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.