Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
By way of preamble, I should say that I'm between my assignment as ambassador to Belgium and my new job in New York, which I should start on July 5. I'm not there yet, and don't pretend to be the expert.
On the first point Dr. Martin raised, I think we have to be very aware of the so-called CNN effect, which focuses on one crisis where the international media can get in and get access, to the detriment of attention to other areas—the Ivory Coast is a good example—which somehow slide off the headlines. It doesn't mean that they're any less important or compelling. I think the job of a professional foreign service is to bring those other dimensions to the attention of the government.
The Ivory Coast is still in enormous difficulty, in fact in a sort of civil war. There is a United Nations mission there, but it's certainly one that shouldn't be forgotten.
The Congo is an enormous country of huge strategic importance on the continent, where literally millions of people have died in the last 10 to 15 years, and where there is hope, if we can find ways to support the electoral process and the country going ahead.
In northern Uganda, I think my predecessor and the government played an excellent role in bringing this humanitarian problem to the attention of the Security Council and getting them to focus on it—and in being very active diplomatically. Mr. MacKay has directed us to be even more energetic in trying to work out a solution.
So this is a long way of saying I'm very much in agreement with your preamble that we have to find better ways to prevent conflict. The peace-building commission should be a good first step, but it shouldn't be the only one. Canada has to come up with its own ideas as well.
On the UN millennium development goals, this is a big challenge. The world summit last year, which was five years after the adoption of the goals, was designed to focus attention and say to the world community, how are we doing? If we don't step up our efforts, we're not going to make it. Of course, if you don't make those goals—in Africa in particular, nothing's static—it means a sliding away.
I confess I don't think there's an easy answer to that, or I don't have it, but I think it's important. They are a very important benchmark that we need to keep in mind as more than a goal. Regarding CIDA programming, as you know, the CIDA thinking is very much oriented towards those goals and trying to make sure that our ODA effort serves and advances them.
On UN reform, Kofi Annan has presented the detailed reports on internal administration, which, as a kind of layman, I would say make eminent good sense. They are what I would term the modern management principles, which we would apply in Canada. I think we have to keep arguing for the effectiveness of administration and modern methods.
A big challenge at the UN is that its internal rules and regulations, as I understand them, were designed for another era, when the UN was primarily that building in New York and organized and gave support to conferences. In the last 15 years there's been an explosion of UN operational activities in peacekeeping missions and international humanitarian assistance. The nature of the organization has changed; its own internal processes have to change.
The last question Dr. Martin put concerns overlap.