I think the issues today make the challenge of developing the police more onerous than the first time—albeit Haiti had never previously had a civilian police. We now have a situation in which we essentially have to clean out the wound before it's going to heal. So there has to be a very significant vetting process. There is a number of fairly high-ranking people who have to be vetted from the organization.
We need a stronger organization within the inspector general's office, and in fact this has been identified in current planning. The vetting of some of these people will be a test of the government's will to make substantive change. I echo Madame Laporte's assessment of the current director general of police, Mr. Mario Andresol. To give emphasis to a CIDA program that was run in the 1990s, he is a graduate of our middle and senior management program, which was designed through CIDA. In fact, it's a program that the Haitian national police have asked to be reinstated.
But the challenge will be to clean out the organization before it can be healed, in order to ensure that from a fiscal perspective, the government is prepared to sustain what we can develop—albeit I think a previous witness talked about a future of 8,000 police officers. That doesn't include a border guard customs service, which will be part of the federal police organization, increasing significantly the resources for the inspector general's office—plus the personal security for government officials. So it may well be that we are talking 10,000 to 12,000 people being necessarily to do all of the related security functions within a country that hopes to have all these pillars under one umbrella.
It will take a significant amount of time and a significant amount of money. We need to have the donors committed in terms of staying the course, working collaboratively, because no one donor--and certainly Canada, and I include the United States, with its deep pockets, in this--is prepared to take this on as a singular project. We have to do it collaboratively.
Our contributions have to be well timed and well coordinated. We have to put accountability mechanisms into place and, frankly, hold the Haitian government's feet to the fire on some of these issues. They must lead, they must be partners, but in any partnership, in any partner arrangement, there are obligations on both sides of the fence, and we have to see those carried through.