Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The first point I'd like to make is as a former member of the Royal Canadian Air Force in the sixties: I hope we never send our military in harm's way without the best of kit. I think that's an extremely important comment.
You spoke of Haiti before--there's some relevancy and some comparison to Haiti--and you spoke of democracy. We did a study of Haiti, and being there on the ground in Haiti was invaluable to give us a perspective on the country. One of the things that I noticed that came out of that was the real sense--as you said, Mr. Manley--that an election doesn't necessarily make democracy, that there's a lot more involved in it than that.
I know we can build our capacity on governance, we can build our capacity on political parties, we can build all of these other things. But something that came through very plainly in Haiti was that many of the citizenry didn't understand what their representative would be doing for them, their member of Parliament. There was a very poor understanding of it.
One of the recommendations that came through was to--as in Canada--take it into the schools. I know you've been building the capacity on the schools, but the next thing is to work on the next generation and the generation to follow: that they be aware and seized with the importance of what improving a democracy means on the long term. Is that one of the observations that you made too? If you would, comment on the long-term next generation, and the generation to follow too, because those will be the people that vote.