Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing today on what has to be one of the most distressing and alarming tragedies unfolding before our very eyes. I'm sure you must feel this each and every day, all day long, and probably have nightmares about the sorts of genocide in slow motion that just continues to roll out.
That said, I'm very, very encouraged by several parts of your presentation today, not for a moment to indicate--and I don't think anybody would--that we should have anything but a desperate sense of urgency about the situation that's unfolding, but I'm glad to hear you stressing the importance of working through multilateral channels, through international bodies. I think when we sometimes depart from that, we get into misadventures, and we see what happens in Iraq and in Kandahar. There was also your emphasis on peace-building, creating the conditions that are capable of really leading to genuine human security and genuine enduring peace, because this is so often lost in the desperate sense that people have for military intervention.
Maybe it's not a welcome comment, but I have to say, I think we're not doing very well on the women, peace, and security front, either here in Canada or across the world, and it's very reassuring to see women in very senior roles working together--no insult intended whatsoever to the male member of the panel.
I'm thinking about people around this table on the committee and people who are here representing groups--STAND, SHOUT, Students For Darfur, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and various organizations--who have been desperately pleading for a more robust response from Canada.
I'd really like to ask two questions. First, could you be a bit more specific and a bit more explicit around the kind of comprehensive peace-building, confidence-building work that you see as being so important and that Canada has been engaged in?
Secondly, really following up--and I'm not coordinating my question with Mr. Goldring, but he raised questions about stretching the troops' resources to the limits and our military capabilities--I'd like to know whether we have sufficiently today within Foreign Affairs and within CIDA the robustness we need in the diplomatic forces, in the diplomatic strength, expertise, and confidence, both in terms of numbers and in terms of expertise that is desperately needed to be able to bring this to a peaceful resolution, which may or may not be possible without there being a more robust security element. Do we have enough of that human resource to play the kind of role that is perhaps even more promising for enduring peace?