Evidence of meeting #23 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was canadem.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.
We're deleting “development assistance”. We're replacing it, if you will, with a more robust definition of development assistance. The clause that's there currently reads:
“development assistance” means official development assistance as defined by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
We're saying here, that it means funding that's transferred to developing and multilateral institutions. This was a clause that was taken directly from some comments the minister made.
Bloc
Caroline St-Hilaire Bloc Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
Mr. McKay, I have no problem with the first part of your amendment. However, at the end, you talk about “libéralité”. I am only telling you that it requires some explanation even though it might not be what you are expected to do today. However, we have some reservations that I wanted to draw to your attention.
Do I still have some time left? Yes.
Your amendment to clause 3, line 9, page 2, is a good amendment. I only need some clarification. Would that include other ministers like the Minister of Finance or the Minister of Foreign Affairs?
This is what it implies, isn't it?
Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.
Yes, it's the “competent minister”. We actually talked about whether it would always be the CIDA minister. The CIDA minister's name is simply CIDA by convention rather than by any other form. It could be any competent minister.
Bloc
Caroline St-Hilaire Bloc Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
Great. I have a last question.
In another amendment to clause 4, lines 29 to 31, you reinforce a point. I applaud you for this! It was stated that the minister may consult and now it is said that “the competent minister shall consult“.
We wonder if this is not giving too much leeway to the minister. Wouldn't it be a good idea to set a timeframe, for instance “shall consult civil society organizations on an annual basis”? You are saying “shall consult” which is stronger but the minister is free to consult when and who he is willing to consult. Couldn't we impose a certain timeframe?
Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.
Well, I'm ultimately in the committee's hands on that.
The product of the consultation, if you will, comes out of clause 9. If there is other language that you think might tighten it up even further, I'm more than happy to hear it. This is a pivotal clause.
Conservative
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. McKay, for your presentation.
I want to discuss the bill. I am still having difficulty, as I expressed to the chair.
I had expected you to suggest some amendments, and I'm not surprised. But I guess I am surprised that we are now dealing with amendments that we shouldn't be dealing with. We don't have them and no one has moved the amendments.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Mr. Menzies, we're not dealing with amendments today. We're not doing clause-by-clause today.
There are going to be witnesses. Mr. McKay has given us some ideas that we can work on.
We've already heard there will be other amendments brought forward, maybe even by Mr. McKay, who may make some suggestions saying he went to committee and that came back.
We aren't in clause-by-clause. I'll make that abundantly clear.
Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.
I'm keen to listen to every word you say, Mr. Menzies.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
Well, I guess what we've done so far is basically clause-by-clause. That's why I wondered.
But I do want to raise this as a point. It's something that.... In your speech, you were critical of the bureaucracy, and I tend to defend the bureaucracy, because they're usually working under the direction of a minister. Your comment was that the bureaucracy will want to get this right and will want to do it carefully. My concern is whether this bill was hastily put together, and now we hastily have some amendments to add to it.
I think everyone here recognizes that this new government is all about accountability and transparency, and we do want to get this right. We do want to make sure that we are using aid dollars in the most effective way, and we need to make sure this is transparent. We also want to make sure that the delivery mechanism of this is transparent to taxpayers.
I'm concerned that we're trying to rush this through. The bill that was tabled doesn't appear to be what we're discussing here today.
We have a number of concerns. The one I would like you to address, if I could.... Even though we're not going clause by clause, in your changes to the minister accountable.... We have three ministers who are actually accountable, no matter how we add this up. There is the CIDA minister, who basically reports to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. We now have the finance minister involved in this. I'm very concerned that this bill doesn't address that accountability, who is responsible, and how that is dealt with.
Perhaps you could address that, if you would.
Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.
There's no question about the finance minister. He has a huge responsibility in terms of our external relations with other countries, and he takes the lead responsibility. By phrasing it as “the competent minister”, that would allow Parliament to direct its attention to how this report was formulated and whether the finance minister has signed off or provided his own report, or it would allow Parliament to actually require the minister to account for how he or she discharged his or her responsibilities under the bill.
You're absolutely right to say that this bill is about accountability and transparency. It was part of your party's election platform. It was your leader, in his incarnation as opposition leader, who actually was, in part, the genesis and mover of this bill.
I would quibble with you with respect to the haste in getting it right. Certainly, you've had quite a while to do it yourselves, and thus far, as far as I know, there is no bill on the order paper that would get it right. So here we are, we're all parliamentarians, and that's what the Canadian public expects us to do--provide accountability and transparency and get it right, hence, if you will, my unusual procedure of presenting suggested changes to the bill well in advance so that members can comment on it.
My final point is that I think the minister should be endorsing this bill, because it gives him or her a complete answer to other ministers who may want to do project X or project Y out of the CIDA minister's funds. So I think your minister should be dancing in the streets.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
And indeed she may, but it would be in a city other than Ottawa. But I would doubt that she would be dancing because of that.
To your comment about the fact that we've had lots of time to get it right, I must comment. We've had less than ten months. In the thirteen years the Liberal government had, they didn't quite take this as seriously as they are now. So I applaud your reawakening to this cause.
Going back to what we were dealing with in Bill C-293, which indeed is what we're discussing here, I'm very concerned--and I think I raised this in my speech--about the obligation of the minister to report back, to answer back to petitioners about why they haven't received aid, why they haven't received enough, why they've received the wrong thing, and that sort of thing. That's not the minister's job. I still fear that whoever the minister may be, it's not a good use of his or her time to be responding to every potential recipient of Canadian aid.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Menzies.
Unless it's a ten-second response, we're out of time.
Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.
On the petitioning, that's no longer in the discussion. There is actually a precedent in the environmental legislation on petitioning. I regret actually having to give up on the committee function and the petitioning function, but there's a minority government, it will ultimately have a short life, and we would like to get it done. I know it's a bit of an insight--the members know that.
Conservative
NDP
Alexa McDonough NDP Halifax, NS
I hope we're all approaching this as a work in progress. Let's remind ourselves that it's work that began on April 1, 2003, when we began to really hear about ODA, where we and other countries stand, and what it all means.
For the public who wonder if we ever manage to collaborate and do some things cooperatively, maybe it would be a good demonstration by us for ourselves and Canadians that we can actually come together and get this done. As John McKay has said, and I appreciate, your opening comment was that you've tried to reflect the spirit of the debate in second reading of Bill C-293, and I would add, hopefully respect the record on where we've collaborated to try to move forward on this. So let's try to keep it in that spirit.
This isn't clause-by-clause, but I think it was very helpful for you to respond in a very direct way to the very clear and pointed criticisms that the parliamentary secretary has put forward. Surely the point is not to start way back where we left off in debate, but to move it forward.
With all due respect to the parliamentary secretary, if you think we're rushing through this, maybe you needed to be with us in five cities in five days in the Nordic countries and the U.K. a couple of weeks ago as a committee. Most of us had a sense of how humiliating it was that we were so far back in the pack in really addressing our commitments to an appropriate level of ODA, and our need to be very explicit about our commitments to engage in civil society and make sure that a human rights focus is also reflected.
I appreciate that my party was the original drafter of this bill. Some very legitimate criticisms were put forward by the parliamentary secretary, and there's been an earnest effort here to respond to those concerns. We're not going through clause by clause, but having gone through the proposed amendments, I think they respond in a genuine way to the concerns that were raised. I don't think there's one of the proposals for change that I would not agree with.
So I'm not just clinging to the original version of this. I think we have to exchange ideas and agree to improve it as needed. The only criticism I have is that clauses 6, 7, and 8 need to be deleted, as you now have indicated, to fully respond to the criticisms that have been made.
I want to say a further word or two about what we heard while we were waiting for the original international policy review from the minister, which morphed into a statement. We went ahead and tried to grapple with this issue and heard from a lot of witnesses as to what kinds of things were needed to get us on track. We had further reinforcement of that from all of the opportunities we had on our recent European trip.
I hope we can move fairly quickly to have some witnesses come before the committee. Perhaps we need to turn our attention a little to whom that should be. Certainly CCIC, which represents over 100 NGO organizations and civil society groups that are very much engaged in the work that is the main focus of this bill, would be a crucially important witness to hear from. I hope we don't have to go back through the whole process we engaged in here for almost three years that brought us to the point today where we're looking at what the legislation might be.
The only other thing I would raise a question about is the term “the competent minister”. It may be typical language that I'm not familiar with in such a bill, but I don't know whether that's a judgment.
Conservative
NDP
Alexa McDonough NDP Halifax, NS
All I'm saying is that if that's a term that is used to mean the minister who is at the time dealing specifically with these matters, then that's fine. If not, it may need a bit of a different word--the “relevant” minister, or the “most directly affected” minister, or something like that.
That said, I think this has been a genuine attempt to respond to the many points raised. Hopefully we can move forward with this by scheduling some further witnesses. I know the parliamentary secretary has had a chance to raise concerns. If these are concerns shared by the minister, I guess we'd want to hear from the minister as well and move forward from there.