—but let me just say quickly that we're very much focused on issues of transparency and accountability, I think appropriately so. We have witnesses who represent agencies that get very tiny sums of money from the Government of Canada. We subject them to quite a lot of scrutiny. We want to know and understand what they're doing, with what effect, and so on.
We're talking, in the case of the World Bank and the IMF, about huge sums of money, and concerns have in fact been raised before this committee again and again that, on the one hand, where we're delivering ODA, as paltry as our commitment is at the moment in relation to that of many other countries, some of our policies at the IMF and World Bank actually are quite counterproductive to what we state as our primary objectives.
You have structural adjustment programs that actually undermine our poverty reduction programs, in some cases. I don't want to start elaborating on that extensively, but I am saying I think it's a big issue.
On the other hand, I'm very happy to accommodate a friendly amendment, if the point is that we should hear first from the minister and whatever appropriate officials he's going to bring, and IMF and World Bank officials, with a view to further consideration along the lines I've suggested. In other words, it doesn't commit us immediately to a more extensive study.
But I would make the case that it's a very substantial sum of money we're talking about, and for us to be so consumed with transparency and accountability for tiny amounts of money in various NGOs and so on, but not concerned about the transparency and accountability of our own participation in IMF and World Bank, seems to be a very out-of-balance kind of view of accounting for our—