Thank you very much. There's never enough time.
Welcome.
Your chair has made it clear you're not all of one view; you're not in complete accord on all issues.
Our chairman spoke about where we are in Afghanistan.
It will come as no surprise to you to know that not all of us, as members of this committee, are in agreement with the decision of the Canadian government to extend by two years an already committed mission that had nine months to go—subjected it to a vote, basically suspended the normal rules, and put that vote through without the benefit of briefing notes, without the benefit of evaluation of how the current mission was going. So my party, although it's a difficult thing to deal with, voted unanimously against the extension of that mission. I think subsequent events make it even clearer why that was the wise course, which doesn't solve the problem, that's for sure.
I want to pick up on something I wasn't going to raise, but someone else did, and it deserves an alternate point of view, and that is the status of our aboriginal people. In some ways, the first question raised, which was about Canada's commitment to delivering on its official development assistance levels, is our greatest international shame. Our greatest domestic shame is the current status of our aboriginal people.
Not to take it from us, because I think in some ways it's a more appropriate question to be put to the aboriginal Canadian community. Today, by chance, is the tenth anniversary of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, a document that was drafted after a very exhaustive consultation across the country and a great deal of research and soul-searching.
It is not an exaggeration to say that ten years later that document, which was called Gathering Strength, is viewed by many aboriginal people as perhaps better named Gathering Dust. The reality is, yes, there are some aboriginal people doing very well, but there are many aboriginal people, inner-city people, non-reserve based, who are living in terrible conditions of poverty, with very high levels of unemployment, and there are many reserves where there are unemployed people in the 70% to 80% range, who don't have safe water in today's world, which is simply unacceptable.
It was never supposed to have been a maximum, but a minimum international obligation by donor nations to commit to 0.7% of gross national income for overseas development assistance. I have a question around the role the EEC may play or not play in this regard.
Very quickly, when I was elected to office initially, it was in the province of Nova Scotia, at the provincial level, and as chance would have it, I was the only woman and the only New Democrat elected in that election. Through some mysterious process, I know not what, the EEC somewhere took pity on me and invited me to come on a one-month study tour of the then member countries. I was instantly struck by something, now over 20 years later, which has stuck with me ever since, at the model--then EEC, now EU--for setting standards toward which you constantly work to try to elevate your member nations and toward which you try to bring aspiring members to a certain level to bring them in.
In some ways, the Canadian model is the inverse of that, and one of the criticisms about the free trade deals—not fair trade, but free trade deals—into which you've entered is that it tends to be based on a drive to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator, without setting clear standards.
With respect to that model, I've watched the success of it with respect to economic development in Ireland, the result of that regional economic policy. The result of that is I've lost my younger son to Ireland, and I have two Irish granddaughters and a third one on the way--because of the dynamism of that.
My question is whether there is a role for the European Union. I realize they can't reach in and directly affect domestic policies, member nation policies, with respect to meeting the ODA obligations.
Is there a process at the EU level that works on bringing countries up to deliver at least on the minimum of 0.7%?