I'll back up again and refer to these three projects by way of examples.
They are pilots. This is new for Canada, although, as I mentioned in my statement, many other countries have been doing this kind of work for years.
The debate that's taken place here in recent weeks around this has given these three projects more notoriety than they deserve, in the sense that these projects very much developed bottom-up. This was not a question of companies going to CIDA and lobbying for money and then finding a partner. These were projects that were identified by the NGOs in question on the ground in these countries. They were looking for partners. The companies identified themselves as potential partners. The NGOs did a lot of their due diligence on the companies. I think it probably worked both ways.
Once they developed a project, CIDA expressed an interest in it. It saw them as worthwhile projects, because they showed the potential of leading to lasting outcomes, such as providing technical skills and skills training for workers. The one in Burkina Faso is a really good example. They're training electricians. They're training plumbers. There's a whole range of skills that are going to lead to jobs within the industry or outside the industry. There are many different types of skills.
As we all know, employment supports families. When they come from an educated family, kids want to be educated. From then on, it generates a lot of longer-term social benefits.
Another important point is that these have been characterized as subsidies, but it's important to point out that.... In the case of Rio Tinto Alcan in Ghana, it doesn't operate there. It did at one time, but this is a project it's doing with WUSC several years after it stopped operating in the country. I don't know how one could characterize that as a subsidy.
In the case of Burkina Faso and IAMGOLD, a lot of the beneficiaries of this investment are hundreds of kilometres away, and they may or may not work in the mines. Most of them probably won't. They're going to work elsewhere. I see this not as CIDA subsidizing mining. I see it as mining subsidizing CIDA and helping extend CIDA's reach and the reach of these NGOs to do development assistance in these countries.