Yes, thank you.
There is in fact a real danger that certain countries whose budgets are not sufficient to supply social services will not only be de-motivated but also very pleased to leave the room for companies or whoever, so this leaves an ambiguity in terms of who is responsible.
The Economic Commission for Africa has come out and said we're not completely.... Chapter 6 of their report is on corporate social responsibility, but before this goes ahead, there has to be a framework. There have to be public policies. For example, if a clinic or a school fits into a public strategy, that means that when the mine is finished, something will go on and there is public accountability for what's being created.
This is absolutely key. What we're seeing—from the standpoint of researchers and people working with the ECA—is that if you bypass local political processes, you are delaying bringing in governments that are going to be accountable to their people.
We have seen this for the last 20 or 30 years. So it is high time that people say that there is no reason on earth why the African countries should just be destined to export raw bauxite or raw gold. These resources need to be transformed locally. That implies strategies. That implies planning. That implies public responsibilities. And the mandate of our aid budget is to reinforce locally owned developmental strategies that are sustainable in the long term. So we have choices.
Unfortunately, we're completely missing. Canada is completely off the boat. In Australia and Europe, people are lining up to help the ECA. Canada needs to be on that page, not partnering with companies and NGOs that are going a totally different route in situations where there's not the monitoring, not the adequacy of doing the follow-up work and the evaluation. People we work with in Ghana say companies declare all sorts of things in corporate social responsibility. There is no way of checking what goes into CSR. There is no way a company is really going to tell what is going on, because there are no standards. These standards have to be locally owned. That process has to go on before we have this idea that PPP is going to be successful.