Well, perhaps I can start. As the excellent Halifax Initiative report points out, it's been about 15 years since the Auditor General had a look at Canada's involvement in the IFIs. So one can begin there by saying it's time for the Auditor General, who has resources to bring to bear on this, to have a look again and to do this as a more regular activity. I think that would be one mechanism that should seriously be considered.
Other than that, as I mentioned in my remarks, there's no substitute for continuity. You can't solve this in one swoop. There has to be continuous engagement and dialogue. I would suggest re-forming the subcommittee that existed in the 1990s to look at the IFIs, and perhaps broadening that to look at multilateral organizations dealing with economic and social cooperation, because there is an issue of how the IFIs and the UN cooperate. Minister Flaherty himself made an appeal for better coordination among the UN and the World Bank and the IMF.
Now, how you do that is actually more difficult than it sounds, but it requires focus and constant debate. To have a subcommittee that looks at these issues and calls witnesses from academia and from the private sector, as well as from civil society, cannot but help.
The final thing I would say is that one hears that many people think of money going into a black hole when they think about the World Bank, or the IMF, or multilaterals. Well, it's actually more to the point to say that the multilateral organizations have some pretty good mechanisms of oversight. The independent evaluation office at the IMF and the independent evaluation group at the World Bank produce some excellent reports. Those reports need more dissemination and reading, and if we had an IFI or a multilateral subcommittee of this committee that would afford time for committee staff and witnesses to engage in the debate using that material, which is out there....
In many ways, I would like to say that there's much more material available to feed this debate on the oversight than we often give credit to the institutions for.