That's a very big question.
Now that CIDA has created an Office for Democratic Governance, perhaps that is the place where lessons will be rolled up and learned and remembered, but in fact we already have an International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, and it is funded by Parliament. I've never understood why we need more institutions when we have institutions that are already there. If it's not doing the work that's wanted or needed, then it should be given the mandate and the marching orders to do it.
When I say it has been a patchwork approach, I'm not opposed to the idea of a patchwork approach because there is so much to learn. We actually don't know what all the answers are. My concern about the patchwork is that we aren't learning from it. We have a huge propensity in the aid business—and it's not just in this area, it's in the whole area—for what I call the failure to learn from failure. We promote success. We advertise success. We pretend we know what we're doing. We tell the Auditor General for certain we know exactly what we're doing. Everybody who has a project to pitch, whether they're inside CIDA or whether it's NGOs or anybody else out there, talks about the certainty with which the results will be achieved. The truth is that if we knew how to do all this, we would have done it years ago. If we knew how to create jobs in developing countries, if we knew how to end poverty, we would have done it a long time ago.
A lot of this is experimental. A lot of it is risky. We should acknowledge the mistakes. We shouldn't repeat them. We should acknowledge them, not punish them, but learn from them, and certainly not hide them.
That's a long, indirect answer to what you ask.