Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for being here today, ladies and gentlemen. Your presentation was most interesting.
I would first like to congratulate you, Mr. Beer, for your frankness in explaining the problems faced by police officers or members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police over there. I had asked a question of Mr. Thompson, who preceded you, about why we did not have any conclusive results. I do not find you very positive, so I will direct my questions to Ms. Laporte.
Ms. Laporte, I am familiar with the work done by CIDA employees in the field, because I was the critic for the Bloc Québécois on CIDA, and I would not want you to take my questions as reflecting poorly on CIDA. I simply want to understand what happened.
Impunity and corruption have long existed in Haiti. I have a friend who went there in 2000 to do a doctoral thesis and who came back saying that the system is rotten and impunity is omnipresent. In the place where he was living, there were about 5,000 police officers for eight million inhabitants. People describe the situation as horrific.
Since CIDA has been in Haiti for a long time and since I know its workers there well enough to know that usually they are very well informed about what is happening on the ground, why is it that CIDA nevertheless continue to invest in Haiti? It disengaged gradually and has less and less of a financial investment, but it has nevertheless invested in this country. Did we not have an obligation to produce results?
In an announcement on May 1, 2006, the Minister said that CIDA would be investing $48 million in Haiti. Twenty million dollars will go to the local development program to help communities assume responsibility for socio-economic development, and $5 million will be used to support democracy.
There are two major problems in Haiti. First, people must have food. So the first problem is agriculture. The second is security.
Is it not strange to spend $20 million on socio-economic development to promote small business and only $5 million on democracy, when we know that this is such a big problem? You were saying earlier that there was no development possible without security, and vice versa.
What official guarantees do we have that this time this will work? Earlier, you gave some guarantees, but are there any others? Do we have any guarantees from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN, or do people simply assume that Préval will take certain actions?
I noticed that it was a joint statement by CIDA and the RCMP. Can any pressure be applied to ensure that this works?