Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much for your presentations. I had the opportunity to briefly discuss this topic with Mr. Dechert, a few weeks ago. I am very interested in this subject. I have visited Mali a few times. For us in Canada, that was an example of success.
As Mr. Saibel was saying, hundreds of millions of dollars were allocated over time. I am under the impression that we all believed we were successful, that we had implemented institutions that functioned properly.
I have a simple question. Malians were perhaps as surprised as we were, but in a way, the international community's warning system failed. It seems that we and other partners—other countries, other allies of Canada—were lacking information.
I have the sense that there's a bit of a systemic failure. It's not personal to the foreign affairs department or CIDA at all, but the international community, which held up Mali all the time as an example, was caught, I think, in an embarrassing position where this money that we proudly allocated to strengthen democratic institutions, and the Auditor General.... If the Auditor General reports to a bunch of people with machine guns, in a junta, it's not a very effective reporting mechanism.
I'm just wondering what lessons we and other partners are taking from this. How do we make sure that we're not caught in a situation that I think is regrettable? As I say, it's not a blame thing, because the international community, writ large, was caught with this.
How do we make sure that other hundreds of millions of dollars that we're spending...or that other priority countries we've identified aren't suddenly going to wake up one morning with captain whatever as president and a sense that we put taxpayers' dollars into a circumstance that turned out to be unfortunate? I'm just wondering what lessons we're trying to take, writ large, to see if somebody is evaluating other countries to make sure this doesn't happen in other.... Well, I say “make sure this doesn't happen”, but how can we prevent it from happening? Perhaps a better way to say it is that we need to try for a bit of an earlier warning system.