors' lack of coherence in the programs taken into particular countries. We could do work in Canada to develop strategic plans for democracy assistance in the particular countries where we want to intervene. Again, I stress that in my view there's a need for a kind of whole-of-governance strategy based upon research on the peculiar circumstances of a particular country: its characteristics, where it stands in the process of democratization, where it's coming from, and what kind of experience it had before entering into the process of attempting to develop democracy.

We need strategic plans; we need strategic planning. If you look at the critical research assessing assistance to democracy, you'll see this is one of the issues that's raised. I think Canada could do something useful by doing this kind of research. And if we were to do so, if we were to start establishing these kinds of plans, I think we could deal with one of the most telling criticisms of the work in assistance to democratic development: the lack of coordination among donors, including the duplication of effort and neglect of important elements in the process of democracy-building.

The third thing I think we could do here is establish a training program for practitioners, or for people who want to make careers in this field, in the delivery of democracy assistance. I don't mean this just for Canadians; there is a need for a program of this kind on an international basis. Think about the large number of donors and practitioners. What I'm suggesting is that they need some help, some special training to do their work well.

In this respect, the one final comment I want to make is that from my observations in the field, and from what I've learned in research about what other Canadian practitioners are doing, our way of working with recipient countries has been pretty effective. I don't want to claim there's a uniquely Canadian approach, but I do think there are more or less effective ways of delivering this kind of assistance, and ours has been consistently effective. We're widely seen to be more sensitive to distinctive conditions in recipient countries, more open to local advice and engagement, and more inclusive in our relations with partners.

I think I'll stop there with my general comments.

I understand that the document I prepared on what we've been doing in the Ukraine has been circulated, so I'd be happy to answer any questions. In explanation, much of what I've had to say to you here comes not just from my examination of the literature of this field, but also from my own work in the field in the Ukraine over the past nine years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Perlin.

Mr. Kopstein.

[Professor Jeffrey Kopstein, Director, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, University of Toronto , As an Individual]

Good afternoon. I want to thank you for inviting me to appear before your committee today.

Democracy promotion is a vitally important topic, which deserves the attention of all Canadians. I say this knowing that many Canadians tend to be wary of democracy promotion. Why are they wary? It's hard to say, but I believe it is because it smacks of telling others how they should govern themselves. As well-intentioned as this reservation is, it is misplaced. Rather than casting democracy promotion aside as un-Canadian or attempting to understand it in terms of pre-existing categories of human rights or the responsibility to protect, Canadians need to think about what our distinctive approach to democracy promotion should be and what kinds of strengths we can bring to the project.

Why should democracies bother with promoting their form of government in other parts of the world? The answer is not simply that it corresponds to our highest ideals of government, but also that it serves our national interests. Democracies are more peaceful. They govern their economies better, and they make better trading partners.

It is true that for many Canadians, democracy promotion has a bad name. Many associate it with the huge setbacks in Iraq. Promoting democracy in the Arab world has not been and will not be easy. This much I think we have all learned. But the difficulties facing our fellow democracies, the United States and Great Britain, in Iraq should not be cause for abandoning the long-term project of democratizing the Arab world.

If the origins of 9/11 are truly to be found in the modernization crisis of the Arab world, in their closed and repressive societies, and above all in their dictatorial governments, then surely the failure to democratize that part of the world will only prolong and reinforce the dangers associated with radical Islam, something that justifiably frightens all Canadians.

Democracy promotion is important for another reason. We are currently living through a backlash against democracy around the world. In the past several years a new group of nations have formed what I would call a new authoritarian international. Among the major countries in this group I would include Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and China. What makes this group and others extraordinary is not only that they have bucked the trend toward democracy but that several have backslid from democracy into outright authoritarianism or semi-authoritarianism. Even more importantly, they have begun to cooperate with each other--for example, through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization--and, perhaps even more ominously, copy from each other legislation designed to undermine the work of foreign-financed pro-democracy NGOs and civic organizations.

If continued, this long-run trend can only make the world a more dangerous place, a place packed full of governments unconstrained by their own populations or, worse, governments prepared to view their own people in instrumental terms, as tools in some sort of struggle against imagined enemies.

What should Canada do? First, it is important to distinguish, as my colleague just did, between the short-term and long-term benefits of democracy promotion. Although there may be some quick wins, clearly this should be a policy for the long haul. The benefits will not come tomorrow or next week, but should be thought of in terms of years, perhaps decades.

Second, as far as concrete policies are concerned, it is probably helpful to briefly examine the successes and failures of the other big democracy promoters in the world: the United States and the European Union. Democracy promotion was first put on the transatlantic agenda after 1989 during and after the fall of communism in eastern Europe. The Americans considered 1989 to be a largely bottom-up phenomenon, one performed by civil society. The job of democracy promotion then was to back civic groups, hold elections, and write constitutions. By the early 1990s, most of my friends in academia and government in the U.S. considered democracy secured in eastern Europe and democracy promotion to have been a success.

Europeans, interestingly, thought about all of this differently. For them, 1989 and the fall of communism were the beginning of the story, not the end. Rather than focusing on civil society, the European Union concentrated on changing the very nature of the post-communist state. First what they said was, in effect—and I put this in quotation marks even though no one actually ever said this—“Yes, we'll let you into the European Union, but on the condition that you change all of your national legislation to make it compatible with EU laws on politics, economies, society, the environment, in short, everything.” This amounted to 80,000 pages of legislation adopted by all candidate member states.

The EU remained suspicious of the big demonstrations that so thrilled Americans in 1989, and Canadians of course. Their idea of promoting democracy was not bottom up but rather top down, dictated by Brussels. Democracy for the EU was not consolidated in the post-communist world until May 1, 2004, the day that eight new European members joined.

In subsequent years, this was the framework that Americans and Europeans were working with. It explains the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. Clearly, the script Americans were working with in Iraq in 2003 was eastern Europe, 1989: bring down the leader, pull down his statue, and let civil society take over. Although this has not really worked in Iraq, it was a good model for assisting in the revolutions in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005: NGOs with foreign help bring down authoritarian regimes--end of story. Yet clearly this model is not enough, for none of these countries has been a perfect democracy and at least two have backslid, have deteriorated.

If we look at the EU top-down model, by contrast, it works beautifully for countries that have a chance to join the EU, but it is all but powerless in other parts of the world that will not be joining the EU anytime soon. The bottom line is that, to date, apart from enlargement, the EU does not have a viable democracy promotion model.

Canada should draw lessons from the strengths and weaknesses of both the EU and the U.S. approaches. We should proceed on both fronts, both in supporting civil society and NGOs on the one hand, and in using the powerful tools of intergovernmental and multilateral institutions on the other. It is important to remember that democracy promotion does not preclude contact with undemocratic regimes. But it is crucial, at the same time, to get the message right. That will be the central challenge for any Canadian government.

As it trades with and engages dictators in less-than-democratic regimes, Canada should continue to back NGOs and civic groups abroad in those same countries, especially in the Arab-Muslim world and in backsliding democracies that I've mentioned already. Canada should continue to foster contact between the citizens of our country and democracies at risk in the Balkans, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union.

In this respect, l was disappointed to learn of the recent cancellation by the current government of the young professionals international program that has allowed the University of Toronto--my institution--and other organizations to send dozens of Canadians as interns to these countries over the years, and in turn receive students from their institutions for internships in Canada. This is the kind of long-term spadework that must continue and should be part of Canada's democracy promotion tool kit.

I should also add that Canada has nothing like the Fulbright scholar program through which hundreds of leading intellectuals from authoritarian countries have managed to spend time in the United States. This is most unfortunate, because it would be so easy to implement, very cheap to run, and the long-term benefits are proven. First-hand experience with Canadian multiculturalism is not something that foreign scholars soon forget. That is our strength and we should play to it. I should also add that Canada has nothing like the National Endowment for Democracy. That would be a good idea too.

At the same time, as we continue to engage authoritarian states in bilateral and trade relations and in multilateral organizations, we should begin to think of new forums for privileging democracies internationally, in both intergovernmental and multilateral organizations, to make clear the cost to be paid for non-democratic behaviour. This is something the EU has done well with its candidate members.

How can we adopt this model for Canada? Here, if we want to think big for a moment, what I would propose is a caucus or a community of democracies, either within or outside the United Nations. Canada might potentially have great credibility in putting this forward. The UN itself is one venue for this, but it may be discredited regarding democracy promotion--we should be honest with ourselves--especially after the debacle with the Human Rights Council. An alternative, one that I and many of my colleagues have been discussing for quite some time is an attempt to breathe life into a formal organization, the Community of Democracies, which was initiated in Warsaw in the year 2000. And I'd be happy to talk more about that later.

Let me conclude by reiterating that democracy promotion is not something that will yield rapid results. It should be a long-term, multi-pronged policy that should mesh with the other tools of statecraft. If done correctly, I believe it will provide a valuable regulatory ideal for Canada and it will make Canada and our world a better and safer place in which to live.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Kopstein and Mr. Perlin.

We'll go into our first round, which will be a five-minute round.

Mr. Patry.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you both very much for your remarks.

My first question is for either of you. One of the obstacles of democracy promotion is the perception of the local society, which perceives it as interference in internal affairs. What is the best approach for this, and how can we maximize the benefits of our aid without being seen as interfering in domestic affairs of other countries?

My second question is for Mr. Perlin. You mention in your remarks that we don't have the tools for the evaluation of our democratic assistance. Does “we” mean Canada doesn't have the tools, or the United Nations, or all the world, all the countries? Knowing that our committee is right now doing a study of democratic development, what would you recommend as a tool for evaluation? Without evaluation, we won't know where we're going.

Thank you.

[Prof. Jeffrey Kopstein]

Your question is that if we're actually involved in democracy promotion, the project of democracy is perceived as being something foreign, as being something imposed, as a kind of imperial project. That's how I interpret your question.

The best way to proceed is, first of all, at the level of human contact, NGOs. If governments are involved in those, that's not perceived as being something foreign, right?

The Fulbright scholars program in the United States actually had a very good reputation abroad, even at the height of the Cold War. There were still Fulbright scholars coming over from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. It was an indirect form of democracy promotion.

As far as direct forms are concerned, your question is a very important one. The government should probably not get involved directly in promoting democracy. It should probably get involved through the creation of something like a Canadian endowment for democracy, an arm's-length organization that would be.... You know the details of this kind of thing better than I, but it would be, in effect, a crown corporation that would be separate from the ministries per se.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Perlin.

[Dr. George Perlin]

Rather than speaking to that issue, I'm going to speak directly to the second question.

The answer to your question is that the tools don't exist, period. It's not just a Canadian problem. If you look back at the journal articles over the past five, six, or seven years, there are two new journals that have appeared since this was done. One, published in Britain, is called Democratization, and many of the articles in that journal are focused on how well democratization works. There is a particular series of articles there, two articles in particular by one individual in which this question was specifically raised.

In part, it's a problem that we haven't found a way to pull together these different categories of assistance. We don't have what I'd call a holistic approach, so it's hard to find measures. That doesn't mean you can't find some framework for doing it. The argument that has been made in a couple of articles in Democratization, the argument that I want to make, is that if you develop country-specific strategies, you can identify there what the needs are against some model of how a developed democracy should look, you can identify the elements of success and failure in that country against that model, and you can then develop some evaluations of that country's progress and the kinds of things that need to be done.

At the moment, the kind of evaluation research we have, results-based management, for example, which CIDA uses, I find a very effective management tool for the work I'm doing in Ukraine. But the day my project finishes and I write my report for CIDA and it goes on the shelf, that's when the work we've done, the assessment of that work's impact on Ukraine, will cease. So what I'm arguing is that we need something at the theoretical and conceptual level that will give us measurable tools.

May I add just one other comment to this?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Please do.

[Dr. George Perlin]

There is a big difference between how you evaluate this, the successes and failures here, and how you evaluate the successes and failures in the delivery of economic development assistance.

If you put a pump in a village, the pump is there after you go. If you've given them some tools to make the pump work and some training, it will continue to work. But we don't have the same kinds of specific criteria that we can apply here. That's one of the difficulties. So I'm arguing for a theoretical exercise that will produce conceptual categories that practitioners can apply.

We need to connect the academic community, which is thinking about these issues, and the practitioner community. That's a major problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Perlin.

Madame Barbot, you have five minutes.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Yes, thank you.

Thank you Mr. Perlin and Mr. Kopstein, your presentations were most interesting.

Mr. Perlin, I particularly appreciated the fact that you emphasized the context in which you intervene. In my opinion, too often, we….

[Dr. George Perlin]

I'm not getting the translation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Turn to channel 2 or 3. Are you getting the translation?

[Dr. George Perlin]

Yes, okay.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Mr. Perlin, I was saying that I appreciated the fact that you emphasized the context in which you intervene, that is to say you don’t simply go and try to promote democracy and certain activities without taking into account the overall situation that is already there.

I am also very concerned about the question of measurement. I understand what you’re saying, that we must have some kind of measurement criteria. However, you also mentioned training programs. You talked about programs that could be set up in the future.

Could these programs not be a concrete means of measuring results? Maybe these programs could, in the long term, perhaps help us identify certain indicators in future behaviour, in future events, that would give us some idea of the training programs’ impact. However, could you tell us to whom these training programs would apply?

I also have a question for Mr. Kopstein. When you talk about establishing a caucus for democracy either within or without the United Nations, I wonder if this doesn’t minimize the United Nations’ role. What greater role would this caucus play that is not already fulfilled by the United Nations?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Madame Barbot.

Monsieur Perlin.

[Dr. George Perlin]

I think Professor Kopstein would be better equipped to answer the question about the apprenticeship program. I was thinking about this primarily in theoretical and conceptual terms in terms of developing some tools that we could work with.

I think the problem now is that we don't have any tools. It's possible we could use something like that apprenticeship program, I guess, to put people out there to do the field work. The problem is that if we send them out there now, they don't have anything to work with. They have no model, no set of categories to do the assessments. So that was my concern there.

You asked me about who I had in mind when I talked about creating a training program here. Again, I'm not just talking about Canada, I'm talking about a need generally. We send people out to do this kind of work--and I mean not just Canada, but other donors as well--without a really solid understanding of how one goes about this. On the earlier question about political intervention, for instance, manifestly this is a much more sensitive area of intervention. How do you deal with that?

So what I'm arguing for is a training program, some kind of training centre or program here, that would prepare practitioners--and not just in Canada, but anybody who wanted to get into this field. Nobody's doing it, and there's an opportunity here for us to do something.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Kopstein.

[Prof. Jeffrey Kopstein]

Thank you very much for your question. Let me deal with the part about the United Nations, because it's a pretty important question.

The United Nations itself was set up not as a democracy-promoting organization; it was set up as an organization after World War II to promote peace. As such, it included both democracies and non-democracies. It's been pretty good--not great, but pretty good--at promoting peace.

We're talking here about doing something different, however. We're talking about promoting democracy, which, yes, is sometimes at odds with stability. When you promote democracy into a country that's a dictatorship, you're destabilizing it. That's clear. So it does have implications for the long-term functioning of the UN.

In certain categories the UN is not good, and the UN has been a pretty lousy democracy promoter. Just now, the UN is getting started with a democracy promotion division. I was just in Washington, D.C., last week, where I heard its head speak, and he even admitted himself that they're really not very far along the road on this. They're starting to understand that democracy promotion is important for guaranteeing the peace. It's not simply matter enough to have treaties between countries, some of which are democracies and some of which are non-democracies.

So I would agree with you that democracy promotion potentially stands at odds with the functioning of the United Nations, but sometimes that might be a good thing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Kopstein.

We go to Mr. Goldring.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Professor Perlin, I visited the Ukraine and monitored their elections, as well as Haiti, and recently Guyana too. I understand that there are many complexities and many areas that have to be involved in the promotion of democracy and that it is a very difficult subject, and that's why we're studying it. But there seem to be some common concerns that cross from different countries, whereas that may not be as applicable to Afghanistan.

We certainly saw in the Ukraine, and in Haiti and Guyana, that there's a need, at the political party level, to have some indoctrination, some understanding of what their role is in interacting with the municipal communities, what their role is as a servant of the people, and what their role is understood to be by the president, or whatever leadership of the government there is.

Does your program at the university level, which has been going on for eight years and is seemingly quite extensive, not leave out an element of education starting at the primary level? Because the number of students who may very well access this post-secondary education would be a much smaller percentage of the country's population than those who would do it in primary. Have your efforts examined what they are teaching at the primary level, at a more basic level?

Second, how long would this component be, as a term, for educating one person? And how much of a percentage of that educational component in university deals with party structuring and party politics?

[Dr. George Perlin]

In fact, we are doing work in the secondary schools. The minister of education asked us to take the content of the curriculum we had created for universities and translate it into a course that could be delivered in the secondary schools. The big problem he had, and continues to have, is that he doesn't have teachers trained to teach civic education. So what he's asked us to do is help him train teachers to teach civic education.

On the very point you raise about parties, we're developing a teaching-methods course through a series of pilot courses we're delivering in grade 11 in a selection of schools chosen by the ministry. Last year I visited one of the schools where this was being done, and the teacher had organized the class into different political parties. She was teaching lessons about the functions of political parties, so they carried on a little exercise for me in which they demonstrated what they'd learned about how political parties function and what their purpose is within the framework of a democracy.

To try to answer both components of your question, yes, we are looking at the application of this in secondary schools, and yes, it does include a significant focus on parties.

If I may say so, as well, in that regard, our program is not just creating a university course; we are working with law enforcement personnel. They have specialist institutions for training law enforcement officers and the people I call law enforcement ranks. They're all internal security people. We have a program on democracy and human rights that we're applying in those institutions.

We also have a program that is being delivered through the National Academy of Public Administration Distance Learning Centre. It's part of the Global Distance Learning Centre, the Ukrainian facility, which was, by the way, funded by Canada. We have created a course there for in-service public servants. The first component of that course is the responsibility and accountability of a public servant under a democratic system. The second part of that course explains, if you like, the dynamics of politics. It's done in two courses, and the second course is about the dynamics of politics, about political parties and elections and those processes.

So, yes, we are working on education about parties—that's a very important part of the curriculum, and there are sections in the text—and we are working with people in the security system and we're working with public servants and we're working in the secondary schools.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Is this nearing the point that you could have a short rendering of what your accomplishments have been and perhaps a manual or information on what you have been doing in Ukraine at the post-secondary level, as well as the high school level?