Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 4th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Welcome back. We will reconvene our committee.

I remind committee members that we do have votes this afternoon. We have been looking forward to Mr. Axworthy's testimony for some time, and I think the votes are at 5:30. We're going to have to figure out how we're going to do this, along with some of the committee's business.

Madam McDonough.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Without meaning to prolong, because I know we're anxious to get on with our witnesses, I'm concerned to see us bump our committee business again with the break week coming up. Hopefully we can make some decisions that will give some guidance to staff who are here in Ottawa during our absence, and they can then put that guidance into the schedule. So if we could take even a couple of minutes at the end to do that—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We will try to keep that in mind.

In hour two, we welcome Dr. Thomas Axworthy. He's the chair for the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University. He was the principal secretary to former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, and has held numerous appointments, including teaching at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Dr. Axworthy has argued that Canada should take a more leading role in the field of international democracy promotion. He has proposed the creation of Democracy Canada Institute--and I think we heard something similar in the hour before--which would receive a much larger annual funding than the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development and would include initiatives involving Canadian political parties.

Dr. Axworthy, welcome. You've been a guest with us before. We have appreciated you in the past and we look forward to hearing from you today.

We'll have a ten-minute presentation, followed by questions and answers.

Thank you.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy, Chair, Centre for the Study of Democracy, Queen's University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'll read a brief statement. As you've said, you may have to leave for votes, and then answer questions, but I'll put this on the record.

I'll be referring in my statement as well, ladies and gentlemen, to very brief summaries of a series of studies that we have done at our think tank at Queen's University. I have some copies of the studies here. If there are any members whose staff or who themselves want to read the background papers, the original sources to which I'll be making brief reference in my statement—some of them are quite lengthy; the blueprint on Democracy Canada Institute is about 100 pages long—we can send them. We also have some hard copies.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I would appreciate that, for every member.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

All I need is their e-mail addresses and I'd be glad to do it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Send it to the clerk, and we'll get it circulated.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

Okay.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin. The committee is to be applauded for undertaking a study of Canada's role in international democracy promotion. The subject of democracy promotion--its relation to traditional foreign and development policy goals, the push-back by autocrats like President Putin, the recent crackdown on dissent by powerful dictatorships like China, and most of all the anarchy in Afghanistan and Iraq, where democracy-building faces violent opposition--is now one of the core issues in international relations.

Canada has always paid lip service to the value of democracy promotion--what democracy has not?--but unlike trade promotion, or the responsibility-to-protect principle, it has never been a fundamental of Canadian foreign policy. Individual Canadians work abroad for democracy promotion, and many of them work for institutions created by other states or international organizations. The National Democratic Institute, one of the best known in the world, has over 30 Canadians in senior positions. The IDEA multilateral foundation, when I spoke there recently, had Canadians from Saskatchewan. So Canadians everywhere are working for democracy promotion.

The organizational vacuum in our foreign policy machinery, however, means that these people do not work directly for an organized centre of democracy promotion in Canada. As in so many other areas of international policy, on democracy we talk a good game, but the Government of Canada has very limited capacity.

This committee has put out three excellent areas of inquiry that your witnesses and you will be studying, so I'm going to address all three of them too briefly. The first question is “why democracy?” and international comparisons. Then I'll spend a little more time on the Canadian role with the particular institution, Democracy Canada, which our institute has been promoting. On “why democracy?”, you asked how democracy promotion, within the wider context of foreign policy itself, fits into a general foreign policy, as opposed to the intrinsic merits of democracy.

Until recently, the priority of democracy for foreign policy decision-makers has never been high. In 1648, in the treaty of Westphalia, the European powers made state sovereignty the centrepiece of international relations. Kings could be beastly to their own populations, but the nature of the regime was of little concern to other states. What mattered was the balance of power between states, not the internal characteristics of the regime.

From Richelieu in the age of Westphalia to Kissinger in our own age, the realist school in foreign policy looks primarily at the determinants of power and how it is used. Such a calculus gives very short shrift to morality and, until very recently, to democracy. As Franklin Roosevelt once said about a local dictator: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.”

This overwhelming realist consensus, however, has occasionally been challenged, usually from the liberal or radical side of the political divide. The philosopher Immanuel Kant first made the critical point in his famous 1795 essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch that the nature of regimes, whether they were monarchies or republics, empires or local municipalities, did make a critical difference. Republics were less likely to go to war than monarchies, since citizens knew they were the ones who would die on the battlefield. As the previous witnesses have talked about, in international relations one of the few inviolable rules we have is that democracies do not go to war against each other.

In the 19th century, English liberals like John Bright attacked the amorality of realpolitik masters such as Palmerston or Bismarck, and called for internal changes to the monarchies across Europe. Bright explained:

We have the unchangeable and eternal principles of the moral law to guide us, and only so far as we walk by that guidance can we permanently be a great nation

Gladstone, in his famous Midlothian campaign against Disraeli, one of the great realpolitik practitioners, attacked Turkey's abuses against its own subjects, and argued that morality should trump state sovereignty.

In 1917 Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”. Lester Pearson led the fight within NATO in 1948 and 1949 on article 2, the so-called Canadian clause, to make the alliance into more than an old-fashioned military pact by emphasizing the cultural, social, and economic links between the North American democracies. What was important for Pearson was that NATO was a pact of freedom-loving democracies, not merely a military pact. That began to change with the accession of Turkey and Greece and other countries in that early Cold War era.

The liberal idealist perspective butted against the predominant realist tradition throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. But in 1982 a new champion emerged and the debate was literally transformed. Ronald Reagan was a dedicated anti-communist, but instead of just containing the Soviet Union, he wanted to transform it by promoting democracy as a fundamental proposition of American foreign policy.

In 1982 Reagan, the most important conservative in American history, gave a speech worthy of Woodrow Wilson. He told the British Parliament, and I quote:

The objective I promise is quite simple to state: to foster infrastructure of democracy, the systems of free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

The Reagan administration created the National Endowment for Democracy. The British created the Westminster Foundation. The Germans have long had their Stiftungs, as we have just heard from previous witnesses, or party research institutes with very active international programs; and multilateral organizations like the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance--IDEA--spread the best practices around the world.

In looking at the United States today, total yearly U.S. democracy funding exceeds $1 billion. Now, the literature on democracy is enormous. Do we aim for deep, deliberative, transformative democracy where citizens are themselves engaged in policy debate? That was the question in a point raised by Ms. McDonough to the previous witnesses on what kind of democracy we are addressing. Or is it enough to have procedural democracy, a system that allows citizens only to have the ultimate sway during elections?

Two principles certainly apply: rule of the people, and rights of the people. As theorist Larry Diamon writes in Squandered Victory,

“Democracy is a system of government in which the people choose their leaders--and replace their leaders--in regular, free, and fair elections. Democracies are governments of laws, not individual men and women, in which the people are sovereign and government functions with the consent of the governed.”

To achieve such consent of the governed, there must be, according to Challenge of Democratic Development, a very good and early study by the North-South Institute, 1991-92,

...universal adult suffrage in free elections; the right to run for office; freedom of expression, association, political organization and dissent; alternate sources ofinformation and genuine policy choice; and the accountability of government to voters.

Democracy requires a culture of liberty that endorses and envelopes the mechanism of voting as the means to express choice. Liberty, in turn, requires independent courts, equality before the law, and protection for minorities. Citizens must respect the rights of others even as they exercise their own rights. Rule of the people and rights of the people are the basic democratic minimum.

As we then move to transformative democracy, the participatory element of democracy allows human capacity to flourish, so we have a minimum and a maximum. The minimum we can attain, the procedural rules; the maximum, which is each of us achieving our human capacity, is an ongoing and never-changing goal.

Lessons learned from the work on democratic transitions.... There's no magic bullet or surefire formula for democracy promotion. Promoting democracy requires attention to specific circumstances and to the limitations of outside intervention. Change agents must proceed by interaction, not imposition.

There are few straight lines in history. As Kant, the original enlightenment liberal, wrote, “From such warped wood as is man, nothing straight can ever be fashioned”.

Drawing on the democratic case studies of the Queen's University Centre for the Study of Democracy, which are here before you, the following lessons appear to be relevant. First, there is nothing harder than attempting to develop democratic norms when there is no state and anarchy reigns. Since Plato, we have known that there must be order before there is liberty. A functioning state must precede a functioning democracy.

In Afghanistan, a critical initial decision was to hold a Loya Jirga, or traditional assembly of Afghanistan notables, to create Afghan ownership of the democratic process rather than dictate some of the occupying power. The Afghan transition began well, but shortages of troops, or boots on the ground, to ensure security now threaten the whole enterprise.

The ratio of international soldiers to inhabitants in places like Bosnia was about one soldier for every fifty citizens. Such a figure has never been reached in Afghanistan or Iraq. In a word, the EU and NATO took the security dimension of Bosnia far more seriously than they have taken it in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Secondly, militias must be disarmed. In the forthcoming Queen's University study of Israeli democracy, which is another study we will have out by the spring, a key tipping point was the decision of Ben-Gurion to disarm rival militias and to create the Israeli armed forces. Ben-Gurion went so far as to fire upon the Altalena, an armed ship designed for the Irgun militia of Menachem Begin. Even as Israel fought for its existence in the 1948 war, even as Israel was at war with its Arab neighbours, Ben-Gurion refused to allow private internal militias. Allowing militias to continue to be private armies has likely been the single greatest mistake made in Iraq; there are many of them, but that's probably the largest.

Third: local government, municipalities, is the building block of democracy. In Taiwan, the immediate post-war decision by the KMT to continue with the Japanese innovation of local elections for municipalities allowed the arts of democracy to grow and gave a non-threatening outlet for dissenting citizens. In democracy transition, we tend to almost instantly race towards national elections. In virtually every study I have looked at, I'm convinced that the investment in local municipalities, local government, and local elections is the way to allow the arts of democracy to foster and build. Taiwan is an enormously important example of that. The investment in Taiwan both allowed the KMT to get used to democracy, and it gave an outlet to the dissidents to learn the mutual tolerance that was required. Eventually, the KMT, an authoritarian party on its own, brought in its own democracy. The learning process was a generation of that.

Fourth, democracy takes time to take root. There are no quick fixes. Outside interveners must be prepared for years of effort and substantial investment. The European Union, the United States, and Canada all made a major commitment to rebuilding Bosnia after the civil war. Bosnia was Canada's first experiment with its three-D policy of defence, diplomacy, and development. It must be understood that each of these elements is necessary if real rebuilding is to occur. With nation-building or democracy-building, we should not go in unless we are prepared for a long and costly commitment. I regret that with the enormous expenditure and the lives of several of our soldiers in the 1990s, we are now moving out of Bosnia after having made that large initial investment and with many problems still in eastern central Europe.

Lastly, five, democratic values are universal. Asian autocrats have promoted Asian values as a counterpoint to democracy, and they have implied that democracy is a western invention. The Queen's University case studies on both Hong Kong and Taiwan show the self-serving nature of this argument. Taiwan is the first Chinese society in 5,000 years to become a sustained, consolidated democracy. In Hong Kong, up to half a million citizens have taken to the streets to demand and to defend their democratic rights.

Amartya Sen, in Development and Freedom, puts it well: “Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means”.

The Canadian role--your third area. The committee has asked witnesses to comment on three broad areas: democracy assistance as an objective, comparative lessons, and the Canadian role. My response to these questions is as follows.

On democratic assistance, the nature of regimes is important. If Kant is right, and republics are less likely to go to war against fellow democracies, spreading democracy is in the security interest. If Amartya Sen is right, spreading freedom is a vital component in development policy. If Lester Pearson is right, democratic advancement must go forward at the same time as military engagement in any alliance.

For all these reasons of security, development, and morality, democracy promotion should become a key component rather than an afterthought of Canadian foreign policy. But the lessons drawn from successful transitions to democracy show that the democracy road is long and arduous. It cannot be done on the cheap, and it cannot be done without clarity and commitment.

In the third area of Canadian policies and activities, the main point is that Canada lacks a central democracy assistance organization. Canada has a wealth of knowledge and professional expertise grounded in Canadian values that could make a real and meaningful contribution to democracy assistance initiatives abroad.

A Canadian-based democracy institution--we've called it Democracy Canada--grounded in a federal, ethnically diverse, multilateral, and bilingual country would be welcomed by the international democracy promotion community. This new institution should have the following features.

Democracy Canada should be an independent organization reporting to and accountable to Parliament and a minister. It should not be part of any department.

The mission of Democracy Canada would be to promote and enhance democracy abroad. Democracy Canada would employ a network of experts to provide practical experience and assistance in areas of democratic development to their counterparts in partner countries.

Democracy Canada's activities would focus on political party assistance, including training in campaigns, electioneering, and media relations, which would introduce a tool largely absent from Canadian foreign policy, and that is, concentrating on party-building in democracy, also a question raised with earlier witnesses.

The program should also include, as Mr. Perlin has talked about, investment in civic education, democratic transparency, election monitoring, participation, especially among women, and assisting in the general building of democratic institutions in legislatures and public services.

The focus on political party assistance, election preparation, training, and mechanics would distinguish the institute from the legislative mission of the Parliamentary Centre, one of our best NGOs in this area, and the civic education mission of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, which does a wonderful job on human rights and on civic education.

The board of such a Democracy Canada should consist of 12 to 15 members, drawn from nominees of parties now sitting in Parliament, international partners, and experts in democracy promotion. Replicating a successful aspect of the International Development Research Council, one-third of Democracy Canada's board should come from international partners. The board would have fiduciary responsibility for Democracy Canada.

The institute would also be governed by an advisory Democracy Canada council, consisting of members from the democracy and governance community of Canada as a whole.

An annual Democracy Canada conference would be held to bring together the Canadian and international democracy community to promote mutual learning, the dissemination of best practices, and to help coordinate Democracy Canada's future objectives and priorities.

We have many people working on this area in Canada, but they very rarely talk to each other. The institute would develop its own programs and staff, but it would also partner with others.

We have suggested an annual budget of $50 million, about half of the IDRC budget, both to fund worthwhile projects by its partners and to undertake its own activities.

Democracy Canada would also be allowed to fund proposals for international work submitted by Canada's political parties, as happens in the U.K. with the Westminster Foundation. But it would not automatically allocate a portion of its funding to the existing party structure.

Democracy Canada's permanent bureau staff, in addition to program coordination, would undertake a research function to gain an understanding of the local context of Democracy Canada's partner countries. To enhance its effectiveness, Democracy Canada would work with existing Canadian and international organizations such as the IDRC, as well as organizations within partner countries.

Lastly, Democracy Canada would coordinate team Canada democracy delegations around key Canadian foreign policy objectives. With Democracy Canada, coordinated assistance could be provided to a partner country, including elements of political party assistance provided by the parties, legislative assistance from the Parliamentary Centre, electoral assistance from Elections Canada, civic education as by International Human Rights and Democracy. That is, bringing together several organizations, each with their own piece, and going on a coordinated democracy mission in a country that we think is worthy of such help. Democracy Canada would maintain the overall focus of the delegation and would be responsible for democratization programs in the partner country.

While in the Ukraine studying the Orange Revolution, I met a young Ukrainian woman who told me the story of why, flying from Ukraine to Washington, she waited for hours to file past the tomb of Ronald Reagan as he lay in state in Washington after his death. His call, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, had resonated across eastern and central Europe and had allowed young people there to dream that Soviet tyranny did not have to be permanent. She wanted to pay her respects to the man who had once given her hope.

Natan Sharansky, in The Case for Democracy, similarly recounts how the example of his teacher, Andrei Sakharov, taught him, and I quote him: “The world cannot depend on leaders who do not depend on their own people”. Sharansky further writes that “Those who seek to move the earth must first, as Archimedes explained, have a place to stand.”

Canada must stand with the world's democrats. We enjoy the blessings of democracy at home. We owe it to ourselves and to those who share our values to make a serious effort to promote democracy abroad.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Axworthy. We appreciate your testimony.

We're going into the first round. We may cut the first round a little bit to get as many questions in as possible.

Mr. Martin, you have four minutes.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Professor Axworthy, thank you for being here.

We have a disease in Parliament called “studyitis” that I'm sure you know very well. It's rampant. Rather than taking a problem and actually doing a study and implementing solutions, we study things to death. But our biggest failure—not peculiar to our institution, as you know—is our failure to implement the recommendations in studies, and you quite eloquently drew attention to the vast number of studies and groups that exist.

We also heard from the last group that democracy can't really have traction unless the GDP goes to above $6,000 per person per year. The problem in the countries we're trying to address is that the economic potential of a country is being thwarted by leaders who engage in behaviours that are egregious, frequently elected. So none of these leaders are people of the calibre of Seretse Ian Khama of Botswana, who even before they found diamonds decided quite intelligently to be a very strong leader and implement and utilize the resources of the country for the benefit of his people.

In your view, what can we and should we do to address leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who has destroyed an otherwise very strong country and turned it into a basket case, and negatively affected the future of an entire generation of Zimbabweans?

My second question: We have the IDRC. We have Human Rights and Democracy. We have the Parliamentary Centre. We have the Canada Corps. Why do we need another institution, when we already have all of those institutions? Isn't the biggest problem a failure to implement recommendations that are coming from the very intelligent people in our country, that we're simply not implementing what should be implemented?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

Mr. Axworthy.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

Right. On the first point, there is an issue about elites and elites' behaviour, and their relationship to people below.

In a world with limited means, limited aid and limited resources, where CIDA is already cutting down from 150 nations to 25 or so, the world has a variety of measures that it can bring, both on a corruption index and on an abuse index. I think human rights and corruption should become one of the central criteria in the allocation of a variety of incentives. It makes no sense to invest with Mugabe. It does perhaps make sense to invest in civil organizations, in the case of Burma, governments in exile, those who are trying to replace the dictators, to help those directly, which again bears on my answer to your second question. If one is in a particularly perilous position, by requiring assistance to go to those who are trying to overturn or destabilize local dictators, as an earlier witness talked about, it is almost impossible for a government organization, in CIDA, DFAIT, or others, to do this.

One reason we think a new institution is required is twofold: first, to put some daylight between the government of the day and a body that reports to Parliament but is influenced by parliamentarians and not influenced by the executive; and secondly, virtually nobody works in the area that I happen to think is important--because I come from, at one time in my life, a political background as well as now an academic one--that the roles of parties are absolutely crucial. We have troubles with our own parties at home. We certainly need to build parties abroad. The people who know how to build parties are people who have been in parties. With all the institutions you've talked about, they do wonderful work. The party extension is certainly not one of them. Therefore, we are missing a piece in Canada, in my regard, a very vital piece, which is the party piece of the democracy equation. You either have to add that to an existing organization, or create a new one complementary to what exists but having a real value added in what I think is one of the essential pieces of the puzzle.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Bernard Patry]

Thank you, Mr. Axworthy.

Madame Barbot, please.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Thank you for your presentation.

I am more and more worried when I hear about that type of democracy promotion. It’s strange, because I am in total agreement with everything democracy represents. What I will say is probably due to the fact that I come from a country that was perceived to be under-developed, a country that is probably more on its way to under-development. I often have the impression, when we attempt to promote democracy abroad, that we want to bring democracy elsewhere but that we fail to examine the state of democracy in exporting countries.

I also have the impression that we don’t take sufficiently into account the notion of freedom that you spoke of and freedom is at the heart of democracy. If people don’t accept democracy in the way that we want them to, it isn’t going to work. We go as far as to decide who has a right to democracy. That worries me.

In this country, democracy has many aspects. Our acts and regulations reflect its general aspect. We can go so far as to say that democracies don’t fight amongst themselves. The fact remains however that democracies often have profound differences. Indeed, in a democracy such as ours in Canada, certain parts of the country don’t agree on the fundamental principles of democracy.

That being said, what worries me, is when you send the International Development Research Centre, an organization that promotes democracy, in countries whose citizens have voluntarily chosen or accepted a government, to tell them how their government should work.

Is there not a danger of interfering in the internal policies of that country?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Madame Barbot.

Mr. Axworthy.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

In any aspect of foreign policy, but particularly in democracy promotion, it's best to begin with humility. Nobody is arguing that Canada or any of the western democracies are necessarily superb. But what we can point to is that there are practices and traditions that other nations, that dissident groups, might find useful to learn from on a comparative basis. That's really the essential point.

Where we've had tremendous difficulties in democratic transitions--in Iraq, for example--hubris, almost a democratic imperialism, has been part of the problem, as opposed to listening and working with people on the ground. My experience has been, though, that Canadians are invited, are welcomed, are asked, everywhere around the world, by a host of people who want to at least learn comparatively what we've done in the Charter of Rights, what we've done in the status of women, what we've done in multiculturalism, what we've done in federalism, what we've done in election party financing. It's not that we are better, it's that we are different. We have had some experience, and we've learned some lessons.

I think anybody who works in democracy promotion learns as much in the countries they are working with. What we hope to achieve in our program at Queen's, for example, is to create a multilateral source of democracy promotion so that when we work with refugees in Bosnia, the next time we're asked to work on refugee problems, it will be with our Bosnian partners, who we worked with in Bosnia. And so it goes.

What I would like to do is take the local experiences of a host of countries who have some successes or failures and then use that for an international training or teaching corps. Canadians may put the overall framework, and Canada may fund it, but in our concept of the centre—as I've said, I'll be glad to send the papers to you—we want to help local partners do much of the work. My idea is for a consortium of democracy builders based on talent around the world but funded and guided from Canada, in part because we're not seen as an imperialist power.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Axworthy.

Mr. Van Loan.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Thank you very much.

I don't know if you recall, Mr. Axworthy, when we first met. You were scrutineering for a fellow named Jim Coutts.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

Yes.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

I was scrutineering opposite you, for a woman named Laura Sabia, in a byelection a long time ago. You ended getting Jim Coutts' job, as I recall.

In any event, I want to thank you for this. We are doing an intensive study. Your proposal, as I've observed to the committee before, is probably the most tangible one being put in front of us. For that we thank you a great deal. I think it's a worthy and a good proposal.

I'm particularly interested in what you call the “multiparty and umbrella model”, and its potential application here. Part of the committee is going to be travelling next week, and they will have an opportunity to hear from the Westminster Foundation people. We've talked about doing some kind of Washington component so that we can learn from the National Endowment for Democracy people, the National Democratic Institute, IRI, and labour and business organizations.

On the party aspect, I think you've really put your finger on it when you say that's important. I don't think we recognize it in our volunteer-based parties, but Canada has a lot more to offer than I think the Americans, who do their politics with money, and some of the other countries that are involved in this. We actually have a lot of hands-on skills and so on that can apply, which makes that part of your proposal appealing.

With regard to the National Endowment for Democracy model, the Westminster Foundation model, and the Dutch inter-party model, how would you compare them or assess them vis-à-vis each other?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Van Loan.

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

The model that I would like and think would be appropriate for our country would be the multi-party model, based on the Dutch or Westminster models. Whatever divides us in Canadian politics at home on the issues, the men and women who work in our parties and are in Parliament at least believe that democracy is a system worth promoting and they are expert at because they are practitioners in it.

I have found in working with Canadians abroad—and I've worked with well-known Conservatives and members of the New Democratic Party, and so on—that those kinds of differences matter very little when you are trying to teach about poll organization, media relations, or how Elections Canada operates.

I also think our own parties are oriented domestically so heavily that it would do the parties themselves some good to think about issues abroad. Their work in such an institute could have an interesting impact on the local parties themselves—broaden them, and they might actually enjoy cooperating with their fellows. I know it's different from the parliamentary atmosphere in question period; committees are a little more collegial. The model of a multi-party institute, agreeing on a series of programs in countries and sending out activists or militants from those parties, seems to me a better model for us.

I have also been employed from time to time by the American models, and you'll speak to them. But in certain places I have seen the NDI group working with one set of problems and the Republican group working with another. They may meet at the airports, but they don't seem to meet on the ground very much. If I could avoid that by having a team knitted together in a joint mission, that's a personal preference. In our comparative study, this is the one that's best for Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Axworthy.

Madam McDonough.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Our time is very short, and I think what we look forward to is receiving that more comprehensive proposal for the Democracy Canada Institute.

We've got them here, great.

A couple of the questions I was going to ask were answered, but I want to zero in on one thing very specifically. The economic threshold for success in democracy-building has been mentioned a couple of times. In the composition of a board, which you referred to, I think you mentioned “one-third democracy-building governance” kinds of representation, but do you also envision some representation from more of the economic development, international aid, and humanitarian community, as part of that governing board?

[Dr. Thomas Axworthy]

When we look at the literature, one of the older lessons of democracy was that it was the growth of the middle class that leads to demands for democracy. That seems to be empirically valid, but there are many poorer countries—Somalia has just been mentioned—that have made that jump. I wouldn't be held in thrall that unless you have a large middle class, don't even attempt it.

I believe that pluralism and democratic accountability are in fact critical components of the development nexus. When you look at debt levels, for example—the vast debt levels in Iraq, and so on—most of them are run up by dictators because they're not accountable to legislatures or to people. The lack of accountability, even in a minimally functioning democracy, as opposed to deep democracy, makes it much harder to have personal agendas on those macro scales, in terms of development assistance. I tried to make in my argument why there is a security dimension in democracy. In my view, there is a moral or values dimension, and also a development dimension.

One of the best organizations I know in Canada is the IDRC. I think they have been helped enormously—and some of the meetings I have gone to there—because so much of their board is international and reflective of local experience, precisely on the point that was asked earlier. I would very much want that part of Democracy Canada, not forgetting the development context of democracy. Sometimes in the development world that's a debatable proposition, but I think it holds and should be reflected in the organization I'm recommending.