Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank the minister for coming here today.
I have two questions. My first one is dealing with Afghanistan. The second one is dealing with Africa.
Minister, you talked at great length, and most of your talk today was about Afghanistan and your commitment to Afghanistan. Over the winter we had senators and MPs visiting Afghanistan, and they were not too impressed with the developments that they have seen over there. Last week we had Minister MacKay here, giving us quite an impression that widespread reconstruction is being done in that region.
Yesterday there was an article in the Ottawa Citizen. There was a gentleman named Seth Jones from the RAND Corporation, and he just spent two weeks in Kandahar. He claims that while Kandahar City and the Zhari district are seeing reconstruction, virtually nothing else is taking place in the rest of Kandahar province, especially in the rural areas.
Can you explain the discrepancy between your colleague's statement that there's widespread reconstruction being done in Afghanistan and the comments by this gentleman on the rural areas? That's my first question.
My second question is dealing with Africa. Just recently a report came out from the Senate, under the leadership of Hugh Segal. It was quite critical of CIDA's role in Africa. It also had some very constructive changes that your department should be dealing with as it's trying to deal with the African situation. We made a commitment in Kananaskis a few years ago that the Canadian government was going to really make some constructive changes in Africa. We don't see it mentioned in the budget. When you look at the budget numbers, there's very little left over for us in Africa. We were supposed to double our commitment in Africa over five years, and the budget doesn't seem to reflect that.
Those are my two questions, Minister. Maybe you can answer the first one on Afghanistan, and the second one is the role we would like to see in Africa.