I have to say--maybe I'm not fully grasping something--the fact that this is so actually makes me worry that we're doing even less about poverty reduction with our current ODA obligations than probably most Canadians believe, than even parliamentarians think to be the case, because we're coming nowhere close to meeting our obligations to the millennium development goals, nowhere close to meeting the levels of ODA that we should be delivering.
We've just come back from Europe, where it was utterly humiliating to be a Canadian, frankly, and trying to explain. People weren't even polite, off the record. They'd say, “What the hell has happened to Canadians? You know, we're just seeing no real progress, no real commitment.” Every one of those countries had already committed to 0.7%, and some of them were actually close to 1%.
Am I wrong in my conclusion about that? Maybe it underscores why we need this legislation to actually make a real serious push on poverty reduction. None of it precludes these activities from taking place, but it does preclude a false notion of how much we're committing to serious poverty reduction. These can be supported because they have merit in their own right. Maybe some of them need to be under defence or somewhere else, but we wouldn't be getting false credit and giving ourselves a false signal of how much we're actually doing in the way of serious poverty reduction.