Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to talk to you about the core of what we're doing in our study, which is democracy promotion.
Right now there is a backlash against democracy promotion in a bunch of countries around the world. In Russia earlier this year they brought into effect a law against civil society organizations, basically restricting them severely and preventing them from doing their work. They've effectively shut down independent media, certainly in the electronic realm, in Russia. In Belarus you have a total clampdown on civil society. It's virtually non-operable, except in clandestine ways. Similarly, the media is virtually all state-controlled. In China you have the situation, with their getting Internet companies, of agreeing to freeze the word “democracy”, and so on. In Cuba and North Korea they don't even have a backlash; they never even started down that path. Some of these groups are now even meeting together in a Shanghai cooperation group to try to shut down democracy.
I look at this as something that as a government we find difficult to do. Another thing we find difficult to do as a government is to support political parties and political party development abroad. We've had submissions from Tom Axworthy, respected former chief of staff to Pierre Trudeau from the Liberal side—and we've heard from others—that the way one can do this best is by creating an arm's-length kind of organization, whether it be on the model of the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy or the National Endowment for Democracy.
I look at the summary you have presented and I see, for example, that under the sample programs, the word “Russia” never appears, the word “Belarus” never appears, the word “Cuba” never appears. That illustrates part of what I was saying about the limitations of being able to do aggressive work promoting the freedom part of the agenda.
We've done some “rule of law” work, for example, in China, trying to train judges and so on. Some people might be critical and say that actually helps support regimes. We're hoping that some of our rule-of-law approach rubs off, but one can be afraid of the opposite.
My question to you is this. Is there value in looking to a more arm's-length approach to some of this kind of work, on the model we've seen in the Netherlands, in Great Britain, in the United States, of creating an arm's-length form of funding that political parties can still be involved in and parliamentarians can still be involved in, but that gets into some of those more challenging things the government has trouble doing?