Mr. Chair, let me try to respond without being speculative, because I don't believe that's my role as an official, but to comment on factors that certainly have been at play and that I think you might want to take into account.
One is that the existing definition of ODA as defined by the 30 countries that now are members of the OECD--and I think about 25 participate in the development assistance committee. That's out there; that's defined. It's a moving target; it gets renegotiated. It progressively gets expanded and has been over a number of years, certainly in the last ten years, largely in response to many donors' desires and not just Canada's alone, as the nature of development assistance changes, particularly to factor in more peace and security-related issues, to enable donors to count some of their expenditures that are related to the goals of development assistance as ODA. That will happen regardless of how Parliament chooses to legislate and how governments choose to act under the act.