Thanks very much.
I'm the director of the Centre for Trade Policy and Law. What we do for a living is help governments and their stakeholders in business and in non-profit sectors around the world design, negotiate, and implement their international trade and economic strategies.
In the context of your study, what we do is combine the expertise of former practitioners from the ministry of trade and trade-related ministries, like Finance or Industry and so on, with policy-oriented academics that bring together more perspectives and ideas. The professors also help with the training of the experts.
We're jointly sponsored by the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton, here in Ottawa, as well as the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. We've been in business for about 22 years now and we've worked in about 40 countries. We've spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia. We're now focused on the Americas. We're actively engaged right now in Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Panama, in the Caribbean, and in Cuba.
Governments around the world come to us for a lot of reasons, but mainly for something that Canadians are pretty good at: that is, (a) how do you negotiate and develop a strategy with a larger economic power?, and (b) how do you deal with the United States? In the first case, it could be the United States, but a lot of times it's that Uruguay wants to know how you develop an economic strategy under Mercosur with Brazil and Argentina. You have those kinds of dynamics as well.
In Canada, you're uniquely positioned because, first, we work, as you know, with the United States every day, and second, trade experts in other countries have a different kind of perspective. You can't really find in Europe a critical mass of experts because trade policy is concentrated in Brussels and all the countries are everywhere else. The only real competitor we'd have would be Australia or New Zealand, but they're more regionally focused on Southeast Asia.
I've read some of your testimony. Canada is seen as having one model. What typically happens is that countries are interested in looking at all kinds of different models and choosing for themselves which one makes sense. So they're interested in Canada, but they're also interested in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. What we try to do is position what we do in the context of what other donor projects or other expertise governments are getting in a particular area.
Typically, our programs have four components.
First, you want to develop local expertise and have it stick somewhere. So you develop professional training programs that can be offered either in the training institutes of governments, like the foreign services do it here, or in university programs. A lot of times what happens is that you can give expertise, but information really is power in a lot of places, and people hoard it. So it's very important to put something on the ground through some professional training courses.
Second, what we try to do is set up organizations like ourselves outside of government and try to build some kind of public–private trade policy community over time. I'll get to that in a minute.
Third, there was some discussion in the testimony about finding local champions and so on. A key component is trying to help those champions continue to be champions and to increase the number of champions on a particular initiative. You do that through strategic advice, very similar to what Gale was talking about, in the expertise they provide.
Finally, what you want to do is have something that continues over time in order to continue with the process.
So on training, what we try to do is develop specific programs--so-called trainers programs. They usually want some kind of validation of these things and some international standards, so what we do is that we take many of the courses and programs that we offer at Carleton or Ottawa University and try to help them get to those same standards so they can learn for themselves. It usually takes three to five years to develop a local ownership for that kind of thing.
Second, we try to establish a trade policy network within the country. I have three examples of how we do that.
One is that you try to set up a trade unit or a secretariat as a starting point within the trade ministry to focus attention and skills development in a particular area or set of issues.
A second would be to create an independent organization outside of government and outside of private organization. This is the best case scenario, but it takes a lot more money and a lot more effort and discipline.
The third one is to find a local institution that's pretty much like you and that wants to take on a similar kind of mandate and build up their internal capacity.
In terms of what you're looking for in a successful model in our area, but more generally in what you're doing here in your public sector capacity building, we find it very useful to focus on applied issues as opposed to theoretical issues, and therefore it's very helpful to have current and former practitioners engaged in some of your activities.
Second, a lot of times people put a whole bunch of experts together, but you also need a business organization around it in order to manage it and basically keep the business part of it operating. Otherwise, there are just discrete activities without some sort of strategic plan and implementation of those. Of course, many times you're using donor funds, so you have to figure out a mechanism to ensure those funds are spent responsibly.
We find it's very helpful, and in fact necessary, to have people engaged within the organization who have direct links into the ministry and into the issues that matter to the public sector area you're looking at. In other words, you try to find people like us in those countries, people who are either seconded for a period of time from the government to work on these things or who have retired or otherwise left. You do find that in a lot of developing and transitioning economies people have left the public service to try to get things going in the private sector.
We're looking for organizations that have links to other similar kinds of firms and organizations. Basically, if you're going to have a business and you're going to invest in some expertise, you have to come up with some services that the organization will provide in order to make it sustainable financially over the long term. So you're looking for similar organizations that work in those areas.
Finally, in our area at least, trade policy, the sort of lingua franca is English, and it's also a kind of test case to see if the people who are engaged in trade policy have been outside of their country and have worked in some of the trade files. It's not necessarily the case in other areas of public policy, but in this area it's key. In Canada if you want to know something about trade policy, you have to get posted to Geneva, certainly to the United States, and to Brussels. Those are the key places to gain your experience. French, of course, is spoken in both Geneva and Brussels, but the working language in many of these meetings is English. So that--for us, anyway--has become a test case of whether somebody is engaged on the issues in a serious way.
On strategic advice, what you really want to do is help the champions continue to be champions and provide them with independent advice in support of the policies or initiatives the ministry is pursuing.
Finally, then, there are some key challenges. When I was reading the testimony, I saw that you've been grappling with some of these. Basically, the challenges depend on the level of ambition and the resources available in order to do what you want to do, as well as your acceptance of risk. Working in all countries has a certain level of risk. Working with 10 or 15 people and trying to build them up and provide long-term support is a pretty risky strategy. A lot of programs try to train as many people as possible so that you can say you trained 50 people or 100 people. That's good in some contexts, but if you really want to have some lasting local impact, you have to find the right people and build it from a smaller base.
These things typically take eight to ten years to develop some sort of sustainable strategy for such organizations. The risk of inaction—and a lot of it came out of the presentations we heard this afternoon from the two ministers—is that the files just stay where they are, that there is no public sector reform, that things do not move forward, and that the issues actually get more difficult and more challenging over time.
That's an opening presentation, Mr. Chairman, about what we do and how we do it. I thought it was important just to give you a case study as a subset of your broader discussion about public sector capacity building.