Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 24th, 2006

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

I'd like to think we are lean and mean, and I'd like to stay lean and mean. Staying lean and mean means you're not getting too much funding, and do you know what? I'm largely happy with the funding we're getting. Will we get better? Yes, we will, because there will be more and more Canadians who register with us. I predict that there will be anywhere from 25,000 to 35,000 people on that roster ten years from now, so we will continue to struggle to figure out how to do that with not too much money.

I would suggest that the better way to proceed starts to feed in with what your mandate is on this study, democratic development. The reason we're here is not to help Canadians get jobs. I love my fellow Canadians and that's what the end result is, but that's not what drives me.

What drives me and what drives my colleagues is assisting the international community—the UN and others—and, at one step removed, assisting local societies as they move forward. That's what drives me. That's why I recommended that we have this and why I think it has been very successful.

What I'm leading to is the fact that CANADEM has its own roster. The Norwegians have theirs; they have a Norwegian Refugee Council and they have NORDEM. The Germans have ZIF. Everybody's moving along just fine. They're still a long way behind us, but they're coming. They have their own money.

It's the developed countries that don't have this. That's the real gap. Not only do they need to know who their experts are. When we have a UN mission out there, we want the best Canadians that we have going out there. We want them working alongside the best Congolese, the best Haitians, the best Somalis, or the best whatever.

The real gap is them having their rosters, and that's where I'd like to move forward. That's where I think there's a real potential. If Canada is really sincere about strengthening the international community, this is a huge gap.

Right now, you probably have a good idea of how staffing is carried out in the UN. They don't have easy mechanisms, so you find that a particular permanent mission is putting forward the best friend of the president. That's how it occurs right now. We all know that's how it goes—not that there are not great third world individuals in the UN, but it's more luck than anything else.

That's where the real gap is, and it doesn't—

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

It's in identifying the needs and the areas of excellence within the developing countries. Is that what you mean?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

Exactly. It's having rosters of Congolese, rosters of Nigerians, helping them to create their own rosters that are merit-based, lean, and mean, and having those feeding into the UN.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Obhrai.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Thank you for coming in.

As you can see from many of the questions you are hearing from us, we are wondering what it is that you're doing. You, yourself, alluded to the fact that not many are aware of what each organization is doing. There's a lot of duplication happening. We just came from a tour of Scandinavia, and there is a lot of duplication taking place there. So we don't know what your organization is actually doing.

Quickly, can we have a list of your board of directors sent to us? Who is on your board of directors? You do have a board of directors, right?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

Right.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Could we have a list of who they are?

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

Will I send them to you, or just give them to you right now?

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

I want to know, because I've been in Parliament for eight years and I don't even know what you do. This is the first time you've been here, and back out in the west nobody knows what you're doing. There's a total disconnect in the west.

So I would like to know what you're doing with your roster and everything. What are you doing in the west? A lot of people are out there. How are you approaching advertising yourself as an agency funded by the government? How are you reaching to Canadians out in the west? I'm really interested in knowing, because in going around the international development community out in the west, nobody's heard about you guys.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

I'm not too sure who you're talking about, because we have a lot of westerners registered with us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Maybe you can just give us a little bit of an indication as to how you recruit.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

Recruiting has been a real challenge. Although, again, $650,000 may sound like a lot of money, one of the real challenges for us is to function with that. As many requests as we get, there's not a lot of money left. There are two sides: the need for extra money for advertising, and if you advertise in a certain way, getting a whole raft of people registering. Then you have to screen them, and that's really expensive.

So what we've tended to do is count on word of mouth within particular communities, or we'll do targeted recruitment. We did targeted recruitment with the Afghan Canadians. And we have regularly, over the past five years, gone back to the federal government saying that this was a huge success, this was awesome, that these Afghan Canadians are getting picked up all over the place and we want to go to other groups of new Canadians and recruit them.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Well, what I want to know is, in the west, there are Afghanis in the west--

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

We'd love to go to the west and do targeted recruitment, but it's about getting the funding to do that. So we are very careful about trying to recruit more than we can handle. In other words, if we trigger 500 people from Calgary registering tomorrow, we have to screen them all. So we rely on word of mouth, experts in crisis response activity talking to other experts, by and large.

We might not be as well known to long-term development workers. But among those who are doing crisis response in crisis situations out there, everybody in Canada in that field knows of us. I'll guarantee you that.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

We'll talk more on that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I may just also mention that if you go to the CANADEM website, you just click on one of the links and it'll show you who their board members are. They're listed right on their website.

In conclusion, I have just one very quick little question. Do you get requests from groups like the United Nations and such for people for an exercise somewhere that isn't sanctioned by Canada? I'm thinking that you have this great roster of people who are ready, willing, and able. Has it ever happened that organizations have made requests when it's really something that Canada...? It's not a sanctioned exercise.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

No, that's never happened. I've been doing international human rights for 25 years, and if I figure that it's not a credible mission out there, we're not going to act on it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You just nix it.

[Paul LaRose-Edwards]

I've got a whole bunch of board members behind me. Warren Allmand, for example, would jump all over me if I stepped outside the bounds of what was appropriate. No, we have never been in that situation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right. We want to thank you for coming.

That concludes our time here today. We're going to suspend and give you the opportunity to exit the chair, and we'll bring another colleague in here.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right, committee. We'll call this meeting of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade back to order.

We're pleased to have with us the Honourable John McKay, member of Parliament from Scarborough—Guildwood. Mr. McKay is the drafter of a private member's bill, Bill C-293. He is with us today to talk about his bill and perhaps some potential changes. I see he has brought some changes that he may want to table later on.

Mr. McKay, you are well aware of how this committee works. We welcome you, and we'll let you speak for as long as you want--ten minutes usually--and then we'll go into the first round of questioning.

The first round will be a seven-minute round, followed by a five-minute round.

Mr. McKay.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

You and all other members will be relieved to know that I'm not proposing a long, inspiring speech.

Already I see that Ms. McDonough is disappointed by that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. McKay, we've heard you in the past and that wouldn't be what we expect.

[John McKay]

It might be long or it might be inspiring, but it probably won't be both.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!