Evidence of meeting #47 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was haiti.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Okay. You probably were projecting to have built more at this point?
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
Slightly more. It's the logistics chain that is the problem—the buildup, and then you can implement.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
I figured that. I was going to ask you about that. You already touched on land access being one of them, and getting a model that works.
Is it your belief that you'll hit that target by the fall?
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
One of the things that I think is important, which we've seen in other areas—and you've already touched on this—is that when you're helping, you're working with people locally. Do you have numbers of how many Haitians are actually employed in the work you're doing?
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
With the Canadian Red Cross, I think there are 700 Haitians employed in construction and technical and support services, throughout Leogane, Jacmel, and Port-au-Prince.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Can you open that up a bit for us? I think that's one of the things people want to know more about: how it works, how you hire people.
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
We hire people primarily through the Haitian Red Cross. When we put our plans in place, the construction crews are all Haitian; the supervisors are all Haitian. We also get the communities involved in the construction. We select people from their own communities to do the digging of the trenches for their own homes.
The community is very much involved. We mobilize the communities with volunteers who go into communities to find out whose houses were destroyed. We send technical teams out to do the assessment. Once the technical teams say Mr. Dewar's house has been destroyed, we check Mr. Dewar. Is he one of the most vulnerable people? Is it a single family...monoparentales ?
We have a whole process, first of all, going into the communities, identifying who are the most vulnerable and whether their homes have been destroyed. This is a group of volunteers who go out and who are paid a slight amount of money. Then we have groups of technical expertise—engineers—and all of them are Haitian. They go into the communities to do an assessment of the land, to see where the debris needs to be cleared.
Then we have the crews who peg out the land. We have the excavation group, primarily from the community, and then we have our charpentier people who put up the housing. Then the Dutch Red Cross comes in and puts the water and the sanitation in for almost every house, depending. In some communities they share—
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
Absolutely. Everybody works through locals. The planning is done by some of the delegates, and we're trying to replace ourselves as we go along. We try to get as much of the local expertise as possible. For example, the engineer the Dutch hired is a local Haitian.
Director General, International Operations, Canadian Red Cross
And a lot of the lawyers are also.
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
The lawyers, the notaries, the site supervisors. We hire as many people.... We don't bring people from Canada or other places to do this work.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
That's helpful. When we hear about numbers of places built, I think it's also important to see there's a ripple effect. Everyone talks about capacity-building these days: the skills, also the cash for work so you can stimulate the local economy. That's a principle that I think most people want to see followed.
We haven't talked about it or touched on it, but I know you do work with women. There's a lot of concern about the exploitation of women. It's not new, but it is heightened with the precarious situation people are living in.
We often talk about security, but when you look at concerns around gender violence and the precarious situation women are in.... I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about that as an issue and how you're dealing with it.
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
We have a specific violence prevention program.
Violence against women is one of the main social issues identified in Haiti. What we do when we give shelters out is to try to ensure that if the couple is married, for example, the property right goes to both the man and the woman. For couples who are not married, the title goes to the woman because we understand the women are in more vulnerable situations.
In our communities, our work crews, we deliberately select women to do work. In our warehouse--I hope you will come to Haiti to see the massive warehouse we have--we hire women specifically in non-traditional work. We try to address that side of it.
On the violence prevention, we're training our staff—the local staff, the regular staff—identifying violence, and also finding out the resources in Haiti to address those issues, such as the social system or the police or whatever. We need to find the local actors who can help these people.
We don't have specific programs or halfway houses, but we are in the community. When we do find these facts, we try to get the resources to them and show them where they can get assistance.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
On the last piece, I have a question I ask all aid agencies. What are your administrative costs with regard to your work in Haiti?
Director General, International Operations, Canadian Red Cross
By that do you mean the actual costs of running the team we have in Haiti?
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
I guess I'm looking for an aggregate of what your administrative costs in Haiti would be. Is it 5%, 10%...?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
We're going to move back to Mr. Lunney as we start our second round. You have five minutes.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, folks, for being here. We very much appreciate the good work the Red Cross has done, and we are certainly proud of that work. I appreciate also the way you started off this discussion with the very practical remarks about defining disaster versus an event versus the capacity of a nation. That's sort of the direction I want to go in a moment.
I just wanted to pick up on some of the themes. Since my colleagues have asked some of the questions I had lined up, and you've answered them very well, let's go on from there. The land reform question and the lack of access to land was a good one, I think. But you know, we have a real problem here still, a year later after the fact, with debris removal. Maybe that's a good place to start.
To what extent is rubble still an impediment to progress and to actually building those houses you want to build and to housing the people who are desperately going to need it as we move towards a difficult season, weatherwise, there?
Country Director, Haiti, Canadian Red Cross
In the peri-rural areas and the peri-urban areas, it's not such a big issue. But in Port-au-Prince, it's a tremendous issue. The rubble is taking up so much space that it's very difficult to build a new shelter on a place you have to clear. Clearing it can be very dangerous, as well, so a lot of organizations are loath to get involved in the clearing.
As well, there's this aspect of building back better. I wish I'd brought the pictures of what they call the bidonvilles on the sides of the hills, where people are living. We have to be careful when we do rebuild to build safely and to give a bit of space. That means that some people will not have a roof over their heads in the same area. You can't rebuild better if you build back the way it was.
Rubble removal is a huge issue, and it's still one of the major impediments to building in the greater Port-au-Prince area.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
You mentioned in your remarks the houses you're building. I think you said you had 1,200 shelters prepared now and will have 7,500 by the fall. There are some pictures in the documents you gave us. We were talking about temporary shelters versus more permanent ones. I wanted to clarify whether the pictures we see here--you might have said that they're built on rented space--are the temporary shelters you were talking about. Or are these ones that might be considered permanent shelters? Can you help us with that?