Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 24th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

This is the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, meeting number 23. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we continue our study of democratic development.

We are pleased to have with us today in this first hour Mr. Paul LaRose-Edwards, executive director of CANADEM, Canada's civilian reserve. Since 1997 CIDA has approved programming worth over $13 million to CANADEM. CANADEM receives $500,000 annually for its roster services from Foreign Affairs. We look forward to asking questions a little later on.

We welcome you to our committee today. As a committee we have met with your counterparts in Norway. This fall we've begun this study of democratic development; certainly we are very pleased to have you representing your agency here today.

As is the proper protocol for this committee, we will give you time for an opening statement--usually approximately ten minutes--and then we will go into the first round of questioning. Usually we learn not just from the testimonials but from the questions and answers.

We look forward to your presentation.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards, Executive Director, CANADEM (Canada's Civilian Reserve)]

Thank you very much.

Thanks for inviting me to be part of your process. I think democratic development, the issue you're looking at, is a critically important issue.

As you said, I head CANADEM, which is Canada's civilian reserve. I'll try to keep my comments brief, because I agree that we'll probably get more out of the questioning.

I think one of the strengths of this committee is that you're all inherently aware of the validity of Tip O'Neill's statement that “All politics is local”, and so can take that into what I would rephrase for this endeavour as “All democratic development is local”.

I've been working on international human rights for 25 years with a number of international organizations. I was on staff with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with the Commonwealth Secretariat, with Amnesty International, and with a number of other organizations.

My CANADEM perspective on effective democratic development builds upon the fundamental truth that all democratic development is local and further personalizes, in a sense, that truth. I really believe strongly that success comes from getting the right people out there and involved, people who can make things happen, and then providing them with some resources, and then largely getting out of their way. But let me expand on two observations that are germane to my role as head of CANADEM and also, in a sense, explain a little bit of CANADEM's value-added role in all of this.

The first observation would be that the genius of any economic or social development lies with innovative individuals who populate committees like this, departments, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, businesses, and societies. The corollary is that even though Canada can and should assist, the future of any democratic development lies with the local civil societies and governments in question.

The second observation is that the success of Canada and Canadians as mentors and facilitators of local civil societies that are forming themselves also lies in the identification of those individual Canadians who know how to make a difference, how to make things happen on the ground. That's what CANADEM is all about: harnessing the best and most effective Canadian individuals that we can identify.

CANADEM is now in its tenth year. It was initiated after a recommendation in a report to Foreign Affairs was critical of UN field operations and recommended that Canada unilaterally create its own roster of human rights experts. It took off from there.

Part of the genesis of it was a relationship with NORDEM, the Norwegian Resource Bank for Democracy and Human Rights. For a long time we used the same terminology, so the “DEM” in CANADEM is democracy, but we've rapidly moved beyond that. We've gone a slightly different route from NORDEM.

At this point in time, we work with over 200 UN agencies, missions, or divisions on the ground, as well as an equally large raft of other international organizations and NGOs internationally. We've put out over 10,000 résumés of Canadians. Over 2,500 Canadians have been shortlisted through that process, and over 2,000 have actually been engaged.

CANADEM is divided into three major divisions. The first one is the roster, which includes the rapid recruitment assistance program for the UN, which was our initial raison d'être, and that funding comes from Foreign Affairs. The roster is now just under 8,000 Canadians, and it's expanding fast.

The second major division is CANDEP, our deployment arm. We're just closing the book on four successful major deployments. One was CANPOL-Haiti 1, in which 25 police experts went down to Haiti. There was the Elections Canada international monitoring mission for Haiti; running in parallel with that was the Canada Corps deployment of election observers to be attached to that particular mission. We also assisted Elections Canada with the international mission for Iraqi elections.

There are a number of other deployments coming down the pike very quickly. They include CANPOL-Haiti 2, which will see us sending thirty police experts down to Haiti for a year this time; assistance to the Haitian Conseil Electoral Provisoire; sending monitors to Haiti, Tajikistan, Nicaragua, Congo, and other spots; further assistance to Elections Canada for its new mission, the Canadian mission for accompanying Haitian elections; border security to the West Bank and Gaza; a number of activities in Afghanistan; and it goes on.

The third division of CANADEM, which in a sense comes before those first two, is CAN-Jeunesse, which is our youth division. We see ourselves as having a major role in mentoring and employing young Canadians into their international careers. That's rapidly expanding.

There are two characteristics that enable CANADEM to be a useful tool for the international community and for the Canadian government to put Canadian civilian boots on the ground. One characteristic is that we are an independent, not-for-profit organization, which gives us greater freedom of action and allows us to turn on a dime to undertake rapid recruitment and deployment.

The other characteristic speaks to risk and liability. There's an ability and a willingness on the part of our board and our senior staff to take serious risks in moving this forward. That's another one of our advantages. These two combined have allowed us to evolve into pretty much a full-spectrum civilian reserve, from the selection of candidates, to their training and equipment, and to deploying them on the ground.

In conclusion, you're looking at best practices and how Canada can best contribute to democratic development. I would repeat very strongly that every success will have smart, effective individuals at the core of that success. Even the best-designed initiative will fail if it's staffed with incompetent individuals. Equally, even badly designed initiatives will have positive impacts if they're populated by effective individuals who can make things happen on the ground.

My two concluding points are, one, again I feel very strongly that all democratic development is local; and two, getting the right individuals is critical to success. CANADEM is a primary source of Canadian experts.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Edwards.

We'll go into the first round.

Mr. Patry, for five minutes, please.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you very much, Mr. LaRose-Edwards, for being here today. When I look at your background, I can see that you have a long list of skills and that you have taken part in missions in all kinds of areas.

In your introduction, you mentioned that you had just finished a mission in Haiti where 32 police officers had been deployed. You also mentioned Afghanistan. As we have a strong presence in those two countries, my two questions will be related to them.

Just five weeks ago, I was in Haiti where I led an OIF parliamentarian mission aimed at helping the new parliamentarians from the two Houses of the Haitian Parliament. One of the problems on the ground was obviously a security issue, so don't you think that, even if you have organized a mission there, there is no continuity?

When we went to Haiti as parliamentarians the government of Mr. Préval and Prime Minister Alexis told us that people come to help but they leave too soon. I would like to hear your comments on that subject.

Also, what was your involvement in Afghanistan? Tomorrow, the Minister for National Defence and General Hillier will appear before our Committee. As you certainly know, we have a strong presence in Kandahar and there are problems in that region. I would like to know what kind of involvement you can have in the democratic development of a country like Afghanistan, particularly in the Kandahar area.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Patry.

Mr. LaRose-Edwards.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

In response to your first question—continuity, and are we leaving too fast from mission areas?—obviously that's been a challenge from time immemorial. I suspect that's not going to disappear rapidly. There's a shortage of funds, and I think we'll constantly try to find ways around that.

My personal approach is I've always felt that internationals moving in should be rapidly training their replacements amongst the locals. In other words, assume that three or six months from now you'll be leaving and won't be coming back. If you want anything to be sustainable, you'd better be training the locals.

The international community falls into the trap of thinking they're going to go in with all the solutions and they'll direct things on the ground. Personally, I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I really do believe that the innate intelligence of the local host society is there. They can learn. They need a window of opportunity and some new ideas. In that lies a solution to the reality that we will never stay engaged in very many places for very long. It will be off and on, off and on.

A better solution is to make sure that from day one we're putting most of our resources into mentoring and bringing along the local host society, organizations, and government. In part, these are the kinds of individuals we like to roster and send out, who understand this, and they're not looking to make a career out of staying there for years on end; they're looking to develop local capacity.

I don't know if that gets to it, because I don't think there's an easy solution on the larger issue of funding.

In Afghanistan, we've been involved there and sending people over for almost five years now, quite apart from identifying experts for activities in Afghanistan. We deployed police experts and some judicial experts there. We're also a major route for DND to recruit what they call cultural interpreters. These are Afghan Canadians. We've got a roster of 200 Afghan Canadians registered with us and screened. So DND approaches us to pick up these individuals to deploy alongside Canadian troops as key force magnifiers out there.

This is actually a bit of a segue to something that we've been looking to do, where we can, with limited resources—tap into more of those new Canadians to draw on their skill sets for them to go back, not as returning Afghans or returning Congolese, but to go back as Canadians with a particular knowledge and awareness of local culture that those of us who are born and raised in Canada just couldn't possibly have. So our Afghan Canadians have been a huge success story. The Afghan government has picked them up directly from us, DND, Foreign Affairs, and a raft of international organizations.

For the future, there is discussion about sending police and other experts into the Kandahar area. It's good news, bad news. The bad news is that it's very dangerous in Kandahar and elsewhere. The good news is we have an incredible number of individuals, among our 8,000, who are prepared to go there, who understand the risks but also understand that somebody's got to step up, take those chances, and try to make a difference on the ground. So we've already been in contact with some of our police experts, and a surprising number have said, sure, I'll go to Kandahar, which was a bit of a shock for me, but that's great.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

You have another minute.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. LaRose-Edwards, I believe that I mentioned Haiti and Afghanistan to you. Those are countries where there are real problems and a lot of violence.

Is CANADEM able to intervene in countries where there are such serious issues?

In Mauritania, for instance, there has been a coup without violence and in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau there are also problems but no violence. Can CANADEM intervene to try to prevent that violence or re-establish good governance in those countries?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Paul LaRose-Edwards.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

I'll clarify what CANADEM is and is not. We don't in fact run anything on the ground, per se. First and foremost, we are this roster of 8,000 people. A modest add-on is that we can get people out onto the ground. So we can take an individual, give him equipment and a weapon, and we'll deploy him down to Haiti. Once he or she gets down there, he or she will be attached to an existing entity or mission. In the Haiti context, the attachment will be to MINUSTAH.

The roundabout response to your question is there are organizations out there trying to do preventive conflict management, and they come to us for experts as well. A lot of our experts go out with these organizations to do this preventive action. Like you, I'm sure, I think that's the better way to go. We respond rapidly to those organizations to help them find the Canadian experts who can do this kind of work.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

Madame Barbot is next, for seven minutes.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Mr. LaRose-Edwards, thank you for coming. I am trying to understand what you do exactly. You are hired by Foreign Affairs and you represent Canada abroad to a certain extent.

Do you contract out your services? Are you a personnel agency? Are you mandated by Foreign Affairs? What kind of control does the Department have, if any, on the work you are doing?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

We're what I would call a “quango”; we're a quasi-non-governmental organization. We don't have a constituency as you would have in an Amnesty International. That said, we're not part of government either. The fact that we're not part of government makes us valuable to government. We're a tool they can use. We're a trusted partner with the Foreign Affairs START folks right now, and with CIDA and others, but they can use us in a way that means they do not have to take ownership for what we end up doing.

We're a service provider and an implementing agent. CIDA is quite used to using implementing agents. This is newer to Foreign Affairs, but that's coming along very well. This is valuable if something goes wrong out there. Although we can be given very clear parameters by the Canadian government and by Foreign Affairs as to what they want done, at the end of the day, if it goes wrong, it's our fault all the way. It is our fault if we lose one of our individuals on the ground, as we did last year; one of the individuals we deployed in Haiti was killed. It allows a certain arm's-length relationship for Foreign Affairs and CIDA.

Equally, and perhaps more importantly, it makes it easier for the international community to utilize us. They do not have to approach us through an official démarche; they can approach us directly. If they want an expert, we can find them an expert in 24 hours. They just send us an e-mail; we make a rapid dive into our database, pull out the right individual, see if he or she is free, and send the résumé off to that requesting organization. It really makes us far more useful to the international community than if we were inside government.

This whole debate took place very early on in the creation of CANADEM. It could have been set up in Foreign Affairs or set up outside. I argued there was a value in setting it up outside, Foreign Affairs agreed, and the rest is history. Part of my argument was we should be like NORDEM--outside of government.

I don't know if that quite gets to it, but we're a non-governmental organization. We're a not-for-profit organization.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

I find it surprising. Isn't part of the government`s prerogatives to offer those services and to be responsible to the people? When we talk about democratic development, since this is what you are doing, how can we give that responsibility to an outside organization...

From what you told me, I get the impression that you do the work that the government could not take the risk to do itself. As parliamentarians, we want the government to be responsible for what happens on the ground, particularly as concerns democratic development, something that is done with taxpayers' money.

I do not understand. I have difficulty understanding the role you are playing.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

This is actually a fairly standard construct, not only in Canada but internationally. For example, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees will quite often engage NGOs to run refugee camps. Almost all of CIDA's activities are carried out by implementing partners that are outside of government, outside of CIDA.

The controlling link, of course, is that they ask for RFPs. We bid for projects in many instances. The government can tell you that this is how you have to spend your money, this is what we want you to do, and if you don't do it, we're not going to pay your second tranche; we're going to take you to court, and we're going to want that money back. There's always that way for government to control any of its implementing partners--as CIDA does.

Equally, it creates a certain amount of pressure upon us to remain a very lean and efficient organization. If we get too expensive, the government is going to step away from us. We're not government employees, and as a result the salary scale for CANADEM is extremely low--it's an NGO salary scale. If this had gone forward within the Canadian government, it probably would have cost about three to four times what it has cost. It's a very cost-effective, lean mechanism. There are a lot of examples of how it's used elsewhere, both internationally and in Canada.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Are you the only organization in Canada that does that kind of work?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

No, there are a lot of organizations similar to us.

There was a certain niche that was not being filled. We've got a lot of implementing agents for doing things in the field. What we did not have was a roster. There was no national roster, and that remains our biggest value-added.

Obviously at the beginning, there was an idea that this would be a human rights roster. That is why I proposed it, why Foreign Affairs started to fund it, and why we looked at Notre Dame as a good example—and that's what they remain. It is largely a human rights roster with a modest add-on on the democracy side.

But as we did this, it became more and more obvious that, wait a second, there's no roster for this, so maybe we should roster that as well, or oh, there's nobody rostering this, to the point where now—and in your kit, there's a study put out by DPKO, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations—there are rosters for the deployment of civilian experts and peace operations.

This is a real success story. Canada is head and shoulders above the world. The closest roster to us is the German ZIF, which was modelled on CANADEM. ZIF has a roster of 1,000 people. We are the only roster in the world that is specifically designed to assist the United Nations, and therein lies a fair amount of the reason for our success.

I am going off on a bit of a tangent here. I don't know how I got there, but—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

That's all right. That's the place to stop because you're out of time.

Mr. Goldring?

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Mr. LaRose-Edwards, I'd like to talk a little bit about your recruitment. You say you have 7,500 members on your list of possible people to send on missions, and you send them on missions in a variety of areas around the world.

My question is, with a list such as this, I would think it would be advantageous for members of Parliament who wished to go on these missions to not only participate in the observation but also to get other value-added issues conducted at the same time by various meetings and so on, because obviously the election monitoring itself is a one- or two-day experience.

Also, as I am sure you are aware, I have been on a couple of other missions, and of course to the Ukraine. I even spent a week in the Ukraine on my own without an interpreter, and I did pretty well.

My question really concerns your response to my office, which I thought was rather caustic, with comments like, “Peter can probably have lots of fun anyway, but I can't believe you people are bothering me with this”—when I am making a serious application to go. Then there was another comment that it would be a major sign of disrespect to Haitians to send non-French speakers to observe their elections. Why is it that it's not an insult for other nations, such as Ukraine and maybe other countries too, to have English-speaking people who have the interest and take time out of their own lives to go to the countries? I would hardly think that it would be a sign of disrespect for those countries. Why would it be that way for Haiti?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

I think you're absolutely right, it would be extremely valuable for MPs to be part of the CANADEM roster, because among other things, the CANADEM roster is a networking tool and will be increasingly used for that. So whenever someone is looking for a particular kind of Canadian expertise—and it may be for a one-day effort or for a longer period—CANADEM is one vehicle for them to drill down into Canadian expertise and find that expert. So on that I agree absolutely.

One of the valuable roles that CANADEM plays is being able to find the best and most appropriate Canadian expert to populate a mission or be put forward for a particular opening in the UN. We are very much merit-based.

Certainly when we're looking for experts to work in a local host society, we always attempt to find people who speak the local language, understand the local culture, which is particularly important for missions such as elections observation missions, when you're quickly in and out. You don't have time to slowly come up to speed over a couple of months to know the local language. For Haiti, what we were looking for was people who had Creole and French, amongst other skill sets. So quite consistently we will attempt to find the best match.

The criteria for this are not criteria that we set. CANADEM doesn't set the criteria. We respond to the international organizations telling us what they want. We have a situation where we probably have upwards of ten million Canadians who have sufficient French to speak French with Haitians. We thought it particularly appropriate then that the international community was French-speaking.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

With a serious request from a member of Parliament, and knowing that we've worked on other election observations—and without belabouring the point—I would think it would behoove you to respond in a more gracious way and to perhaps give the invitation to maybe work on other select missions if we have time to do so. I think the interaction of members of Parliament with your organization could serve to better both.

I have a second point that I'd like to talk about, and it concerns your comments about working with the political entities at the community level. Maybe you can enlighten us, because part of this discussion is about democratic development and an interest or a beginning interest and realization that we should be working from the community basis with the political parties, with the policy and principles development, and with potential federal members of Parliament, as they may be, to promote the idea that they should be promoting the community interests in bringing things forward to the federal system.

What work have you done on that aspect, and what could you foresee that your organization could do?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

We're truly responsive to what the request is. In other words, if we get a request and they're looking for someone who is a former—

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

What have you been doing?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

What have we been doing? Probably the easier question is, what have we not been responding to?

We respond to or focus on about a thousand mission openings a year, and for some of those missions, it's for four, five, or ten. We counted the Ukraine mission as one, although we had almost 500 individuals deployed on that one.

In other words, I'm hard-pressed to think of what we have not responded to.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

No, but you made the comment that you had been working with political entities on a local basis, and I'm wondering about the nature of the work you did. We're fully aware of the election monitoring, but what other work did you do with the political entities on a local and regional basis?