Thank you, Ms. Deschamps.
I do not know what Ms. Joya is basing those statements on. I first visited Afghanistan in January 2002 when I was deputy prime minister. When I was in Kabul, I visited a CIDA project run by the NGO CARE. That was the reason why I agreed to become involved with CARE Canada after leaving politics. The project involved giving widows in Kabul enough food so that they could survive. CIDA is one of the few international aid organizations that continued to work in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime.
I met those widows; there were 30,000 of them in Kabul. The goal of the CARE project, the Canadian project, was to help 10,000 of them. All it involved was giving them a sack of wheat, a sack of beans and a bottle of canola oil per month. One woman told me that her husband had been killed during the civil war, leaving her with six children, the youngest six months old. At first, she worked, but when the Taliban arrived, she could no longer do so. She asked me to thank everyone when I got back to Canada for saving her children's lives.
Six years later, our panel went back. Now, the CIDA and CARE project is not just a humanitarian project. The widows are involved in a development program, they receive micro-loans to help them create their own jobs. This is a significant change that has been brought about in a few years.
Can we say that people there are living in comfort like ours in Canada or the United States? No, not at all. This is a country that is twice as poor as Haiti. It is still a problem. Has the situation improved? Let us hear what your witness has to say, but as far as I am concerned, I have seen an improvement.