Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 29th, 2009

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for appearing here today.

Ms. Sussman, your organization listed some of the member organizations that you represent, and it looks like there are about 30 here, but I understand that there are more than that. How many organizations does your group represent?

[Amanda Sussman]

Many of those listed there are themselves associations. For instance, the Canadian Council for International Co-operation has over 100 members in itself, and the Canadian Food Security Policy Group, which is listed there, has 35 in addition. It's difficult to have the exact tally, but there are at least eight or nine major associations such as those, which themselves have many, many members. Then on top of those coalitions, more than 100 individual organizations have endorsed this document, which is now being shared widely through the Make Poverty History campaign.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

And with your organization, the Halifax group, it would be a like association of multiple organizations? How many organizations? Do you identify a number of them?

[Fraser Reilly-King]

There will be some overlap of organizations. We have 19 members, so that includes the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Quebec.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Sometimes when we have organizations such as yours attending, it would be helpful to have more details of some of the organizations that are represented. We had Rights and Democracy here earlier. Would that be one of the associate organizations of either of your organizations?

[Amanda Sussman]

Rights and Democracy has not participated so far.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

But I notice here there are some that do work for CIDA now. How would you characterize that? Is there a number of them that would now do work for CIDA on projects internationally?

[Amanda Sussman]

Many do, yes. The international development organizations do a lot of work with CIDA.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Could you characterize what approximate numbers, or some guesstimation of numbers of actual personnel and people your various groups would be representative of?

In other words, you have a proposal here to go forward as suggestions for the upcoming summits. I'm wondering if you collectively represent 100,000 people who are involved in your various organizations. If all of them have had some input or sign-off on these suggestions, I would suggest that's a good indication of a pretty good cross-section of civil society on a suggestion to move forward. Would that be a fair assumption?

[Amanda Sussman]

Yes. Each recommendation was signed off by the individual organizations. There have been representatives from each, and then more broadly, other individual organizations are endorsing the whole document, which means it goes through their internal—

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

From their members--not only from their executive, but from their members.

[Amanda Sussman]

Yes, from their members.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

So that would be a pretty good cross-section, I would imagine.

Given that, and you're asking here to have travelling on this, I would think that you've already done pretty good canvassing of a good cross-section of civil society. Would that not be a duplication of efforts? What more could be determined by travelling and having meetings across Canada?

[Fraser Reilly-King]

I think, in part, it's a question of travel. There's a precedent for this happening, I believe, for Kananaskis and Halifax. There was some trouble involved when the committee held similar hearings in the lead-up to the G-8. It's in part a question of travel, but also a suggestion that the committee spend more time on these issues.

I have a focus on financial issues, and Amanda focuses on a lot of child and maternal health issues, but there's a huge spectrum of issues within this, and we can't represent the full expertise of those issues in half an hour or 45 minutes.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

So your proposal here would be a kind of draft for consideration, but by no means all-inclusive. That should be viewed in that way too.

[Fraser Reilly-King]

We've come together, over 20 groups, as a coordinating committee, and feel the three priorities for next year are climate change, the financial crisis, and a number of issues related to the millennium development goals, which will be up for review next year. I think that might be a good framework, perhaps, for organizing the focus of the hearings around those three issues, and perhaps also the broader issue of governance in the transition from a G-8 to a G-20.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Looking at the proposal, I could see that there should be a lot of room for discussion, too. For example, in one item it calls for 100% debt cancellation of all indebted poor countries, and it's really not identifying what is a poor country. That's a pretty broad sweeping comment to make. Another one here is supporting the existing levy on airline tickets in 13 European and developing countries, but not really defining what the developing countries would be. Then there's a strong recommendation for the carbon tax on wealthy countries, not really defining which ones they would be, then carbon dioxide omissions, or equivalent mechanisms, and a global currency transition tax and a global financial transitions tax.

I would say that there is commentary in here that leaves a lot of room for discussion.

[Fraser Reilly-King]

One thing we struggled with, obviously, was to try to capture all of the issues, but not do it in 100 pages. So there are a lot of elements in there that still need further defining. I mean, there are 43 low-income countries and around 60 least-developed countries, so there could be some debate on which ones get debt cancellation.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Yes, and your comment too on increasing the G-20 to a G-29 or a G-30. I mean, it still leaves the question of who you are going to leave out. There are a lot more countries than that, too. There are lots of questions to be answered on it.

Are you aware of whether the Canadian government has received or is at least part of a drafting of proposals to be discussed at this? Surely somebody must be putting pen to paper on some initial ideas about what they propose to bring forward.

[Amanda Sussman]

Are you referring to the Canadian government's draft proposals?

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Yes.

[Amanda Sussman]

We have not seen anything concrete. The dialogue process between the G-8 Sherpas starts quite early, which is why we have submitted this proposal now. But we've had nothing more than informal conversations.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

There was a comment on reducing levels of emissions to below the 1990 levels, and another that our basic proposal would put us far short of that. We have to understand that absolutely nothing had been done at all until 2006. I believe that our government's plan to reduce emission levels is a pretty aggressive plan. We have to make up for a lot of lost time. What has been proposed by the government is far superior to anything that has ever been conducted before. This needs to be taken into account.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Just to remind you, the agenda isn't specific to what Canada's doing. It covers what other countries are doing as well.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

The comment was on Canada.