Thank you very much for your presentation.
I have to say I haven't had an opportunity to fully review the report you presented to the committee today, and I appreciate the opportunity to quickly look through it. It is clear there are some sections of this report that do speak to the issue of poverty reduction, for sure; if not, I don't know what on earth we're doing participating in these organizations at all.
At the same time, for us to be consumed with the issue of confidentiality and for that to be used as an argument against what we're trying to achieve here is to ignore what is a huge problem in the international development world, the black box of the IMF and the World Bank, which I think leads us more and more to be concerned about whether many of the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions aren't driving and deepening poverty, instead of actually preventing, reducing, and alleviating poverty. Forgive us if we're not overly consumed with the issue of confidentiality. I won't speak for anyone else, but I would say a lot of the progressive community wants to see the lid pried off some of that confidentiality.
Having said that, I don't think anybody would advocate that we should thumb our nose at agreements we've entered into in protecting confidentiality. So the real issue is, what is the information from our participation in the Bretton Woods institutions that is the business of Canada? Surely, at a minimum, the information is the business of the commitments that Canada undertakes.
I guess I should be asking you for recommendations on how to amend this, but I can see we could certainly amend very directly the provision in the bill to simply say that no violation of our confidentiality commitments can be made in the reporting on our Bretton Woods institutions. Is that not a reasonable proposition to set that out as an amendment? I'm not a legal drafter, but in some way it seems to me that this should be possible to achieve.