The U.K. legislation at first seems similar to this bill because it has this lens of poverty reduction, but there are big differences between what this bill proposes to do and what the U.K. legislation does.
It's interesting, because we have a past history with the U.K. on the legal front, but there are quite a lot of differences between Canada and the U.K., particularly in the organization of government. Here in Canada, we have statutes that establish departments. In the U.K., that's not what they do. They have the statute that gives, in this case, powers to one minister. That statute doesn't have any impact on other statutes, because there are no other statutes creating other departments. In this case, in the case of the bill here in Canada, this bill does have an impact on other statutes that I've mentioned exist.
Also, another big difference in the U.K. legislation is that the legislation, this focus on poverty reduction, applies only to one minister, whereas under this proposed legislation here, there is a definition of “competent minister”. We assume there could be more than one competent minister, so it may apply to many, like two or three or I don't know how many ministers. So that's another difference.
I understand there was a lot of preparation work before the U.K. legislation was enacted. There was a white paper that had been published by the government at the time.
There's no petition system, no consultative committee in the U.K. legislation. It's a simpler mandate. It's clear that humanitarian assistance is separate from development assistance, because of course the situation is very different. When you deal with humanitarian assistance, you focus on saving lives, period, first.
The U.K. legislation also has its own definition of “development assistance”. It did not include the OECD one.
I hear there was a lot of debate in their House of Commons about whether or not they should refer to international human rights or human rights in the legislation, and the government decided that, no, they did not want that.
So there are differences, the main one being that it applies only to one minister and not to the whole U.K. government.