Thank you very much for coming, Mr. Smillie. I would like to have you come back because the document that I have just read has raised many questions for me. Your vast experience could help us further our understanding on many points.
I'd like to talk about one paragraph that I found particularly inspiring. On page 2, it states:
A problem, however, for anyone spending government money in today's climate—one might say today's “fog”—of results-based programming, is the need to demonstrate cause and effect; to show that efforts aimed at democratization or improving human rights have actually had the intended results. This has become a kind of programming tyranny, one that has led CIDA and its grantees into an excess of planning and risk aversion, in what is essentially an emergent and risk-prone business.
I would like you to expand on this. Earlier you quoted Mintzberg, and I would like to hear what you have to say.