Thank you, Mr. Abbott.
To be fair, yes, we were in multiple countries. Some people said we moved from 127 to 69, or 78, etc. But in fairness, the former government had published a list of 25 countries. When we took office I asked, “What does this mean? What's been done to focus in these countries, the concentration of the former government? How has the movement been? Have the resources followed? Have activities followed?” There was a list, I will grant you that. However, there was no directional indication of what “countries of concentration” meant under the former government, and certainly no articulated public statements focusing work within the country, etc.
Consequently, I want to be fair. We didn't go from a hundred and some odd countries or 78 countries down to 20. There was a list of 25 countries. Yes, there were changes in those countries. Some of the countries that were on the former list in fact were only receiving maybe $4 million in a bilateral program. The majority of the money going into that country was through our humanitarian assistance because it was a humanitarian situation that was happening, either through natural disasters or in many cases through conflict situations. So the best vehicle and the best means to address the largest or most significant challenges in that country would be through refugee settlement, to support food aid, to support responding to droughts, etc. When you look country by country, depending on the country, the impact of adjusting bilateral programming does not reduce our humanitarian support for those countries as well.
To address the question about what else at CIDA, I will say that there is one other thing that does concern me. Now that we've chosen thematic focused areas, I don't believe we have the expertise at CIDA. There was a day when CIDA historically, in the past, had expertise in-house. It moved away from that, I think, over the past decade, decade and a half. So now, as expertise is required, consultants are hired. I think if we choose a focus, it means we have to have at least a satisfactory level of expertise at CIDA.
The other thing too, and I think we can all witness it, is when we're working in a large department that has sectoral and also geographic interests and activities—and we've heard this about governments and the public service before—many times silos are created and there is not cross-talk and sharing of information across the silos. Consequently, you have things happening in isolation. It may be a multilateral branch, or a partnership branch, or a country branch. They don't talk to each other, so they don't know sort of what's happening in the health sector and what Canada is supporting. I'm not saying it's a blatant, humongous problem, but there wasn't that open vehicle by which that would happen naturally, so we're addressing that.
I think probably those are two observations. I think we would benefit from more in-house expertise and to ensure that we encourage cross-talk and that we work together as an agency. For example, in Africa, I've asked the African branch to come forward so that when we have our discussions with the African community, we've already done some investigation and due diligence on what is best addressed on a pan-Africa basis, on a regional basis, and then on a country-by-country basis.
If you look at the Great Lakes region, that is a region, but it includes many countries, so there are issues that they share. Maybe to address those issues we should look more regionally than at three, four, or five countries and different programs all addressing the same issue. That's the kind of thinking I would like to have happen at CIDA.