Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Barrados, for being here. We were just chatting before your presentation, and you said this is the first time you have been at the foreign affairs committee, so welcome.
I also think it's important that we understand the opportunities here. Just after being elected, I actually had the opportunity to go to Iraq. An initiative sponsored by Forum of Federations led me to it. The conference was actually sponsored by an Italian group, but they had seen some of the work that Forum of Federations had done. For obvious reasons they were interested in governance issues and were extremely interested in how a post-Saddam Baath government could work. Frankly, one of the dilemmas in Iraq is that they haven't had the opportunity to have that conversation in time to look at what can be done.
They were enormously interested in Canada. You talk about resource allocation. At the time, I said if you looked at the front page of our paper you'd see one of the premiers of our provinces and the Prime Minister having it out over resource allocation. I said they weren't at war with each other, which of course meant physically. I said that's important, because we have a framework; we have responsibilities. Some are constitutional and known and others are agreed to over time. They also have linguistic differences. They have a majority-minority situation within regions. They desperately wanted to have help in terms of set-up for governance.
I guess you could go around the world and talk about different regions and similar opportunities for Canada to support governance in either post-conflict or developing nations.
I don't think anyone around this table would disagree that we should be doing this. I think it's a matter of how we do it, and your points are well taken that there's a massive opportunity when you consider the people who are retiring from the public service. We have management colleges like Rigaud, in Gatineau, which I know well because my father helped set up one of them, for things like customs.
Do you know what the government's strategy is with regard to taking the opportunity for Canada to be involved, or, as you indicated in your comments, at this point is it nascent and ad hoc? Maybe I'll just stop there, and then we can go from there.