It's good to hear that you have no intention of being part of any future government. That's a comfort of some kind.
With respect to your point, I want people to go back to the genesis of this bill. The genesis of this bill is the last Parliament. In the last Parliament you actually heard witnesses who said poverty reduction should be the central focus of anything going forward. You had the three party leaders at the time writing to the then Prime Minister saying poverty reduction should.... That's what the point of this bill was.
What concerns me—to address your point specifically—is that you'll see as we unfold some of the amendments that what we want in the ODA envelope is focus on poverty reduction.
What I'm concerned about with Mr. Goldring's amendment—and I would regard it, again, as friendly but not necessarily a friendly amendment—is that you start to divert. Is the minister now supposed to ask himself or herself questions about whether this is democracy-enhancing? What are the other areas?
Let's face it. There are always far more claims on the available dollar, whether it's 0.3%, or 0.5%, or 0.7%, than there will ever be money to fill those claims. It seems to me that the more the committee wanders away from, if you will, generic statements about poverty reduction, the more it opens the door for the minister to say, well, really, activity X in country Y falls within poverty reduction, because it has something to do with democracy enhancement. I don't think that was the point of the letter from the leaders, and I don't think it was the point of what you heard in your hearings in the last Parliament.
I just want to caution the committee about wandering off from core purposes here.