Yes, absolutely.
First, I would say I have talked with a number of government officials around the world. This year I'm going to be on every continent except Antarctica, and I've been in 15 cities in the last two and a half months, so I have, I think, a very good feel for what third world and developing nations want from our Canadian businesses. They want the Canadian businesses there. Canadian businesses are not perfect, and a lot of them do make mistakes, but on the whole they conduct themselves better than most other countries in the world, and arguably the best in the world. Our Canadian government is deemed to be one of the best, if not the best in the world. So these developing countries recognize the benefit that Canadian companies and the Canadian government can bring.
I would agree very quickly with something that Bonnie said, which is that business development doesn't work in the absence of good public policy. So I think there is a role for Canadian businesses to help achieve our international development objectives, but at the same time I think that some level of oversight is important. I think that public-private partnerships could be used as a mechanism for that form of oversight. You've got government officials watching what these Canadian companies are doing much more closely than they otherwise would, and they realize that Canada's reputation is going to go part and parcel with the reputation of those Canadian companies. So to the extent that those P3s provide that opportunity, it might be a way that those good policies can be put in place.
To address the question of capacity-building, there's no doubt in my mind, having been in many developing countries in the world, that one of the main things that the Canadian people and the Canadian government have to bring to some of these countries is capacity-building, both in their governments and in their various other institutions. For example, we are world leaders in the mining industry. Canada has ten mining companies operating internationally for every one that the U.K. has. So we are by nature an international country and we have more experience in mining than most other countries.
I believe there's an opportunity for our Canadian government to start working with some of these developing countries to say how they should be monitoring these mining companies. Here are minimum environmental standards and processes and procedures that they need to follow as a country to ensure that the right things are being done. Here are the various tax policies and procedures, which maybe they don't have to follow, but which we found effective in Canada for extracting the maximum amount of tax from our mining companies. I think that's another important aspect: a lot of developing countries might have high tax rates, but they find they don't end up getting a lot of tax revenues, and sometimes it's because of the lack of sophistication of their rules and regulations.
So there are capacity-building opportunities all over the place. One good example is some of my business partners or people I work with found the world's largest iron ore deposit in Paraguay. Paraguay had mining laws that made it completely impractical to mine or own or maintain concessions in that country. They said they needed to adopt these laws and change things so they could operate there, and they did. Paraguay has mining-friendly laws now that are going to allow it to thrive in the mining industry.
So it can be done, Canada can do it, and I think we're the right group to do it.